Nomination of Members to Committees

Debate between Peter Bone and Patrick Grady

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady]

I accept that point. The Government do not have a majority here on the Floor of the House either, and Bills are improved in Committee. The whole point of Committees is that parties are supposed to work together.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has pointed out, the situation is not difficult or unprecedented; it is exactly what happens in the Scottish Parliament, and it has happened on a number of occasions over many years. The Scottish Government at the moment are a minority Government, and they are in a minority on most, if not all, the Committees. Therefore, there has to be genuine cross-party compromise, and the Scottish Government have to respect the will of the electorate. Perhaps that is the fundamental difference, because in Scotland our tradition is one of popular sovereignty. The people have always had the right to choose and, if necessary, to dispose of their Governments. Of course, that is what happened to the UK Government in June this year. They were stripped of their majority, and so they should be listening to our views.

The Leader of the House cited as a precedent what happened in the 1970s, but, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire, the hero of the Brexiteers, Margaret Thatcher herself, stood at the Dispatch Box and opposed the very kind of motion that the Government are now trying to drive through. The shadow Leader of the House spoke about the Maastricht rebels who voted to protect parliamentary sovereignty from the power-grabbing of Brussels. They morphed into the Brexiteers, but they are not rebelling any more. At least the DUP get their £1.5 billion and get to keep their Short money. I am not sure what the parliamentary sovereigntists are getting out of this. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) stood on the Floor of the House earlier this afternoon and quoted, with some approval, what David Cameron said about the progress of a Bill in the House:

“The Bill limps through. Then it goes to the Standing Committee. Their duty is to look at the details clause by clause. But it’s packed full of people that the whips put there. So, surprise, surprise, the Government rarely loses the vote on any of the individual points of detailed scrutiny.”

This same Member who stood here to propose handing power back to this House will now meekly follow his Whips through the Lobby.

[Mr Bone]

That is a complete misrepresentation. I said that the Committees should have parity. Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that that is what I said? [Interruption.]

[Patrick Grady]

I heard the hon. Gentleman say that, but—as my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire says from a sedentary position—that is not what this motion will do, and that is why we will support the amendment in the name of the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael).

Members on this side of the House will get to go home with our heads held high, because we know that we are standing up for our constituents and respecting the result of the election. I sometimes think Members on the other side of the House think we are kidding when we say people from Scotland are paying close attention to what goes on here and what their MPs are doing, but we are not kidding. They are paying attention, and they see this place for the archaic institution that it is. They see the power grabs of a desperate minority Government, and they may begin to think, wonder whether and sense it is perhaps time to invest all their sovereignty in a different Parliament—one 400 miles up the road—and to complete the journey that started with the devolution referendum 20 years ago.