TAPER AND THE DOG SIR,—My attention has been drawn to
the fact that. in your issue of May 3, the writer of 'Westminster Commentary' has hung some rather jaundiced views about the workings of Parliamentary democracy upon the peg of the loss of my car and dog in New Place Yard during the fifteen minutes of the division on the Third Reading of the Rent Bill. The only inference anyone could draw from the first part of his article is that I was not sufficiently interested in the contents of the Bill to spend more than fifteen minutes in the House during the Third Reading debate.
Factually this is incorrect. I had listened to the greater part of the debate, although a previous dinner engagement made it necessary for me to be absent for the last two hours of it.
The writer of the article implies that I and other unnamed Members do not bother to acquaint our- selves with important Government legislation and merely turn up for divisions at the behest of the Whip. This is a little unfair. In the case of the Rent Bill, for instance, I had previously accepted a Labour Party challenge to a public debate in my constitu- ency, for which my opponent was Mr. George Lindgren, MP (one of the two leading Opposition spokesmen on this subject). In order to meet this challenge I had, of course, to brief myself very fully on every aspect of this Bill in order to counter Mr. Lindgren's arguments and answer questions from the hall. I was therefore not ignorant either of the con- tents of the Bill or of the arguments for and against its provisions.
In fact, my attendance and division record since I was first elected to Parliament in 1950 has been a good one; and I think it would have been fairer to have inquired into the facts before choosing this particular incident as an illustration of the point of view your contributor holds.—Yours faithfully, [Taper writes : 'I can well understand Mr. Fisher's anxiety that, having spent the best part of two days listening to the debate on the Rent Bill, such heroic mortification of the flesh should not go unrecorded, and apologise to him for suggesting that he was fly enoughto turn up for only the final quarter of an hour. 1 trust he will soon be among those Members of whom I wrote (admiringly, 1 do assure Mr. Fisher) that they had 'the good sense or good luck to get a pair and thus avoid even the tiresome formality.' As fpr his trouble with Mr. Lindgren and his constitu- ents, I really cannot be expected to intervene. But I hope he got the dog back.'—Editor, Spectator.]
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