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Industry and the Environment

I have heard such moans from Conservative Members on a number of occasions. Anyone who has been here for a long time—I do not recall when the hon. and learned Gentleman was first elected—would acknowledge that the procedures that this Government introduced in the Parliament that ended in 2001 to improve the handling of legislation have unquestionably done that. I remind him that some very senior Conservative Members who are extraordinarily respected on both sides of the House have long expressed the view that the processes of the House, by which we used not to examine many parts of Bills, were wholly undesirable. They felt that to have a structure that facilitated scrutiny—to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the seriousness of the chunk of the Bill in question—of all elements of the legislation was a huge improvement. It is ridiculous of Conservative Members to pretend otherwise. I sat on the Opposition Benches when the Conservative Government whom the hon. and learned Gentleman supported introduced a whole new section into a social security Bill, to get rid of widows’ pensions, after a guillotine. I really do not want to hear these criticisms from the Conservatives, because they are totally unjustified.