HC Deb 15 March 1965 vol 708 cc881-2
Mr. Fell

With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I wish to raise a matter of privilege of which I have given you notice. It concerns a leading article which appeared in the Eastern Daily Press on Saturday, 13th March.

I am sure that we should not be touchy about fair criticism by the Press, but I consider that this article is untrue and is a disgraceful libel on the whole House. I ask you to rule that, prima facie, a breach of privilege has been committed.

For accuracy, I have a copy of the newspaper in question. Would you be good enough to ask the Clerk to read the article headed, "Is the Minister aware?…".

Copy of newspaper handed in.

The CLERK (Sir BARNETT COCKS) read the article complained of, as follows: Eastern Daily Press, March 13, 1965. Is the Minister aware? The people who voted 630 M.P.s into Parliament should look in one afternoon and see how they are wasting the nation's time. One of the prime duties of an M.P. is to make the Government explain itself. After prayers at 2.30, he has an hour in which to exact answers to his questions. A quick sum will show that there are so many questioners and so many Ministers to be questioned, that an hour a day is too brief a time to be frittered away. Yet it is being frittered away, day after day, in a frivolous and shameful fashion. The questions put down on the Order Paper are usually sensible enough. They cover everything from pigs to Polaris. If they were asked and answered with brevity, there would be nothing to complain about. What makes question time infuriating is the torrent of supplementary questions to which a sensible answer can scarcely be expected. Members on both sides seem to think they have been sent to Westminster to display their wit, to practise oratory for oratory's sake, to seize every slender pretext for needling the honourable gentlemen opposite, and generally to behave in a manner that would disgrace a gaggle of fourth-formers. 'Is the Minister aware …' is the favourite opening to a question that is not a question at all, but a recital of rubbish that does not advance the business of the House one inch. Ministers rarely resist the temptation to reply in kind, and the affairs of the day disappear beneath the dust of a party brawl. Mr. Speaker knocks their heads together whenever he can. Too often his intervention, which ought to remind Members of their dignity, calls forth from them a series of trivial appeals on points of order, and the brawl is on again in earnest. Things, the voter may sigh, were ever thus. But they were not. Old-timers can remember when the cry of "Century!" went up as the 100th question was reached. Today the House thinks itself virtuous if it gets to No. 20. The Prime Minister may manage to answer no more than two or three in his quarter of an hour. Sometimes it is his own fault: instead of brushing off the importunate like so many flies, which is what they deserve, he chooses to deliver them a homily. Wherever the blame may be judged to lie, the result is that the Order Paper is stuffed full of questions that will be ancient history before they are answered, and the hour that ought to be Parliament's finest is Parliament's most wretched.

Hon. Members

Hear, hear.

Mr. Speaker

Order. Complaints of privilege must be heard in silence. I shall rule on the hon. Gentleman's complaint tomorrow.