Nomination of Members to Committees

Tom Pursglove Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)]

Mr Speaker, I just want to make a number of very pithy points.

First, I am infuriated by the argument that the Government do not have a working majority. We should look at the numbers. On Wednesday 6 September, 317 votes played 276, 320 played 287, and 320 played 249; yesterday, 318 played 296, 326 played 290, and 318 played 301; and tonight we won the last vote by 21 votes.

I sat on a number of Committees of different sorts in the last Parliament, and I can reveal that a number of Members opposite very regularly did not turn up, and not many of them spoke. So the baulking that we hear tonight rings very hollow with me. I tried to intervene on the shadow Leader of the House and would be delighted if she were to tell me that Members opposite were turning over a new leaf and were going to turn up and participate, because that would be good for our democracy and for the quality of scrutiny in this House.

We will do a disservice if we do not carry through on this tonight. I heard a Labour Whip last week complain about the fact that we have not made sufficient progress on Brexit. The bottom line is we cannot have it both ways. The fact here is that this is not unprecedented, so let us test the will of the House tonight.