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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

I was being distracted, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall just finish my sentence, then I shall follow your stricture absolutely. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the treaty, he will see that it is not a new constitution for Europe. It consists of amendments to existing documents. That is the fundamental difference. I shall turn to the substantive reasons why the motion should be defeated. First, it does not allow enough time for debate. This is a 291-page document. There were 23 days—162 hours and 45 minutes—allowed for debate on the Maastricht treaty. In its breadth, this is more of that order than some of our previous, more minor debates. Secondly, if we pass this motion, there will be a clearly flawed provision that would allow Members to initiate emergency debates and decided by Mr. Speaker or by you, Madam Deputy Speaker, only at the end of the day’s business. That is nonsense; by definition, these matters should be dealt with at the beginning of the day’s business. Thirdly, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who is no longer in his place, and others made an important point earlier—that the Government’s intention of giving clear notice, which is good, has resulted in our having to conduct a debate first and deal with amendments later. That is not the right way round because it means that the Executive go first, with Back Benchers and the Opposition parties having the chance to participate only later and with limited time. Logically, we should be able to see what the amendments are, have a general debate on the issues and vote at the end. There are better procedural ways of achieving the same objective. My fourth objection is the split between four and a half hours for general debate and one and a half hours for amendments. The hon. Member for Glasgow, South-West is right to say that we are unlikely to table millions of amendments, but some hon. Members will table them and he might even table the odd one himself—[Interruption.] We may well need more than one and a half hours to deal with amendments, so the motion is unacceptable in providing only 30 hours in total for all amendments before we reach Report and Third Reading. The Opposition’s proposals would allow 66 hours—clearly an improvement in doubling the time, which is why we said we will support it—but we must provide sufficient time to deal with all the amendments.