Clause 1.—(VALIDATION OF ELECTION OF AND INDEMNITY FOR CHRISTOPHER JOHN HOLLAND-MARTIN, ESQUIRE.) (Hansard, 25 October 1955)

§ Mr. Eric Fletcher (Islington, East)
On a point of order. I had an Amendment on the Order Paper.

§ The Chairman
It is out of order.

§ Mr. Fletcher
This Clause is in two parts. One seeks to declare that a gentleman who was disqualified when elected shall be deemed to have been duly qualified and the other seeks to release him from the penalties which he would suffer by reason of having taken his seat. My Amendment aims at deleting part of the Clause by leaving out from "Esquire" in page 1, line 5, to "is" in line 11.

§ The Chairman
As I have said, the Amendment is out of order and we therefore cannot deal with it.

§ Mr. Fletcher
With great respect, when the Committee is considering a Bill of this kind, which falls into two distinct parts, the Committee ought to consider whether it should deal with one part and not the other or whether it should deal with both parts. Surely it is depriving the Committee of very important rights on this very important subject if a simple Amendment of this kind cannot be considered by the Committee. With great respect, I invite you, Sir Charles, to indicate why the Amendment is out of order and why the Committee should apparently be deprived of considering separately the two distinct questions.

§ The Chairman
I thought that the hon. Gentleman understood why it was out of order. It is out of order because it does not make sense.

§ Mr. Fletcher
With great respect, that is a point with which I can deal quite 61 simply. In my submission it would make perfect sense if this short Bill were to read, instead of reading as printed. Christopher John Holland-Martin, Esq., is hereby discharged, freed and indemnified from all penal consequences whatsover incurred by him by sitting or voting as a Member of that House while holding the said office.

§ The Chairman
That is the whole point. It does not make sense if those words are left in.

§ Mr. Fletcher
With great respect, it might well be necessary to add consequential words.

§ The Chairman
That is the whole point. They are not on the Paper.

§ Mr. Fletcher
With great respect, if this Amendment were carried I would ask your leave to move another Amendment.

§ The Chairman
I am not calling the hon. Member's Amendment because it is out of order. We are on the Question, That the Clause stand part of the Bill. The Committee cannot discuss an Amendment which is out of order.

§ Mr. Fletcher
Surely it has always been the case that, when the sense of an Amendment is perfectly obvious, it is not ruled out of order merely because of some technical or verbal point in its terms. I submit with respect that the sense of the Amendment is perfecly clear. If, as a result of the Amendment being carried, some further wording has to be added in order to make sense, it can be added.

§ The Chairman
That is true, but I am here to carry out the Standing Orders of the House, and an Amendment which is not complete without a consequential Amendment is out of order.

§ Mr. Sydney Silverman (Nelson and Colne)
Further to that point of order. I am not quite sure that I understood the discussion but I gather that the Amendment is out of order because it retains the words at the end, "while holding the said office."

§ The Chairman
That is the point.

§ Mr. Silverman
if that is so, is there not a misunderstanding? "While holding the said office" does not mean while holding the office of Member of Parliament. It means while holding the office which disqualifies him from being a 62 Member. It is not for me to say what is in order and what is not—that is the prerogative of the Chair—but if an Amendment were held to be out of order because of a misinterpretation of the meaning of the words "while holding the said office," possibly the question might be reconsidered.
I take it that what my hon. Friend sought to do was to say that while we shall not seek to defy the Representation of the People Act by declaring a man elected who is declared by the Act not to be capable of being elected, so defying the plain direction of Mr. Speaker earlier this afternoon, nevertheless we ought to relieve him of any financial penalty; and I think my hon. Friend's Amendment was well designed to achieve that purpose if the Committee thought fit to accept it.

§ The Chairman
That may well be so, but it is not in order. I am here simply to carry out the rules of the House, and I cannot call Amendments which are not in order.

§ Mr. Fletcher
In order to facilitate business and to give the Committee an opportunity to consider a vital point, may I ask your leave, Sir Charles, to put down a manuscript Amendment, to add, at the end of line 13, while holding an office of profit under the Crown"?

§ The Chairman
Even if I were willing to do so, I could not do so because I have already called the Question, That the Clause stand part of the Bill.

§ Mr. Fletcher
The last thing I want to do is to argue with the Chair. We all realise that you are bound by rules of order, Sir Charles, but surely I am not asking too much in asking you to facilitate a discussion prompted by the Amendment, the sense of which is obvious and the fault in which can easily be cured by a consequential Amendment. That would enable the Committee to consider an important point which arises on the Bill.

