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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

I am very pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton). The Government’s motion allows us too little time to debate the treaty and the Bill, and the way in which they have split up the time is completely undesirable, as many right hon. and hon. Members have said. A huge number of amendments have already been tabled, and there will certainly be many more. We will simply not be able to do them justice, and the House will be abdicating part of its responsibility in expecting the other place to debate the issues that we do not see fit to discuss. Not long ago, the House was given far too little time to debate the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. Indeed, the Leader of the House admitted that too little time had been given and promised to learn the lessons of that experience. As we look at the motion before us today, it seems that those lessons were not learned—or, if they were, that they were discarded rather too easily. The Opposition proposal for an extra six days of debate therefore has much to commend it. I also approve of splitting the time much more equally between debating the detail and what have been termed the more thematic debates. I shall not seek to compete with the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), whose comments carried a great deal of weight, but I rather share her sentiments. Since I became a Member of the House, I have heard a number of Ministers say that the purpose of the law is to send out a message. Well, it is not. Our purpose is to pass laws, which have to be debated in detail. As other hon. Members have pointed out, what happens to people charged with a criminal offence or facing the civil courts will not be decided on the basis of principles, themes or thematic debates. It is the detail and the specific points of law, and hence the quality of the job we do here in Parliament, that makes the difference. That is why it so important that we have enough time to debate these issues in detail. There seems to be a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Government’s case. We contend that this treaty is essentially the same as the constitutional treaty on which a referendum was promised. The Government’s justification for not holding a referendum is to extol—not very convincingly, but very loudly—belief in the supremacy of Parliament and the fact that we live in a parliamentary democracy, with the clear implication that it is here and in the other place where these matters should be debated. If we follow that through, those who argue that we should not have a referendum, but should debate these issues in this House should surely want us to have adequate time and flexibility to do so. The Government are trying to have it both ways. They say that it is inappropriate to have a referendum because these matters should be debated in Parliament, yet when it comes to the parliamentary debate, the Government are not prepared to give Parliament the time and flexibility it needs. The Liberal Democrats have an interesting policy on how they are going to cast their votes on a referendum, but I believe I heard the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) say earlier that he agreed that the Bill and this treaty did have constitutional significance. Indeed, he said that in arguing why these matters should be debated in a Committee of the whole House. Therefore, it is surely incumbent on the Government to allow a full and proper debate.