With your permission, John, I'll just jump in before we get too far from the Scottish Parliament.
One of the reasons, Mr. Chair, that I think the Scottish Parliament is able to have consensus around how to handle legislation is that they don't have first past the post. They have a system they call the additional member system, but it's essentially mixed-member proportional.
One of the points I would return to is that looking for advantage in election campaigns that are run under first past the post is one of the reasons we have so much partisanship creeping into the way Parliament functions.
Of course, the British Parliament is still first past the post. In my conversations with the only member of Parliament in the U.K. who is a Green Party member of Parliament, Caroline Lucas from the riding of Brighton Pavilion, she said to be very cautious about this programming thing.
Even though it's described in government proposals as though it's just the House leaders who discuss it, it is actually broader than that. They bring in backbenchers and representation. They don't have any such thing in the British Parliament, by the way, as recognized parties with different classes of powers, responsibilities, and rights. We essentially have evolved without any actual legislation or standing order to do it, but by custom we have created a two-tier system for MPs. That doesn't exist in the U.K.
Going back to that, she said that it's still very controversial, and once it happens, the programming is generally seen as the government with its clout bulldozing something through, but they never had the intermediate step of time allocation.
They were looking for a compromise, and all they had was informal agreement between leaders and guillotine, which in the Canadian context would be called closure. In the U.K. Parliament it was called guillotine. This was an intermediate proposal to play with the idea of programming. It was put forward by the modernization committee of the U.K. Parliament back in 1997. They tried it on trial for quite a while and decided to keep it, but it remains quite controversial within the U.K. Parliament and is a relatively new feature, which I do not think we should be following here.
I'm sorry. The reason for grabbing the mike was just to make the point that the Scottish Parliament is far more likely to be able to come to consensus around issues, because in its creation, just as Ireland has proportional representation in the form of a single transferable vote, Scotland has a version of mixed-member proportional representation, which by its very nature creates a climate where consensus is more likely between parties.
I appreciate your latitude, John, and I also appreciate borrowing your Book of Common Prayer, which is extraordinary. I'm going to return it to you.