§ The Chairman
That is not the point. I simply carry out the orders which I am given and if I were to do what the hon. Member wishes I should not be carrying out my duties. I cannot do it.

§ Mr. Silverman
The Question before the Committee is, That the Clause stand part of the Bill. I suppose it would be 63 in order to address the Committee with a view to persuading it that the Clause should not stand part of the Bill.

§ The Chairman
Certainly. That is the debate now.

§ Mr. Fletcher
May I address you, Sir Charles, on the subject, That the Clause stand part of the Bill, and put to you the arguments which I should have put had the Amendment been called? They are inevitably bound up with this question.
While having the greatest respect for the Ruling which you have just given, I must protest at the way in which the Government have treated the House and the Committee in our consideration of the Bill. You will recollect, Sir Charles, that the Second Reading of the Bill was moved by the Attorney-General on 27th July, in very curious circumstances. That was two or three days before the House rose for the Recess and on an occasion when a very important statement was expected from the Prime Minister about the Four-Power Conference at Geneva, to hear which statement the whole House was impatiently waiting.
It was a very considerable indulgence to the Government that, after protests had been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) and others, and with considerable misgivings about the propriety of doing so, the House agreed to the Second Reading of the Bill. As the result of the protest, the Leader of the House agreed that the Committee stage and subsequent proceedings on the Bill should be postponed. Therefore, this is really the first opportunity we have had, either as the House or in Committee, to consider the merits of the Bill.
A farcical situation exists in regard to the disqualification of Members of Parliament, the validity of certain elections, and the Government's refusal to validate other elections. The proceedings which we witnessed this afternoon show a degree of inconsistency almost unbelievable in a democratic assembly. On one afternoon we have had before us three cases of gentlemen elected by a majority in their constituencies, in two of which cases the successful candidates are regarded as disqualified, their election has been declared invalid, and the defeated candidates have taken the seats as Members of the House.
64 The third case is of a gentleman who was equally disqualified, but whom the Government are inviting us to declare duly elected, notwithstanding the illegalities attending his election.
The Attorney-General must explain the attitude of the Government. A whole range of matters disqualifies persons from being elected to the House of Commons. I hope we shall hear from the Attorney-General when the Government intend to make progress with the House of Commons Disqualification Bill, which has been presented and of which the Second Reading has not yet taken place. The whole of the matter is in considerable chaos.
The Bill is concerned with Mr. John Holland-Martin who, like the other two gentlemen who were elected by majority vote in Mid-Ulster and Fermanagh and South Tyrone respectively, was disqualified, after his election, from being a Member of Parliament. Whatever we may think of the morals of Mr. Mitchell and the others who were elected in Northern Ireland, we must agree that they were elected for very special reasons which appealed to their constituents, who well knew of the disqualification of the candidates whom they were seeking to elect. Notwithstanding that fact, the views of the majority of those electors have been disregarded and the minority candidates have been declared elected.

§ The Chairman
I am reluctant to stop the hon. Gentleman but he is now dealing with matters with which we have finished. We are dealing with one particular individual now.

