§ Mr. George CunninghamOn a point of order, Mr. Speaker. It concerns something which I think will be of great interest to the entire House and it relates to tomorrow's business. I understand that no request has been made to you by my right hon. Friend the Lord President for any statement to be made today about a very important addition which is likely to be made to tomorrow's business.
I believe that the House would wish to know now of this addition to the business, which is to be considered tomorrow if present plans go forward. This will be business in the House, not in Committee, and it will concern alteration of the timetable motion on the Scotland Bill in order to divide up tomorrow's session in Committee into three sections. I must not go into the substance of that or protest about it at this stage, but it is extremely important that the House should know that it is coming up. If we are not told now, hon. Members will know nothing of it until they see tomorrow's Order Paper. I therefore ask you and, through you, Mr. Speaker, the Lord President, whether we may be told of the motion which it is proposed should be tabled.
It could be that an amendment which might otherwise have passed, and I believe has a good chance of doing so, and which is designed not to kill devolution but to give effect to the assertions of many hon. Members that the overwhelming majority of the Scottish people want devolution, would be prevented from being debated and voted upon. If new business is being added to tomorrow's Order Paper the Lord President should not wait for us to catch sight of it by accident on the Order Paper tomorrow. He should tell us now what he proposes to put down.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I have no knowledge whatever of any change in the business. I have not been notified of such.
§ Later—
§ Mr. DalyellOn a point of order, Mr. Speaker.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I am not prepared to take further points of order on unnamed business of which I know nothing. If I know nothing about it, how on earth can I rule on it?
§ Mr. PymFurther to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Although I entirely understand your position and respect what you have just said, and I appreciate that the Lord President has not in any sense responded or sought to catch your eye in relation to the matter raised by the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham), it nevertheless appears that there is, to say the least, a rumour of some change which is to take place tomorrow, and I think that this may place the House in some difficulty.
Whether that rumour be well founded or not is not for me at this moment to say, but, clearly, there is a degree of anxiety. The Lord President has not sought to rise and respond, and I suggest that it might be helpful if he did.
§ The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Michael Foot)Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Nobody knows better than does the right hon. Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) what the normal procedures of the House in this matter are. Nobody knows better than the right hon. Gentleman does the way in which decisions of Business Committees are reported to the House. Nobody knows better than the right hon. Gentleman does what the Order Paper is for. In fact, what we are doing on this occasion is to follow exactly—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—what we are doing is following exactly the procedures which have always have been followed by the House by which the decisions of the Business Committee are reported to the House.
Any suggestion that there is anything sinister or out of the ordinary here is an absolute misleading of the House. Nobody knows that better than the right hon. Gentleman does, and he ought to have the common honesty to get to his feet and say so.
§ Mr. PymFurther to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. The Leader of the 1185 House knows perfectly well that I made no such allegation and made no suggestion at all of anything sinister. It is quite untrue and, I should have thought, completely out of order—certainly out of taste—for the Leader of the House to suggest otherwise, since in the remarks which I made, heard by the House? I said nothing of the kind. I was pointing out that he might have responded to his hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury.
§ Mr. DalyellFurther to the point of order, Mr. Speaker. If there is nothing sinister, would it not have been a simple matter—indeed, a matter of courtesy—to report to you what the Business Committee is up to? Frankly, it seems to some of us—I choose my words carefully—that, if these rumours are true, there is a danger that the Business of the House, without Mr. Speaker's knowledge, is being manipulated in such a way[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh".]—that votes which might have been taken and might have been embarrassing will not be taken. I suggest, therefore, that this is an issue on which you, as Speaker of the House of Commons, have a duty to protect the House.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I point out to the House that if there is a motion to be put on the Order Paper, clearly, the House will have a chance tomorrow when it comes up. But since I am in total ignorance of what is proposed, there is no point in pursuing the matter now.
§ Mr. George CunninghamFurther to the point of order—
§ Mr. SpeakerMr. Cunningham—to close the matter.
§ Mr. CunninghamI understand your difficulty, Mr. Speaker, and your difficulty is as nothing compared to ours, if I may say so. I hope that the Government Front Bench, who are not prepared to stand up and say what they intend to do tomorrow, will realise that the House is in a difficult position. They can get rid of the problem immediately if they want to.
May I put this to you, Mr. Speaker, since this is a point of order? If tomorrow there were a business motion making a change in the business of the House, that, I understand, would be an undebatable motion so that there would not be a lot of time lost for debate, and it would be an opposable motion. Am I right in thinking that any time taken upon that motion would come out of whatever abbreviated allocation of time might be brought about by that motion for a clause of enormous importance—the referendum clause—in the Scotland Bill?
§ Mr. SpeakerThe same is true today. These points of order are taking time from the time which is to follow under the guillotine.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. Is the hon. Gentleman in any way going back to the last subject? That is finished now, and I can take no further points of order on it.