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Parliamentary Standards Bill

The 17 amendments in this group make it the largest that we will discuss today, so I hope that hon. Members will bear with me as I go through them. First, I wish to touch on a matter that a great number of the people who have contributed to this lively debate have discussed: privilege and concern for their constituents. There is a danger—some of the later contributions started to approach this—that that view could become self-serving, and we must be careful to avoid that. A number of the contributions reflected the fact that we must keep reminding ourselves that we are in the middle of a recessionary downturn and that what people are worried about is not the issues that some hon. Members have raised. What people are worried about is their jobs and their homes. In the middle of all that, we have faced a scandal with which we have to deal. That is the key matter.