§ Mr. Fletcher
I mentioned the other cases only to point the contrast that exists when we come to the case of Mr. Holland-Martin, who was equally disqualified from being elected a Member of the House. He held an office of profit under the Crown in circumstances which, as I think the Attorney-General himself has recognised, ought to have made it obvious to him and to anybody he took the trouble to consult that he was debarred from election.
He was a Member of the local Board of Directors of the Bank of New Zealand, and he had held that office—a paid office—since April, 1950. At the time of the General Election he had not taken any trouble to consider his legal position, and, 65 according to his own statement, it was apparently in quite fortuitous circumstances that it occurred to him that his acceptance of that paid office disqualified him. Yet, in contradistinction to what has occurred about the election of the representatives from Northern Ireland, the Government have introduced this Bill to validate his election.
We are considering whether Clause 1 should stand part of the Bill. I hoped to accede to the suggestion of the Government about indemnification in respect of all the penal consequences which Mr. Holland-Martin could suffer as the result of taking his seat while disqualified. We do not quarrel with that at all, but it seems to me and to some of my hon. Friends most inconsistent and anomalous, especially in view of what has happened earlier this afternoon, that the Government should seek to validate this election by retrospective action and to declare valid what was quite obviously invalid at the time. I am sure that you will appreciate, Sir Charles, my Amendment having been declared out of order, that it is difficult for me to secure the objective I hoped to achieve, namely, to remove the penalties while retaining the invalidity of the election.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes (South Ayrshire)
We should have an explanation from the Attorney-General before we agree to pass the Clause. There are doubts in my mind whether Mr. Holland-Martin really held an office of profit under the Crown. A committee took evidence, and came to the conclusion that his being a local director of the Bank of New Zealand disqualified him. But it is common knowledge that other bank directors holding positions in the banking world far more lucrative than that of a local director of the Bank of New Zealand are not disqualified.
We know, for example, that quite a large number of occupants of the Government Front Bench immediately become bank directors when they go out of office. I do not remember any doubt being entertained about the present Prime Minister who, when he went into Opposition, became a director of one of the "Big Five." I do not understand why a director of one of the "Big Five"—earning a very lucrative salary—can carry on in this House and not be regarded as 66 holding an office of profit under the Crown while this hon. Member, who is a bank director in a very small way, comes under the disqualification of the Act. I should like the Attorney-General to explain why a bank director getting only £550 or so per annum from the New Zealand Bank is disqualified whereas an hon. Member who is a director of one of the "Big Five"—who may be getting a salary of anything from £4,000 to £5,000 a year—is allowed to continue without being subject to any of the penalties in the Act.
Then, Sir Charles, this is a case rather different from the previous cases which we discussed in Bills presented to the House before the Recess. In those cases it was pointed out that none of the hon. Members had really made any profit from the positions they held whilst being Members of Parliament. This hon. Gentleman did. In effect, what we are doing by passing this Clause is to confirm the election of an hon. Member in circumstances which have changed very considerably since his electors voted him into the House of Commons last May.
I submit that the matter should be left to the decision of the electors. What we are now doing is to say that in the circumstances of October, 1955, we, as the House of Commons, are prepared to declare this hon. Member elected, but the circumstances in May and October are entirely different. It is not for us to judge, but for this hon Gentleman's constituents. He was returned in an entirely different situation. The Government went to the country and he was elected on the assumption that he was being sent here to continue what is called "Tory prosperity"; but the Tory prosperity for which his constituents voted at the last Election has been proved to be an entire myth.
This matter should be decided by a new election. If we are to carry the principle of democracy to its logical conclusion I see no reason why this hon. Gentleman, who has been holding an office of profit under the Crown, should not go back to his constituents and ask whether they want to elect him in the circumstances of October, 1955. Circumstances today are so very different that it is conceivable that his constituents might say, "Oh, no, this Tory prosperity that we voted for in May has become a myth and has no longer any foundation at all," and 67 that instead of voting for an hon. Member to provide more houses it was being asked of them to return the hon. Gentleman to vote for reducing the housing subsidy.
In all these circumstances I believe that the democratic thing would be to say that this should be decided by the hon. Gentleman's constituents. He is entitled to go to his electors and ask whether they wish him to represent them in a different set of circumstances, when the Government are standing not for a policy of prosperity but for what we think is a policy not in the interests of the people.

§ Mr. Hector Hughes (Aberdeen, North)
I submit that this Clause should not stand part of the Bill for the following reasons. One is that a very grave situation has disclosed itself in this House both before and after the Recess relating to a number of electoral irregularities which have had to be rectified. This Clause seeks to rectify one such an irregularity in a very peculiar set of circumstances.
My second reason for opposing this Clause is that the gentleman in question is involved as a bank director. He comes before this House and says that he did not know that in standing for membership of this House whilst occupying the position of a director of the Bank of New Zealand he was committing an irregularity. Such a plea might possibly be accepted in the case of an ignorant man, but is it right for this House to accept it and to embody it in a Clause of this kind in the case of a man who is, presumably, educated and who probably knows the limits and boundaries of the office he occupies? He knows whether or not it is an office of profit, yet he stands for election to this House, and this Clause seeks to regularise the position.
That brings me to my third reason. This gentleman has put himself in the position of gambling with his status. It looks very much as if he took the chance of being elected or not elected to this House. If he were not elected he would probably have retained his position as a director of the Bank of New Zealand; if he were elected he would then come before the House and make this ad misericordiam plea, saying, "I did not know that it was an office of profit—please rectify my position." That is done by means of this Clause.
68 I submit that that is the kind of thing which this House ought not to allow. This is not the kind of Clause that ought to be drafted and brought before the House to meet the position. I say that it is wrong. I support the argument propounded by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes); this is indeed a matter which should be decided, not by a Clause of this kind but by the constituents who voted for this hon. Gentleman. I therefore oppose the Clause. I say it is wrong. It is ethically wrong and wrong in practice. It is constitutionally wrong, and for every reason I hope that the House will reject it.

