Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your guidance; perhaps as Chair of Ways and Means, you might be able to give further clarity. My point of order is regarding the response that Mr Speaker gave earlier to the SNP group leader, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), about the sequencing of the decisions he took. Yesterday, the guidance he gave at the start of the debate was that there was precedent for selecting an amendment by the main Opposition party to a smaller party’s motion, but the letter from the Clerk makes it quite clear that there is no precedent for that. Mr Speaker also said that that was about having the widest possible debate, but last night, the rationale changed to security.
In his response just now, Mr Speaker really homed in on security as the primary reason for his decision, and he intimated that lives were at risk. That is a very grave matter; it implies that as things stood, decisions that Members took on the SNP motion would effectively have put their life at risk. It implies that somehow, debating the Labour amendment took away that security risk, which in turn implies an assumption about how Members were going to vote. Why were those security concerns not shared with other party leaders? What do the security services say, and does this not set a precedent that mob rule can change the business of the House?