Living on a treadmill

PARLIAMENT JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE, MP

On Friday afternoon the House of Commons rises for a curtailed Whitsun recess. As he collects his cases and boards the train for Cum- 6erland, our new leader of the House, Mr Fred Peart, will, I suspect, be looking back wistfully to the happy tranquillity of the annual price review or the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Agriculture is one of the portfolios which is supposed to be a graveyard of ministerial reputations. But even at its most turbulent it cannot have offered Fred Peart any prepara- tion for the experiences of the last two weeks.

From ten in the morning until midnight on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, about nine out of ten MPS have been locked continuously in running debate on four major pieces of legislation—the Transport Bill, the Finance Bill, the Race Relations Bill and the Prices and Incomes Bill—plus a large number of lesser Bills and on a series of Select Com- mittees, all simultaneously. Important parts of these Bills will never be discussed at all before they leave the Commons for the Lords.

Last week the pace was only marginally less feverish: many of us spent the whole of the night of 22 May debating and voting simul- taneously on the Finance Bill and the Town and Country Planning Bill, and travelling home for breakfast almost twenty-four hours after we had reached the House on Wednesday morning. And there will be no let-up after Whitsun, with the Prices and Incomes Bill no doubt passing through, like the Finance Bill, under the shadow of the guillotine.

Let me describe what this routine means to a backbench MP. Last Wednesday I arrived at Westminster at 10.30 in time to guide a party of schoolchildren from my constituency round the House, playing truant from the Finance Bill Committee in order to do so.

At 11.15 a breathless messenger caught up with us in Westminster Hall. 'Division in Com- mittee Room 10, sir; you've got a minute and a half to make it.' I dashed through St Stephen's Chapel, up the stairs to the com- mittee room floor, and arrived breathless at the commitee room to find the doors barred : one vote down.

My schoolchildren ended their tour in the committee room and listened open-mouthed to an earnest and intricate discussion about single premium insurance policies. Then to a hasty lunch with a visitor from Scotland, fortunately at the House, followed by an hour of questions to the Secretary of State for Scotland. Then a brief half-hour with my secretary, dic- tating letters, followed by a meeting down in the depths of the Palace about broadcasting in Scotland, interrupted inevitably by a call to vote in the Finance Bill Committee (it turned out to be a false alarm—but not before one had run up three flights of stairs and a. couple of hundred yards of corridors to get there).

'Thereafter I settled into the Finance Bill Committee, arriving just in time to run down- stairs again for a vote on the floor of the House. And so on through the night. At one point we were trying to vote upstairs in the committee and downstairs in the House at the same time, and Harold Lever, the Financial Secretary, had to stage a not very professional filibuster until his scattered troops arrived. At another we were regaled with a cheerful, if somewhat noisy, visitation from the former Foreign Secretary and his brother.

So we struggled on. The longueurs of the night could be relieved by visits to Mr Robert Maxwell's new automatic coffee, chubolate and soup vendor in the corridor, or to the canteen downstairs for eggs and bacon: and there were

arguments about the manner in which the Finance Bill Committee was being kept up for no better reason than to help supply the Government's quorum for the debate on the floor of the House. As the sun rose high over St Thomas's Hospital, we had added two clauses and two schedules to the Bill.

So we have continued this week. As Members have rushed from a debate of which they have lost the track in committee upstairs to vote downstairs on the floor of the House on a clause they have had no chance to study, let alone debate, tempers have been fraying. It is hard enough for middle-aged men to run 'up and down stairs like prisoners on a reversible treadmill. It is harsher still when all of us, regardless of party, know that the legislation is in many places foolishly conceived and badly drafted; that we should be expected to vote for (or against) it according to party whether this were true or not; and that in each and every case the result is a foregone conclusion any- way. The ultimate humiliation comes from the knowledge that not only have our proceedings degenerated into meaningless farce, but that our electors know it too—and blame us all regardless of our party affiliation.

There is, of course, nothing new about all- night sessions: they are an annual feature of the parliamentary summer. Nor is the present chaos—for once the word is justified—of the parliamentary timetable unprecedented. In the forty years before the First World War the Irish group regularly reduced Parliament to virtual paralysis. What is new, however, is that the confusion reflects more than an inevitable season of legislative pressure or the efforts of a small faction of Members determined to wreck the parliamentary timetable. It reflects, I believe, a fundamental collapse of confidence not only of the overwhelming majority of Mem- bers of both sides in the Government, but also of the Government in itself.

This, of course, is not the whole explana- tion. Indeed, it is not one of the conventional explanations at all. Opposition Members gener- ally blame Mr Crossman, who characteristically approached the reform of our procedures with enormous but evanescent enthusiasm, and then got bored and left his unfortunate successor to clear up the mess he had left behind him. Labour MPS blame the Tories for setting out on a campaign of obstructionism with no better objective than that of wrecking some worth- while, but admittedly imperfect, reforms in our antiquated procedures. To many members of the public, I suspect, the situation demon- strates yet again the incapacity of their elected representatives to rise to the seriousness of our national predicament, and the incurable frivolity of partisan politics.

Each of these attitudes is justified up to a

point. Mr Crossman set about the business of procedural reform in amateurish and arrogant fashion. His acquaintance with the procedures of the House was not profound before his appointment to the leadership. He made his proposals, and he was prepared to discuss them with the Opposition. But failing agreement he was determined to force them through by using his parliamentary majority.