§ Mr. S. Silverman
Like all my hon. Friends who have so far spoken, I should, had this Clause been confined to relieving Mr. Holland-Martin from the very heavy financial consequences of what has taken place, have been happy to support it. I should have supported it because I think that we all recognise that although Mr. Holland-Martin may have been negligent—I do not say that he was—still, whether negligent or not, he acted by inadvertence and in complete good faith. I think, therefore, that the House is quite right to relieve him of the many penal consequences which he himself might have to bear. The House has power to do that, and has power to do that without doing more. Since we recognise that he acted in good faith we should be right to do so much.
If the Amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) had been called and had been accepted, it would, in my submission, have had the effect which he wanted and which would have enabled me and some of my hon. Friends to support the Clause. But it has not been called, and the Committee, therefore, has not expressed any opinion about it, and we are left with the choice only of passing the Clause or rejecting it as a whole. That is a pity, but it is the only choice now left to the Committee, and, having that choice to make, I feel bound to advise the Committee to reject the Clause.

§ Mr. Hector Hughes
In view of what my hon. Friend has said about good faith, I should like to make it clear that when I referred to Mr. Holland-Martin gambling with his chances of getting into this House I was not imputing bad faith 69 to him. I said that he had put himself in the position of appearing to gamble with his chances of winning the seat or not and retaining his directorship or not. I did not impugn his good faith at all.

§ Mr. Silverman
I am sure that my hon. and learned Friend did not impugn Mr. Holland-Martin's good faith, any more than the rest of us have done. But we are still left in the position of deciding whether we are, therefore, to treat the Act of Parliament which declares Mr. Holland-Martin incapable of ever having been elected as though it had not been passed. With respect to the Committee, to the House and to any other decision which may at any other time have been taken, we are in very grave danger of making ourselves in these matters the laughing stock of the country and of the world.
It is all very well to say that some breaches of a statute are trivial and that others are substantial. It may well be so. But if that were so, then every Member of the House of Commons, every citizen and every elector is as good a judge as any other elector or Member of what is trivial and what is substantial. The House and the Committee are obviously very much better advised to base themselves, not on the question whether a breach of statute is trivial or substantial, but on whether a breach of statute has occurred. That is what the House did earlier this afternoon. It refused—and with respect I think it was quite right to refuse—to go into the merits, circumstances, history and arguments for or against and come to any conclusion as to whether or not the gentleman concerned was guilty of moral turpitude, whether he was a hero or a martyr or a common felon. We have refused to discuss any of these matters and we took our decision, on Mr. Speaker's direction, on the plain fact that the statute had declared the gentleman as being incapable of being elected to the House of Commons, and acted accordingly.
Mr. Holland-Martin is also incapable, by statute, of being elected. There is absolutely no distinction to be drawn between the two cases unless we are to go into the merits of the particular group of statutes, and it has already been established that we have no right to do that. If we are not to go into the merits, if we are merely to treat this as a breach of 70 statute, if we are to base ourselves on the statutory right of a man or woman to be elected to the House of Commons, then the two cases are exactly the same.
5.15 p.m.
It may very well be that the House, if it were free to do so, might confirm the statute which rendered the one case in which a candidate is incapable of being elected, and might wish to amend or even repeal the other statute. The Government have declared themselves time after time as being of the opinion that many offices are offices of profit under the Crown in so narrow or trivial or technical a sense that the law ought to be amended, and a great many of us would support them in that view. But until the statute has been amended, it remains the law of the land and is as much binding on the Committee and this House as any other statute.
There have been a number of cases during the past ten years, and I think perhaps before, in which the House, in select cases, one by one, has done what is proposed here. A man has been found by a Select Committee to be incapable of being elected, and the House, which has accepted that finding, has passed a Motion which virtually in his particular individual case exempted him from the operation of the statute. It has repealed or amended the statute in his particular case. In all those cases the matter has indeed been trivial. But no one can say that it is trivial in this case.
Mr. Holland-Martin was a bank director at a not very large but, at any rate, significant or substantial salary. He knew where he got his salary from. He was a director of a national bank, a State bank. In the course of his office the Government have raised the Bank Rate, presumably to the profit of the banks; they have done this certainly twice, and I am not sure whether it has been raised three times.
All these matters do not involve any personal misconduct on Mr. Holland-Martin's part at all. They are matters in which the statute, left to itself, would involve him in heavy financial penalties. I have already said that we are all content that he should be relieved from all of those. But on the matter whether he should be a Member of this House or not, the statute has declared itself. If he is no longer disqualified by reason of his having resigned that office, then the question whether he should be re-elected to 71 the House of Commons—or perhaps it would be more strictly correct to say whether he should now be elected to the House of Commons—is surely a matter for the constituency in whose name he sat and voted here while disqualified and incapable of doing so.
This is not a matter that cannot be put right. If Mr. Holland-Martin's constituency shared the view that nothing untoward occurred at all, it would be within their power to elect him when an election next takes place in that constituency, and if he was incapable of being elected and was therefore not elected there would now have to be a new election in which he could stand and explain himself and a great many other things to the electors. It is in every way fit and proper that he should have an opportunity of doing so. He cannot come and explain it to us—not, at any rate, until we have passed this Bill and it has received the Royal Assent. When it has received the Royal Assent, any explanation will be irrelevant.
If we pass the Clause as we are invited to do and the Bill becomes an Act, nobody will ever get any explanation at all. But this is a matter which calls for explanation to the people who have a better right to hear and judge the adequacy of the explanations than the House of Commons has—that is to say, the electors of this country or those of them who have so far not been represented for several years in the House of Commons. I fail to see why the Government should not adopt that course. Why not?
Of course, it would create a by-election. One can see that a by-election might be inconvenient—

