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House of Lords Bill [HL]

I am attempting to reply to Amendment No. 1. I am explaining why I invite the House to reject Amendment No. 1 and to reject all amendments which fall outside the narrow scope of the Bill. That is not to say the amendments are improper or in any way unconstitutional; of course they are not. They all have interesting topics and, as I have indicated to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, I am in favour of many of them. But they are not within the narrow confine of the Bill, and if the Bill is to have any chance of succeeding we have to restrict ourselves to the subjects of the Bill. If we go wider, frankly, the Bill is dead in the water. It will not go anywhere. We are not going to come here every Friday for the whole of this Session to discuss this issue to the exclusion of everything else; that is simply unrealistic. We have to decide this in facing this first amendment, which falls outside the narrow purposes of the Bill. I was in the middle of describing what those narrow purposes are and reminding the House that the hereditary by-elections came into being as a result of an amendment—the Weatherill amendment—to the agreement that had been made. It was not part of the original agreement to retain the hereditary Members, and the by-election system has been crude and unacceptable. It has lasted much longer than was foreshadowed at the time. The third part of the Bill—