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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

It is, indeed, and my right hon. Friend makes many of the points I was seeking to make—so I shall, perhaps, now make them more briefly. The current Government treat Parliament with contempt. The Conservative Government who were in power for 18 years did, from time to time, introduce guillotines, which I did not always support; I voted against them on a number of occasions because I thought that they were wrong. I believe that it is almost always wrong to curtail debate in this Chamber, although I accept that a Government, who have a mandate from the country, do at the end of the day deserve to get their business through. However, within a year of this Government coming to power, we had moved towards the automatic timetabling of every Bill. Now, whenever a Bill receives its Second Reading, the next motion on the Order Paper is that that Bill shall be timetabled. We are told when it will leave this Chamber, when it will come out of Committee and when its Report stage will finish. If our hours were open ended, that would not be so bad, but as it comes side by side with the change in parliamentary hours many pieces of proposed legislation go to the other place having been very imperfectly scrutinised here, and sometimes with whole sections of them not having been debated at all.