ARIZONA COPPER COMPANY, LIMITED, ORDER CONFIRMATION BILL. (Hansard, 11 June 1901)

HC Deb 11 June 1901 vol 95 cc41-8 41

§ (BY ORDER.)

§ [UNDER THE PRIVATE LEGISLATION PROCEDURE (SCOTLAND) ACT, 1899.]

§ Order for Second Reading read.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read a second time."

§ MR. DILLON
said that this was one of the most extraordinary Bills that had ever been brought before the House of Commons within his memory. They had been given to understand by the hon. Member for Partick that he was going to move that the Bill should be referred to the Joint Committee of the Lords and Commons, and in support of that motion a very interesting document had been circulated to all the Members of the House of Commons yesterday.

MR. PARKER SMITH (Lanarkshire, Partick)
said he found it was not competent to move his motion that day, but he intended to move it on Thursday.

§ MR. DILLON
said the Bill ought to be challenged at once, and they ought not to be asked to read it a second time without at least some explanation being given as to its extraordinary nature. They had had an example of the way in which business was transacted in respect to Irish Provisional Orders, and he thought that members of the Government 42 who introduced those Provisional Orders ought to inform themselves as to what was in them. He ventured to say that not for twenty years had a Bill analogous to this been introduced into the House of Commons. It was of enormous complexity and length, and the purport of it would take any man a very long time to understand. It was introduced under the new Scotch Private Legislation Procedure Act and, being of a novel character, it ought to be challenged. The object of the Bill appeared to him to be to pass an Act of Indemnity for a number of gentlemen engaged in a private mining company in Arizona, who had violated for many years past a number of the provisions of the Companies Acts. The Bill dealt with a number of complicated transactions, most certainly unsuitable to be dealt with in a Private Bill in the House of Commons. What he chiefly complained of was that there was no brief statement of its purpose and effects. Surely that ought to have been done, when, as he saw, from the names on the back of it, those of the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General for Scotland, that it was a Government Bill. He had the strongest possible objection to passing an Indemnity Bill to protect company directors who had broken the law. But he had another ground of objection. From the statement circulated it appeared that this Arizona Copper Company was owned largely in Germany, France, and America, and the Bill would affect the interests of these shareholders to a large extent, and that litigation was pending. In fact, the House of Commons was asked to override the courts, and to destroy private rights, without any notice being given to the French, German, or American shareholders. That might or might not be a truthful statement, but it was monstrous to ask the House of Commons to give approval to such a Bill in the dark.

§ *THE LORD ADVOCATE (Mr. A. GRAHAM MURRAY, Buteshire)
said he remembered very well when the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Bill was passing through the House there was nobody who, in an unobtrusive way, opposed and obstructed it more obstinately than the hon. Member for Mayo, although he had often heard 43 the hon. Member express great anxiety to have the Private Bill Legislation system extended to Ireland as well as to Scotland. He could only say that, if the first results of the Private Bill Legislation system were to be heralded by such statements as they had heard, it would be absolutely impossible to extend it to Ireland. [An HON. MEMBER from the Irish Benches: Why?] Because the whole idea of the Private Bill Procedure system was that of devolution, and the whole spirit of the hon. Gentleman's speech was that the local inquiry was to be overruled by the House of Commons. Every sentence of the speech of the hon. Gentleman showed his utter ignorance of the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act which now stood on the Statute-book.

§ MR. DILLON
said he thought the right hon. and learned the Lord Advocate had stated that he had shown activity in opposing the Bill.