This was asking for trouble. Procedural reform is one area where the minority party can effectively resist the will of the majoritY, as the disastrous experiment with morning sittings proved. Mr Crossman would no doubt reply that if he had waited for the Opposition to agree he would never have achieved any worthwhile reforms at all.

Here I think he was wrong. The view that much of the work of Parliament in the second half of the twentieth century can be done better in committee than on the floor of the House is not confined to the Labour benches. Opinion is divided more on lines of age than on lines of party. If Mr Crossman had made an effort to win the support of younger Con- servatives for his ideas, and then submitted them to a free vote, he might have had more success.

Having had Mr Crossman's reforms imposed upon it, it would be disingenuous to pretend that the Opposition has not, on occasion, set out to wreck them by filibustering. Yet the filibuster can be a legitimate parliamentary technique. So long as government back- benchers can be relied upon to march through the lobbies in support of any legislative pro- posals, however misguided or ill-considered, the knowledge that the Opposition can bring the Government' business programme into dis- array is one of the few restraints on the executive which remain.

Nor can all time-consuming debates on the minutiae of legislation be dismissed as fili- busters. It took us many hours to pass Clause 16 of the Finance Bill and its accompanying schedule, although the purpose of this section of the Bill was to close what is generally ad- mitted to be a loophole which was widely used for tax avoidance. But the clause and the schedule had any number of undesirable side- effects of which the Government seemed to be quite unaware until Patrick Jenkin, in a masterly night-long stint of advocacy, pointed them out. As a result, the Bill, when it emerges as law, will be materially better drafted. In this case the Opposition was per- forming its function most effectively.

But the weightiest criticism against Dick Crossman is not that he imposed his reforms on the Opposition, or that they were motivated by a desire to strengthen the power of the executive (I think this charge; at least, is unfair), but that he entirely failed to fit them into a logical pattern. The committees upstairs have proliferated: but the work on the floor of the House has not diminished. If we were to move the detailed discussion of all legislation upstairs, and at the same time establish a whole new series of select committees, then we should have had a number of days each week when the Chamber was vacated altogether. Mr Gross- man seems to have imagined that the scrutiny of legislation would be speeded up by sending it off into committee. On the whole, the reverse is true. Yet the Government's legislative pro- gramme has expanded to fill the extra time made available for it on the floor of the House. The result is that there is simply not the time to scrutinise major pieces of legislation of the utmost constitutional gravity—such as the Prices and Incomes Bill—either upstairs or downstairs.

This situation was wholly predictable, and widely predicted. That the Government has stumbled into it nevertheless cannot, _I think, be attributed solely to the obstinacy of Dick Crossman or the inexperience of Fred Peart. The truth is that the Government has reached a condition where everyone, opponents and supporters alike and even its own members, know that a pothole has only to show up for ministers to make straight for it. That is why I believe that the present condition of parlia- mentary anarchy fundamentally reflects the collapse of confidence of the Government in itself.

So what is to be done? Lord Carrington has

delivered a measured warning that the House of Lords cannot be relied upon to pass a mass of ill-drafted and undigested legislation on the nod. The constitutional propriety of a move by the House of Lords to send back to the Commons sections of major Bills which have never been debated there is beyond dispute.

The circumstances for an exercise of the powers of the Lords could hardly be more propitious. A case of sorts can be made out for caution in the handling of the Finance Bill or the Prices and Incomes Bill: I suppose the Daily Mirror, The Times and the Sunday Times would send shivers down our spines with headlines about 'the Lords v. the pound.' But if the Lords are not prepared to send sections of the Transport Bill back for proper con- sideration, then the sooner their daily atten- dance fee from the taxpayer is brought to an end the better.

But the real crisis in our parliamentary democracy goes far beyond the breakdown in our procedures. At its root, I believe, lies the willingness of individual MPS to abdicate re- sponsibility to the party machine. That is why the real hero of the past two weeks is not Dame Irene Ward, splendid as her gesture un- doubtedly was. It is Mr Peter Jackson.

I have no idea what is going to happen to Mr Jackson following his decision to vote against the Government on the second reading of the Prices and Incomes Bill. Whether or not he is opposed by an official Labour candidate at the next election is of academic interest, for he is going to lose his seat anyway. Which is a tragedy. For Mr Jackson set a precedent of great constitutional importance. He explained that he was opposed to the Prices and Incomes Bill, and therefore the only logical thing to do was to vote against it. The little boy who pointed out that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes cannot have been viewed with any greater incredulity or disapproval.

Over the years a convention has grown up that MPS do not vote against a government formed by their own party because that would let the other lot in. This is highly convenient for the party machines : but it is surely a myth. For if the government is popular in the country and is defeated in a vote in the Com- mons, it can presumably go to the country and secure a fresh mandate. And if it is unpopular it will not go to the country. It will swallow its pride and drop the rejected legislation.

This is not a plea for indiscriminate cross- voting which would probably make stable government impossible. Most of the time Members of Parliament have a clear obligation to support the government they were elected to support. But the ultimate right to carry resistance to the point of opposition is vital to the healthy -functioning of parliamentary democracy. We have almost allowed that right to become atrophied. If we want to save the principles and practices of parliamentary de- mocracy—and no one should underestimate how fragile they have become—then that right must be reasserted. I haven't seen many village Hampdens around since I entered the House in 1964. But Mr Peter Jackson is one.