Nomination of Members to Committees

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

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

So there we have it: “Great power grab 2”, the sequel, the return—“Then they came for our Committees.” This is an incredible, totally undemocratic power grab from a Government who do not command a majority in this House.

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I will make a little progress, and then give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Not content with giving themselves unprecedented powers under the repeal Bill, the Government are now trying to manipulate the Committees of this House in their favour. The nation should be very worried about what is going on, because this Government are showing nothing other than contempt for democracy in their desire to ignore and circumvent the democratic verdict of this country.

[Mr Evans]

I say to the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), that this is how it is done: a Member seeks to intervene and that is granted, and they rise to speak and then sit down. That is what a debate is all about.

It has just been said that this is undemocratic and a power grab, but we are in the Chamber of the House of Commons with a motion before us. We are going to have a vote; if the Government do not have a majority in the House, they will lose that vote. If the Government win the vote, they have a majority in this House of Commons. So let us not beat around the bush; let us get to the vote.

[Pete Wishart]

I am almost grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Yes, the Government with their grubby £1 billion deal with the Democratic Unionist party have a confidence and supply arrangement on the Floor of the House; what they most definitely do not have is a majority on the Committees of this House, which are determined by the country and how the people voted.

This minority Conservative Government have 317 Members out of the 650 Members available in this House; that amounts to 48.7% of the membership of this House. What they are therefore entitled to is 48.7% of the membership of the Committees of this House. But that is not the case for this Government; for them, democracy is a mere impediment as they grimly hold on to power and ensure they get their way in everything they try to undertake. This is a Parliament of minorities, and the structures and arrangements of this House must reflect that reality and that fact.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman; how could I not?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, whose speeches are normally compelling, but on this occasion there is one flaw. If this motion is passed, it is the democratic will of the House of Commons that Standing Orders be amended, and therefore that has democratic backing. For him to say it is not democratic is simply wrong.

[Pete Wishart]

The Government will pass this tonight; they will get their way because they have the DUP in their £1 billion pocket, but that does not make it right or democratic. They have 48.7% of the membership of the House; they should not have any more than that proportion in terms of Committees.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) talks about democracy, but it would seem that democracy in this place cost £1.5 billion, and we face probably the greatest constitutional crisis that these islands have seen since 1922. We might also reflect on 1974, but if we really want to get a grip on the notion of how Committees are selected, we need to live with the present experience, not that of 1974, and face the constitutional crisis that we have today.

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I want to move on to what happened in the 1970s, because it is very instructive and there are real lessons that the House could learn from that experience.

We now know why this Government have been so lax in putting together the normal functioning arrangements of the House. I raised this matter on the day we came back to Parliament, and I always feared that we would reach the stage when a motion such as this would be presented to the House. All this nonsense about Select Committees and why they were delayed was mere collateral damage resulting from the Government’s intention to control the legislative Committees. Now, at last, the rest of the House and the media are alert to the dangerous path that this Government are taking us down.

This House is determined by parliamentary arithmetic, and the day that we play fast and loose with that arithmetic and the verdict of the British people is the day that we start to walk down a murky, anti-democratic path. Our membership of the Select Committees is based on the number of Members that we secure. That allows us our membership on Select Committees, and it allows for our speaking rights and for all the other arrangements. These orders do not reflect the numbers of the House. We know that because the Clerks were charged with coming up with the formulae that allowed us to determine the Committees of the House. When it came to the Select Committees, the Clerks went away and crunched the numbers and then came back and presented the results to the parties. It was expected that there would be five Conservative members, five Labour members and one from the other parties, and everybody accepted that because it reflected the arithmetic of the House.

The Clerks also said that the Government should not have a majority on Standing Committees because they do not have a majority in this House. When it came to even-numbered Committees, they agreed with the Government that there should be no majority. That was fine, and everybody agrees with that. The Clerks did the numbers and the Government accept that. For Committees with an odd number of members, however, the Clerks said that there should be an Opposition majority. Remarkably, according to the Clerks, the Government only have a majority on Committees of 13 members. If we disregard the information supplied by the Clerks of this House—the people responsible for arranging the arithmetic, crunching the numbers and coming up with the formulae—we are again entering some seriously dangerous territory.

[Mr Harper]

I hesitate to start talking about spreadsheets on the Floor of the House, but the hon. Gentleman has tempted me. It is true that the Conservative party does not have a majority by itself—[Interruption.] That is not a revelation. But the Government command a majority because they have the support of a smaller party. If we take those two together, which is all that we are talking about, we do have a majority. The official Opposition party does not command a majority in the House either, but the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that that should be the case.

