§ Mr. SpeakerYesterday the hon. and gallant Member for Brixton (Lieut.-Colonel Lipton) drew the attention of the House to a matter contained in the People, the issue of Sunday last. He brought it forward without notice as a case of breach of Privilege. The hon. and gallant Member was asked to bring the paper up to the Table. To add to my surprise over the whole matter, he handed me not the whole paper, as the rules demand, but a cutting from it. On that occasion, I used these words:
The hon. and gallant Member ought to have brought up the whole paper; he has brought me only a piece of it. That being the case, and as I have just heard of this and had no opportunity to study it, I will rule for the moment that the hon. and gallant Member has raised this particular matter at the earliest possible moment and I shall reserve what I have to say on it until tomorrow.I was aware, of course, of the rule that the hon. and gallant Gentleman had unwittingly broken in bringing forward a cutting, which is not sufficient; but, if I may be frank with the House, I was so moved by the statement which he made and felt so much sympathy with it that I was anxious not to give a hasty decision if there were any way round the technical objection.I have carefully considered the matter, however, in the interval and I find that it is a clear rule of the House that if any document is made the foundation for a complaint on Privilege, the whole docu- 1859 ment must be produced and not only a bit of it. The only advice I can give the hon. and gallant Member, therefore, is that he should put down a Motion on this matter. That in no way prejudices his chance of the matter being considered.
§ Lieut.-Colonel LiptonWhile I regret, Mr. Speaker, that on a purely technical point unconnected with the merits of the case at all, you have decided that no prima facie case of breach of Privilege has been made out—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—on the purely technical point you have come to the conclusion that I have not properly established to your satisfaction that a prima facie case of breach of Privilege has been made out—may I ask you whether, in these particular circumstances, if I now provide you with a full copy of the newspaper in question, that will get over the purely technical point on which you have based your Ruling?
§ Mr. SpeakerI want to make clear what I was deciding. I said yesterday:
In these matters of Privilege, my duty is confined to seeing whether the conditions are fulfilled which are necessary to enable the hon. and gallant Member's complaint to get precedence over the Orders of the Day."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th December, 1955; Vol. 547, c. 1669–70.]That is all I have decided.The conditions are, of course, that the matter should be raised at the earliest possible moment and that I am satisfied that there is a prima facie case. That does not arise unless the procedural matters are correct. The procedural matter which is now wrong is that the hon. and gallant Member handed in only a piece of the paper. My Ruling is confined merely to that. There is no way I can see now of putting that matter right except by a Motion by the hon. and gallant Member, when the House can do what it likes in the matter.
§ Mr. S. SilvermanMay I have a clarification of one part of your Ruling. Mr. Speaker? I understand that it has already been determined by the Ruling which you gave yesterday that my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Brixton (Lieut.-Colonel Lipton) has complied with the first condition—that notice should be taken of it and complaint made of it at the earliest possible moment; and that what now prevents you from advising the 1860 House that it would be well advised to give it consideration in precedence over the Orders of the Day is a procedural point in that my hon. and gallant Friend failed to bring to the Table the whole of the newspaper. Since that is only a procedural point, is it or is it not capable of being cured now, so that if the procedural point—and it is purely that—were cured, the fact that you have already ruled that my hon. and gallant Friend gave the earliest possible notice will see that he is not prejudiced in having the matter properly considered by the House?
§ Mr. SpeakerWhat I am saying today is what I would have said yesterday had I had the time to consider it, and I must look at it from the position of yesterday. To secure precedence over the Orders of the Day, the hon. and gallant Member must not only have raised it at the earliest possible moment but, if his complaint were founded on a document—the rules of the House are perfectly clear on the matter—he must have produced the whole document and not only a piece of it. This has been the rule of the House since 1878. In my endeavours to help I have been studying the matter.
In that year, Mr. Parnell, who was a very redoubtable Member of Parliament, tried to move a Motion to the same effect, but produced only a series of cuttings from the newspaper. I ought to say that that very distinguished Member of this House at once accepted the Speaker's Ruling of that time that the failure to produce the whole document was fatal to his chances of getting precedence over the Orders of the Day. Perhaps I might add, for the information of the House, that the House always has a distinct bias in its procedure to stick to the Orders of the Day. If, for special reason, provision is made for them to be departed from, as in the case of Standing Order No. 9 or something like that, it is hedged about with rules which must be complied with, and it is part of my duty to enforce them. I have no power to do otherwise. I therefore suggest to the hon. and gallant Member that he should table his Motion.
§ Lieut.-Colonel LiptonWould you be good enough, Mr. Speaker, to answer the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) —namely, whether or not it is now possible to remedy the purely procedural point which you raised by handing in a 1861 complete copy of the newspaper, including the sporting pages? If I may say so, the cutting was not really a cutting but a sufficiently large proportion of the front page of the newspaper to indicate the name of the paper, the date on which it was published and the connection between the words of which I had complained and the newspaper to which I was drawing your attention.
§ Mr. SpeakerI am afraid that the answer must be in the negative. The hon. and gallant Member may remember that when he brought the paper up yesterday I said at once that he ought to have brought the whole paper. He brought only a piece of it. I did not know until then that he had brought a piece of it, and a piece, although considerable, does not comply with the rule. I regret that it is impossible to cure it now except in the way I suggested to the hon. and gallant Member—that he should put a Motion on the Order Paper on the subject.
§ Mr. BennOn a more general question, while I make no reference to this matter, when an hon. Member suspects that a breach of Privilege may have occurred and brings it to your notice, and the matter is held over until the next day, is it not the custom that that is for the very purpose of enabling that hon. Member to bring the document to you so that you may consider it, Sir? I recall very clearly a question of Privilege concerning Mr. Pritt being raised in 1953 by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) in the middle of a debate one night in order to maintain the precedence for the following day, because he had seen something which indicated a breach of Privilege on the tape, and he brought the piece of tape into the House. May I ask 1862 you to clarify what you mean when you say the precedence of the Motion must be preserved, if, when the end of that period of deserved precedence comes, you say that it has lost its value?
§ Mr. SpeakerThe reason why, when the hon. and gallant Member yesterday failed to produce the whole document, I did not at once, as I might have done, rule against him was because I wanted to make certain that there was no way of getting over those procedural difficulties. That was my only reason for delaying the matter.
§ Lieut.-Colonel LiptonMay I make one further submission to you, Mr. Speaker? Would you be good enough to indicate to the House, for the information of hon. Members, what is a complete document? Will you say whether, in the case of a complaint about something in an issue of a newspaper, it is not sufficient, in accordance with such rules of procedure as may relate to the matter, to produce a sufficiently large portion of that newspaper, including the words complained of, to make it clear that the words complained of appeared in a specific issue of a specific newspaper?
§ Mr. SpeakerThe hon. and gallant Gentleman could have found the answer to that in the erudite pages of Erskine May. It means the whole issue of the newspaper.