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Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Bill

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that. Yes, I think that everybody does accept the need for haste, but not necessarily breakneck haste, with the Bill having to complete all its stages this evening. Also, we do not need to finish at 10 o'clock. There is nothing in our Standing Orders to say that debate has to finish then. Indeed, most of us who have been in the House for 15, 20 or 25 years know that many times, when it was necessary, we have debated matters far into the night. Nobody likes doing that, and it does not necessarily make for very intelligent debate or very good consideration, but it is certainly better than having an artificial limit, and saying, ““We must go home to our beds at 10 o'clock, and we'll confine and constrain consideration of the Bill simply to get us out of the building by then.”” That is not how matters should be conducted in Parliament. We should give legislation the time that it needs. As the right hon. Member for Wells rightly said, we are not talking about any old legislation; we are talking about criminal legislation. We are deciding on measures that will determine whether people are at liberty. We owe criminal justice legislation rather more respect and caution than normal legislation. We are rushing things through totally artificially. We do not need to finish today, or at 10 o'clock, yet we are saying that we will accept all that. That is not right. Surely that demonstrates that one of the things which is so desperately wrong with this Parliament, and recent Parliaments, is that we are becoming completely supine before the view of the Executive. If the Executive say that they want something straight away, we give in to them. The House should start to assert itself. It should ask, ““Is this right? Do we consider this to be the right way of doing things?”” It should make its will felt. Unless it does so, and unless we take control of our business and our agenda, the whole parliamentary system will be brought into disrepute. That is quite apart from the issue of the validity of the Bill and of the way in which we are considering it. We are becoming supine in our own Chamber, and it is about time that we asserted ourselves.