[Pete Wishart]

The House is going to get sick and tired of that argument because it is a feeble fig leaf that does not for a minute cover the fact that this minority Conservative Government do not command a majority in the House. They have their murky arrangement with the DUP—they have them in their pocket—and they command that majority on the Floor of the House, but we have to do what is right and what reflects the reality. We must respect the verdict of the people of this country, but we are not doing that.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

Although the Conservative party has the support of one minor party, if we do not have a majority in the House of Commons, how did we pass the Queen’s Speech?

[Pete Wishart]

That is the Government’s problem. If we are democrats, we tend to accept the verdict of the people—they are charged with putting us in this place, and they did not give this Government a majority. For some reason, the Conservative party just cannot respect that reality, which is bewildering.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

Is not this synthetic indignation a bit rich coming from a party that does not respect referendum results and another party whose leader does not even command the respect and confidence of 80% of his own Back Benchers?

[Pete Wishart]

Let me tell the hon. Gentleman about my party, and maybe he will listen. Between 2010 and 2015, the Scottish National party had a majority in the Scottish Parliament, and with that majority we had a majority on the Committees of the Scottish Parliament. Unfortunately, we lost that majority last year by one seat. We had a much bigger percentage share of the vote than this Conservative Government have. What was the first thing we did when we accepted that result? We gave up the chair and the majority on each of the Scottish parliamentary Committees without a sigh of protest. That is how to respect parliamentary democracy and the outcome of the people, so I will take no lessons about the example set by my party.

[Lucy Frazer]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, if legislation that would otherwise go to Committee went instead to the Floor of the House, it would be passed because the Government have a majority to pass it? If that is true, is it not to be accepted that the Government have a majority?

[Pete Wishart]

Parliamentary democracy, and I say this candidly, is sometimes messy. There are sometimes issues and difficulties, but the way to do our business is enshrined in centuries of tradition and convention. We have a Second Reading, we send a Bill to Committee and then it comes back on Report. We then have a Third Reading before sending it to the unelected cronies down the corridor. That is how we do business in the House. Sometime it does not work out quite perfectly, and we have to accept that.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I caution my hon. Friend not to take lectures from the Government on democracy. I remind him that he won his election and that his opponent has been stuffed into the House of Lords, so he should take no lectures from the Conservative party.

[Pete Wishart]

Some of my Scottish colleagues were not deemed sufficiently proficient to fill the post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, so the Government had to ennoble someone to fill it––someone I defeated in the election.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I want to make some progress. I have given way on countless occasions, and I will try to give way as I progress through the next 45 minutes of my speech.

The history is quite compelling, and I am fascinated by the previous examples:

“he said that in future Committees must reflect the numbers in the House of Commons? Is the Prime Minister repudiating that?”—[Official Report, 29 April 1976; Vol. 910, c. 551.]

Those are not my words but those of Margaret Thatcher when she railed against the injustices of the then minority Labour Government’s attempted power grab. If this parliamentary jiggery-pokery was an injustice for Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, it should be an injustice for the sons and daughters of Margaret Thatcher in the 2010s.

[Tim Loughton]

I am intrigued by the hon. Gentleman’s new-found enthusiasm for the blessed Margaret Thatcher, but are there not two solutions to the problem he is trying to set out? One is to have an Opposition majority on Standing Committees, which would inevitably lead to Government legislation being completely chopped up and returned to the Floor of the House in different form, and the second is to decide every piece of legislation in Committee of the whole House. Both those solutions would cause chaos. Is that what he actually wants?

[Pete Wishart]

All these great concerns about chaos and arrangements that will lead to this and that are an indictment of the Members of this House. They say, “If we were to respect parliamentary arithmetic when it comes to this, all it would lead to is chaos.” That says something about the membership of this House. More critically and crucially, it goes against the advice of the Clerks on the membership of Committees. I say to the hon. Gentleman: have a look at what the Clerks determine as to how these Standing Committees should be established. The fact that this House is prepared, in this vote, to overlook the good advice of the Clerks on a matter they are obliged to determine is a shame on this House.

I want to come back to Margaret Thatcher. I never thought I would be quoting her in the House. It is a novelty, and I do not think I will ever get used to it or be comfortable with it. Let me get back to what I was saying about the 1970s and to what Conservative Members are asking us to do here. They are saying that just because the Labour party did something rotten in the 1970s, we must do something rotten too, in order to address this. That is totally unacceptable to Scottish National party Members who say, “A curse on all your houses. Deal with the parliamentary arithmetic. Accept the realities and get on with it.”

