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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

It comes back to the point that I made about the use of timing rather than time. I do not suppose any right hon. or hon. Member, however long they have been here, has received many letters from constituents saying, ““Congratulations. It was really good to see you on your feet at 3 am.”” Most people think that that is a daft way of conducting business, and believe that we ought to look at things slightly differently. My hon. Friend the Minister implied that the Government had got the allocation of time about right. I want to explore that gently with him, and I invite the House to look at the procedures adopted by other countries. Ireland is an obvious exception, because it is bound constitutionally to adopt the process. One country has already ratified the treaty—Hungary, which spent less time debating the treaty than we have spent debating procedure this evening. No hon. Member will say that the approach adopted by Hungary, with its extraordinary history, is less democratic than ours. It is different, and there are differences from which we can learn. The most significant difference is that the official Opposition—the Fidesz alliance, which is a Conservative grouping—agreed with the Government that the treaty should go through. There was no attempt by the Opposition to oppose the treaty just because they were the Opposition: they took a responsible approach as a result of negotiations that took place not in a few hours on the floor of the Hungarian Parliament but over a number of years, and began with the process that resulted in Hungary’s accession to the EU—in which I played a small part. The process in Hungry was profoundly different from the one adopted here, and from the one adopted in Ireland. I suspect that as the rest of the countries undertake their own procedures, there will be a spectrum of approaches. However, there will not be many countries, if any, that spend more hours than us dealing with the matter in their debating chamber. There are many other types of Committee process. On reflection, when we look at this in future, perhaps we will see whether there are any lessons to be learned from the processes adopted elsewhere.