§ Mr. E. Fletcher
And embarrassing.

§ Mr. Silverman
—and embarrassing to the Government at this moment, particularly if the candidate supporting their policy happened to have been a director of a national bank. But what is inconvenient to the Government might be very convenient to the country and very convenient to the constituency. I am sure that even the Government have not gone so far as to say that where there is a conflict between proper democratic practice and Government convenience, 72 proper democratic practice should give way and Government convenience should have it. That is really what we are doing here.
This was a serious infringement and a long, continuous infringement, and it was as much a breach of statute as any other matter of this kind with which the House has recently been concerned. There is no more reason in this case why the House of Commons should repeal a long-standing Act of Parliament in respect of one single individual, merely because its own electoral advantage is concerned, than there was that certain electors in Northern Ireland should not have the opportunity of declaring that the man with the greater number of votes rather than the man with the fewer number of votes was elected in their constituency to represent them in the House of Commons.

§ The Attorney-General (Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller)
I should like first to say that the procedure followed in this case differs in no respect from the procedure which has been followed in other cases which have come before this House. In each of these cases, the matter has been referred to a Select Committee for investigation and report to this House.
In the Report of the Select Committee upon this case, the Committee, representative of all parties, said: Your Committee are satisfied that Mr. Holland-Martin acted in good faith in continuing as a local Director of the Bank of New Zealand after becoming a Member of the House. He informed them that it was on his own initiative that the matter was raised. Your Committee appreciate this and consider that otherwise the question of the validity of the election might have gone unnoticed … That is the view of the Committee which heard Mr. Holland-Martin's evidence, and it is a unanimous conclusion upon that part of the evidence. It appears from the evidence given before the Select Committee that Mr. Holland-Martin brought this question—and it was not an entirely easy question—to my notice at the very first moment possible after it had occurred to him that this office might come within the category of an office of profit under the Crown.
I was glad to hear the hon. and learned Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Hector Hughes), in an interruption of the speech of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman), correct an impression, which, I think, anyone listening to the 73 hon. and learned Member's speech would have gained, that he was in fact, contrary to the finding of the Select Committee, accusing Mr. Holland-Martin of acting in bad faith, because, in his speech, the hon. and learned Gentleman said that Mr. Holland-Martin had been gambling with his status, and it looked very much as if he had taken a chance on being elected or not while holding that office.
I am very glad that the hon. and learned Gentleman made it quite clear that, when he used those words, he had no intention of imputing any bad faith of any degree.
That being so, the next thing to which I would refer is the recommendation of the Select Committee, which agreed with the opinion which I expressed that the appointment held was an office of profit under the Crown, and the Committee concluded therefore that Mr. Holland-Martin's election was invalid. In the circumstances, however—and this again was a unanimous recommendation—the Committee recommended that legislation should be introduced at once to indemnify Mr. Holland-Martin from any penalities he might have incurred, and to validate his election.
I do not think that it lies in the mouth of the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) to criticise Her Majesty's Government for acting on that unanimous recommendation of a Select Committee of this House. The Bill was introduced. It obtained its Second Reading, and it was in the same form as the Bills dealing with the five cases that occurred in the days of the Socialist Government, and the other cases which we have had to consider.