I will make two points about the 1970s, and again I was intrigued when I looked into this. The Harrison amendment was introduced in the most despicable way to this House, by subterfuge and sleight of hand, but the amendment created this set of conditions for a couple of months. At that point, the Labour Chair of the then Committee of Selection died and it stopped; we went back to the normal arrangements and for the rest of that Labour minority Administration, the parliamentary arithmetic of the House was respected. The second thing about that minority Labour Administration was that it became a minority Labour Administration––that Labour Government actually won an election. The current Conservative Government never experienced that a few months ago, so we will take no lessons on this.

Let me deal with this “chaos” thing. Sometimes democracy is not all that convenient and it throws up strange results. Sometimes we just have to get on and deal with it. What you do not do is try to circumvent democracy; what you do not do is table motions like this one, which is so disrespectful to the people who voted in the election.

[Mr Nigel Evans]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman before and I want to make some progress.

What you do is respect the way that the people would do this. The most ridiculous and audacious thing in all the anti-democracy that these guys are up to right now is this new Committee of Selection. As a Select Committee of this House, it should be subject to the formula determined by the Clerks, but the Government want to give themselves an inbuilt majority. They will determine the numbers on Committees with this, so on anything contentious—anything that we are likely to object to—they will determine that an odd number will be used and so they will get their way. This is absolutely disgraceful.

I want to say something to my friends in the Democratic Unionist party, because it is important. I have heard quite a lot about this working majority issue, and I want to explore it a little. I say to them that we used to campaign together for the rights of minority parties in this House, as we all were then. I hope that they reflect on that when they vote tonight and do not just give that crowd over there a majority in these Committees. I hope they remember the campaigns that the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and I fought together to ensure that the smaller parties in this House were properly represented in these types of Committees. We fought long, hard fights together, and it is shameful to think about completely giving this over to the Conservatives.

There is another aspect to this: if DUP Members vote with the Government tonight, it will leave questions about their Opposition status and raise further questions about their entitlement to Short money. It would have to raise those questions because it would look like the Government are paying a rival political party. It is also worth noting that a High Court ruling is coming up soon about the whole grubby DUP deal.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. As a result of the threat of the legal action he has mentioned, we found out earlier this week that the Government say that they need parliamentary approval for this £1 billion bung that they want to pay to the DUP. Does he therefore agree that until such time as that vote takes place, even on their own terms of a “working majority” the Government do not have one until the deal is in place?

[Pete Wishart]

Absolutely. If DUP Members are going to vote with the Government, they should go to that side of the House and end this pretence of being an Opposition party. If DUP Members are going to vote for this and betray all the things we worked for in the past 15 to 20 years, they should just go and sit with the Tories. This Government have failed to respect their new humbled position as a minority Administration; instead, we are beginning to see some unsavoury elements in almost acquiring the status of some sort of parliamentary dictatorship. This House should not accept this proposal tonight for a minute, and I urge the House to reject it and ensure that we continue to honour parliamentary arithmetic.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

In June, there was a vote to leave the EU. Both the Labour and Conservative parties committed in their manifestos to deliver that, so we have a duty to deliver it. The question that arises is how we do it. How do we fulfil the promise to deliver it? There are a number of practical issues that we need to overcome. There are thousands of pieces of legislation that need to pass into our law. Many are technical changes, but we need to ensure that our laws are certain so that businesses are able to be clear about their future.

I listened carefully during the two-day debate to speeches made by Opposition and Conservative Members, by leavers and remainers. Well-respected Members on both sides of the House recognised the importance of ensuring that there are practical solutions to avoid our country’s legislative process becoming gridlocked. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said that we cannot get rid of EU legislation overnight “without leaving enormous gaps.” The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said that the task was “Byzantine in its complexity” and recognised the need to ensure that Ministers have

“latitude and flexibility to do what needs to be done”.—[Official Report, 7 September 2017; Vol. 628, c. 381.]

The method that this Government have put forward is not unprecedented for two reasons. First, as we have heard, the Labour Government in 1976 were in the minority and passed similar motions to ensure that they had a majority on Committees.

[Pete Wishart]

Will the hon. and learned Lady tell us what the sainted Margaret Thatcher thought about that arrangement in the 1970s?

[Lucy Frazer]

We can talk about what was said in the debate, but the outcome was that Labour secured a majority in Committee when it did not have one on the Floor of the House.

Yesterday, the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) said that the previous Labour Government actually doubled the number of statutory instruments that introduced new laws, so if legislating through Committee is accepted, as it has been for many years, as a means of government, and if ensuring that the governing party has a majority was accepted by the Labour party when it was in power, it is inappropriate for Labour to object to that when it is proposed by Conservative Members.