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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

Exactly; my hon. Friend has made a telling point. In those situations, those of us on the Front Benches will have to exercise a good deal of restraint—but we will have to do so within one and a half hours. There are, for instance, 27 amendments on the Order Paper relating to tomorrow’s one and a half hours on Home Office matters. That underlines my hon. Friend’s point. There will be a shortage of time to discuss any of those amendments at all, let alone all of them. One of the reasons why we need more time than the Government have allowed is that they are in the habit of not being frank and open in their dealings with Parliament, let alone the country, on this subject. For the first six months of last year, Ministers made the ludicrous assertion that no negotiations were taking place in the European Union—even though, as we now know, sherpas were regularly meeting around European capitals. In answers to my written questions, the Foreign Secretary has refused to publish assessments and details of the treaty when to do so would conflict with his specious arguments on the matter. Last week, he intrigued the House by saying that it was necessary to vote for the treaty because the commission of bishops was in favour of it—implying that, for the first time since the days of Cardinal Wolsey, the House of Commons should decide whether to ratify an international treaty on the basis of ecclesiastical guidance. Hon. Members not familiar with the commission can be excused their ignorance. It turns out not to be a British commission of bishops, nor even one that includes the majority of our Churches or even the established Church of this country, as the Second Church Estates Commissioner, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), will no doubt know. It is a commission of EU bishops that meets in Brussels and has received funding from the European Union. The fact that it is in favour of the treaty is no great surprise and the fact that the Foreign Secretary felt bound to bring it up as one of his principal arguments to the House of Commons shows that we need a great deal of time to subject to scrutiny the assertions made from the Government Dispatch Box.