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House of Commons (Participation) Bill

I will certainly come on to that point, although I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising it at such an early stage of the debate. This partly explains the rather innocuous name of my Bill: the House of Commons (Participation) Bill. I tried to persuade the Clerk of the House that my Bill should be called the ““Act of Union (Amendment) Bill””, but I was told that all the provisions of the Act of Union were such that they were no longer extant in the legislation of this country. I was rather disappointed by that because I thought that it would have been a sexier sounding name for a Bill and that that might have got more of my colleagues here. We are thus stuck with the title of the House of Commons (Participation) Bill.