PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE. (Hansard, 27 March 1929)

§ Sir C. OMAN

In regard to the question of procedure in this House, I can only speak with an experience of 10 years. My first point is the absolute necessity of time saving in this House, and we ought to restrict the volubility of certain individual Members of this House. If one looks through the OFFICIAL REPORT, one finds that an enormous proportion of the time of the House, judging from the number of columns, is occupied by a comparatively small body of Members of this House. Sometimes those hon. Members pose as the watchdog of the State, and they express doubts upon every conceivable subject. Sometimes they appear as voices crying in the wilderness, and on other occasions they are urging that the time will soon come when red 2526 ruin and the breaking up of law and order will come about. All those hon. Members achieve one end, and that is they take up a large amount of the time of the House. When they get up to speak there is a general exodus of Members from the House. I have often wondered how it is possible for men of considerable intelligence to speak so often with the idea that they are following the career of the great Mr. Burke and becoming the dinner bell of the House. As the Duke of Wellington once said: We must get on with His Majesty's business. There are two or three things which I want to put before the House, and I do so now because it is perhaps the last opportunity I shall have as there will not be a further opportunity in the few remaining moments again after Easter. My first suggestion is that, a calculation having been made of the amount of time likely to be occupied by the Session, tickets covering a period of a quarter of an hour for speaking should be issued to Members of the House, and they should be strictly non-transferable. The speakers who have those tickets should be called to order by Mr. Speaker the moment when the time stated on their ticket comes to an end. In the case of some hon. Members, I think those tickets would be exhausted within a very short time after the beginning of the Session, and I am sure that would be for the general profit of the House, the realm, and the Empire. Probably it might not have that effect, but might only have the effect of leading those hon. Members to speak on subjects in which they were really interested, and to speak at moderate length and generally to give other people their chance. That is my first suggestion—that there should be a time allowance to all Members of the House, which should not be exceeded.

My second suggestion is this: On a minor scale, but very vexatiously, time is wasted in this House by one section of the House, generally the "Noes," called for a Division. Mr. Speaker asks them two or three times whether they wish for a Division, they keep on shouting "No," and Mr. Speaker allows the Division. Shouts ring round the building, the bells ring everywhere, and unwilling Members troop in from the Library or the Smoking-Room, only to find, when they reach the 2527 door, that no Tellers have been appointed and the Division is off. A quarter of an hour is sometimes wasted in that way, and I have a suggestion to make as to how it could be stopped. I have the greatest belief in the wisdom and deciding power of Mr. Speaker, and I would suggest that, when he has decided that the number of Members who have called for a Division makes it necessary to order a Division, the party Whips of that side should be held responsible for having allowed their friends to keep on calling for so long that a Division has been ordered. I should like to have some form of censure invented for the use of Mr. Speaker, and as it could not be applied to any vague and anonymous section, I would suggest it should be applied to the party Whips of that section. I do not know whether it would be possible for it to take the form of applying a fine, but I cannot help thinking that, if the party Whips knew that there was a fine of, say, two guineas for calling a Division and then putting it off, there would be a great deal less interruption of our dinner time, because these interruptions seem to have a particular knack of coming precisely between the hours of half-past seven and half-past eight.

Again, on the question of sparing time, why should it not be possible during Divisions to open the doors for the Division a little earlier? In the summer the heat is torrid, Members are 2528 crowded together to pass through, and frequent shouts of "Gate" may be heard while the Tellers are lingering. It seems to me that a slight change by which the Tellers should be appointed, and should take their posts at the doors at once would be an enormous improvement. The last point I wish to bring forward is that some check should be put on supplementary questions. They are often very right and proper, and necessary to elicit the actual meaning of a Minister's reply, but they are occasionally purely futile, and they are still more occasionally, what is worse than futile, intended to be funny. I should like to find some arrangement by which, by the authority of Mr. Speaker, a black mark should be placed against the would-be funny asker of questions who is preventing deserving questions in the sixties and seventies from being asked. I have made these few suggestions, the result of 10 years pondering. I am sorry they will be perfectly futile when made at this particular hour, and at this particular time of the Parliament, but I thought I ought to express my opinion and, in any case, liberavi animam meam.