§ *MR. A. GRAHAM MURRAY
said that that showed that there might be activity combined with ignorance. The hon. Member had drawn attention to the fact that his name and that of the Solicitor General for Scotland were on the back of the Bill. But the Arizona Bill was of the ordinary Provisional Order character; and this was a Confirmation Bill, hence the names of the Ministers of the Department were on the back of the Bill. He knew nothing of the Arizona Company; he was not a director of it, and he did not consider he was in any way concerned with the provisions of this particular Provisional Order, which the hon. Member rightly said were very complicated. It was the ordinary, at least not unusual, case of a company finding it necessary to ask for special powers to go to foreign courts. What was done under the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act of 1899 was that a petition was presented to the Secretary for Scotland for a Provisional Order. That petition was examined by the Chairmen of Committees of both Houses, and they decided whether the legislation should be by way of Private Bill or by way of Provisional Order. Next, the Secretary for Scotland decided whether there was or was not to be an inquiry if there were no opponents of the 44 Bill. At that time there were no opponents to this Bill, but the Secretary for Scotland, looking to its complicated provisions, decided that although there was no opposition there ought to be an inquiry, and that the company ought so to speak, to prove the preamble. Accordingly there was an inquiry, held by two hon. Members of the House of Commons and two noble Members of the other House. That inquiry was held in Edinburgh, and at the last moment certain opponents came forward and, under the powers contained in the Act, they were given, on special grounds, a locus standi, and were heard. The opponents wanted certain alterations in the Provisional Order, but the Commission did not give effect to their wishes. That being so the Provisional Order was issued by the Secretary for Scotland, who was bound forthwith to bring it before this House in the position of a Confirmation Bill. That Confirmation, Bill now came up for Second Reading. The hon. Member had declaimed on what he understood were points against the merits of the Bill, founded on a statement which he had received. The points in that statement might or might not be true, but what was the position the hon. Member had taken up? If he were successful in blocking the Second Reading he would bar inquiry as to the truth of the statement. The hon. Member for the Partick Division proposed to make a motion that the Bill be referred to a Joint Committee of the two Houses, and that motion he (the Lord Advocate) would heartily support. It was a procedure provided for in the Act, which, said that an appeal might be made to a Joint Committee of the two Houses. That was the simple and ordinary working of the Act, which the hon. Member for East Mayo could not possibly have mistaken had he taken the trouble to read the Act.

§ SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN (Stirling Burghs)
said he might perhaps say a word or two on this question, because he was even more extreme in his view than the hon. and learned Gentleman the Lord Advocate. Together with the great majority of the Scottish Members he, when the House was engaged in the manufacture of this new system of dealing with private Bills, 45 strongly objected to having any appeal to either or both the Houses after there had been a full parliamentary inquiry on the spot into the merits of the case. Like the right hon. and learned Gentleman, he knew nothing whatever of the merits of the case. Beyond the mere name of the Bill he knew nothing of it, but he knew that it had been fully considered by a most competent tribunal in Edinburgh, composed of Members of the two Houses. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that he would support the proposal for a further stage—namely, that of sending the Bill to a Joint Committee of the two Houses. That was where he parted company with the right hon. and learned Gentleman. He objected to it, because it seemed to him that that course would be ruinous to the success of the new system which had been introduced. If, on some plausible excuse, the whole thing had to be gone over again in London after it had been thoroughly threshed out in Edinburgh, let them go back to the old system, with an inquiry in the Lords and in the Commons. He was surprised that his hon. friend the Member for East Mayo should raise an objection to what was merely a formal and necessary stage in a Bill, in charge of a Minister, in order to confirm the decision of a tribunal which sat in the locality of the Bill—which he understood was a procedure his hon. friend wished to apply to Ireland.

§ MR. JOHN REDMOND (Waterford)
said that the hon. and learned Gentleman the Lord Advocate had taken his hon. friend the Member for East Mayo to task for his alleged inconsistency in this matter, inasmuch as the Irish Members wished to have Irish private Bills inquired into in Ireland. The Lord Advocate had pointed out that if his hon. friend proceeded to have a discussion at this stage of the Bill, that would destroy the possibility of any form of Home Rule for Ireland. But look at the inconsistency of the right hon. and learned Gentleman! In the next breath he spoke favourably of the proposal which had been made to send the Bill to a Joint Committee of both Houses, and thus to re-open and re-try the whole case. He would respectfully recommend the Lord Advocate not to speak with such an assumption of omniscience on such matters, and not to 46 lecture hon. Members from Ireland as if he were the only Member in the House who understood the provisions of the Private Legislation (Scotland) Act. Horn Members on the Irish benches thoroughly understood, as they thought, the provisions of that Bill, and what had happened confirmed him in the belief that he was absolutely right when, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, to the astonishment of some hon. Members, he objected to the Second Reading of a Bill moved by his right hon. friend the Member for North Tyrone, which proposed to extend bodily to Ireland the Scotch system. He believed that that system would be found to be illusory and useless. He took the view expressed by the Leader of the Opposition, that if there were to be a devolution of work from the House of Commons to local tribunals, was it worth having, if matters were to be reopened in the House? He thought his hon. friend the Member for East Mayo had rendered a service to Ireland in pointing out how futile the Private Bill system in Scotland was, and how ill-suited it would be to the special demand which Ireland made for the management in Ireland of purely Irish affairs.

§ MR. CAINE (Cornwall, Camborne)
said he knew nothing about the merits of the Bill, but if this was devolution it was strange devolution indeed, and he protested against it. On previous occasions schemes affecting the company were settled without the intervention of the House, and he did not understand now why the time of the House should be wasted on the present Bill.

§ MR. DILLON
said he might be permitted to say that he would not put the House to the trouble of a division in view of the discussion which would take place on Thursday.

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