Business of the House

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The Daily Mail’s campaign has been immensely valuable in highlighting a shocking set of practices. It is simply unacceptable for charities to exploit vulnerable, elderly people to raise funds. Charities that have been involved in such practices should be ashamed of themselves. Of course, the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill is currently working its way through the other place and will end up in this House in the autumn. I say to charities that if they do not want the House to react sharply against what they are doing in those debates, they ought to get their house in order pretty quickly.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I, too, thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business.

Well, well—what an EVEL shambles! I am prepared to take the Leader of the House at his word that he is listening and is prepared to move on this issue. May I suggest a way forward that we could all agree on and work together on? We are grateful that we are getting an extra day’s debate and that we will have more time to consider the issue, but now is the time for him to go to the Clerks, get a Bill and bring it to the House so that we can debate all the issues to do with English votes for English laws properly, given its historical significance and constitutional importance. We would then have the opportunity to amend it and to treat it like every other major piece of legislation. Will he commit himself to delivering that today?

There was a promise to go to the Procedure Committee. That was clearly broken—a manifesto promise made by this Government. Before anything happens, the proposals should go before the Procedure Committee and the Scottish Affairs Committee. They should proceed only with the permission and say-so of those two Committees. Will the Leader of the House commit to that today?

Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has the floor. Please continue.

[Pete Wishart]

I am very grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

We debated the Committee stage of the Scotland Bill for four days. Some 200 amendments had been tabled, and there were some 20 Divisions. How many of those amendments did the Government accept? Zero. None. Zilch.

The amendments were designed in the Scottish Parliament to improve the Bill and deliver the principles of the Smith commission. They were agreed by all parties in that Parliament, they were voted for by the Members who are sitting behind me now. None of them was accepted. We already have English votes for English laws, because all those amendments were voted down on the backs of English Members of Parliament: it was they who decided the votes. When will we get Scottish votes for Scottish laws in the House of Commons?

Finally, may I ask whether we can have an urgent debate on mis-selling and false labelling? What we heard yesterday was nonsense. The Government should have been pulled in front of the Advertising Standards Authority for describing what we heard about as a national living wage. I think that the people of the United Kingdom are waking up this morning and trying to understand what sort of nonsense this is. I am sure that we shall hear much more about it in the future, because we have never come across anything quite like it before. To call that a national living wage does not even do respect to the label.

[Chris Grayling]

The whole point about Standing Orders is that they are the way in which the House conducts its business. We have discussed that extensively over the last few weeks, and I have discussed it with the hon. Gentleman. It is the clear view of the people who put these proposals together in the last Parliament, and of some distinguished figures in and around this place—including former Officers of the House of Commons who are now in the other House—that Standing Orders are the way in which this matter should be conducted. However, I have said to the hon. Gentleman that I shall be happy to consider the possibility of legislation after we have tried the system out for 12 months, and I will listen to his representations during the review that will be carried out at that time.

Of course, if the hon. Gentleman wants the Scottish Affairs Committee to consider these matters over the next few months, he—as Chair of the Committee—is perfectly free to make representations to his colleagues about doing so. We will listen carefully to what that Committee says, as we do in the case of other Committees. As I have said, I have discussed our approach very carefully with the Chair of the Procedure Committee, who is entirely happy with it.

The hon. Gentleman has returned to the issue of the Scotland Bill pretty regularly since the House reconvened. He appears to be missing a crucial point—namely, that this is a United Kingdom Parliament, voting on proposals that affect the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom, and the Bill is therefore a matter for United Kingdom Members of Parliament. Similarly, when the rest of us vote on English votes for English laws, the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues from Scotland will vote on that as well. He asks why we cannot have Scottish votes for Scottish laws. The answer is that he has Scottish votes for Scottish laws already: he has had that since the 1990s, in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.

If we are to have a debate on mis-selling, the mis-selling that we should be debating is the outrageous way in which the Scottish National party claims that fiscal autonomy would be fine and would not lead to a massive deficit in Scotland, huge tax increases for the Scottish people, and an economic disaster for that country.