It is suggested that this case is on all-fours with cases which have recently been considered in relation to Northern Ireland. That is not the case. It has always been a matter of great difficulty in many cases to determine what falls within the description of office of profit under the Crown. Here, as anyone who has read the Report of the Select Committee, which I fear the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) cannot have done, would have seen, this bank of which Mr. Holland-Martin was a director of the local board in London was a bank constituted in New Zealand, and one of the reasons for concluding that the office held by Mr. Holland-Martin was an office of 74 profit under the Crown was that the Government of New Zealand had powers of giving directions to the directors in New Zealand, which might have enabled them to dismiss or appoint any local director.
There really is no comparison between conviction for treason and felony and a sentence following upon it, and the question whether or not one holds an office of profit. One is easily provable; the other is not so easily determinable. There is no comparison in that respect. I agree that under the law as it stands both result in incapacity; but this House has taken a very different line with regard to offices of profit because it has always realised—and we hope that the law about this will soon be tidied up—that any hon. Member of this House runs a considerable risk of inadvertently offending against the law about holding an office of profit.
The House up till now has taken a very proper and generous attitude to those who have inadvertently offended against the law by holding an office of profit. Now, the hon. Members for Nelson and Colne and Islington, East have thrown out a suggestion that we should not apply precedents which we followed in the days of the Socialist Government of validating an election and relieving the individual concerned of all penalties—precedents which had been followed heretofore—but that we should merely give relief from penalties.
The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne says that a constituency might well want now to change its Member. I do not think that is the sort of argument that we ought to consider in relation to this question, particularly in the light of the Report of a Select Committee which has unanimously recommended, having gone into all the circumstances, the validation of the election. It is a suggestion which, I think, has been thrown out for the first time and one which no doubt the Select Committee, when considering the case to which the Leader of the House has drawn our attention today, will bear in mind when making its recommendations.
I do not propose to say any more about that now other than this. In my view, it would be wrong for us to reject the unanimous recommendation of the Select 75 Committee and to depart from the precedents which had been set of validating the election and relieving from penalties all those who have been found inadvertently to have gone contrary to the law by holding an office of profit.

§ Mr. S. Silverman
The Attorney-General will no doubt bear in mind that our discussions are now taking place at a different time and, in a sense, on a different footing from those obtained when the Select Committee met. We have had the Northern Ireland cases since then, and we have had a plain direction, even this afternoon, from Mr. Speaker that where a statute declares that a man is incapable of being elected to the House of Commons, the House of Commons ought to regard itself as bound by it and not seek to amend or repeal it, except in proper form. The circumstances are, therefore, now very different from those with which the Select Committee had to deal.

§ Mr. G. R. Mitchison (Kettering)
I always appreciate, and listen with great interest, to the logical and legal arguments put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman). Whether we agree with him or not, we always have the greatest respect for his opinion on these matters. That goes for my other hon. and hon. and learned Friends who have spoken in this debate.
They put me in the slightly difficult position of having to disagree either with them or with my four hon. Friends who served on the Select Committee, and I think it best to say quite frankly that of the two opinions I prefer that of my hon. Friends on the Select Committee; and I reject the somewhat insufficient distinction that has just been drawn between the circumstances at that time and now. We have had other cases before a Select Committee and before this House, and today we have had an intimation that one is to be referred. Perhaps it is better to say nothing whatever about it, not even about the matters which the Select Committee will consider when it deals with that case.
76 Therefore, for myself and, I believe, for many of my hon. and right hon. Friends I say we accept the Report of the Select Committee, as we did, on a question which it is very difficult indeed to distinguish from the question before the Committee—the question on Second Reading of this Bill. We accept it, and we believe that this Clause ought to stand part of the Bill if only because that to which we gave a Second Reading without a Division would otherwise seem to be somewhat meaningless.