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Business of the House

I do not want to be disobliging to my noble friend, whom I admire very much, but I say again what I said to the noble Lord opposite. I have been trying to make that point, and I am grateful to him for reinforcing it. It is the fundamental issue which I believe noble Lords should be allowed to wrestle with. Do we want to be the sort of House that we have just been, where we have voted by that large number—288 Peers—to close down, at the behest of a Peer, without any debate? I would like to have heard other Members from the Cross Benches responding to and commenting, from the viewpoint of their experience, on the noble Baroness’s speech. As I said at the start, I would like to have heard my noble friends Lord Naseby and Lord Cormack, who wished to speak.

I have tried to explain to the noble Lord opposite that my amendment addresses the same issue. Sometimes in life you get a second chance. This amendment offers the House a second chance to address and hear a little about why this great principle of freedom of debate should be cast aside, but on a more limited scale. I do not ask, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did in her powerful speech, that the House should reject the principle of a guillotine. I put before your Lordships a proposition relating to any Bill that has been allowed

only one day’s consideration in the House of Commons —we have not got this Bill yet, so it may be this Bill, but it could be any Bill—and we are discussing the principle here. This is an issue of principle about the guillotine. Surely any Bill that has been allowed only one day’s consideration in the House of Commons should receive full and unfettered consideration in your Lordship’s House.

I come back to the central point: what is this Chamber for if not to revise, consider, scrutinise and debate? I submit that there should not be curtailment of consideration on a Bill which is not an emergency Bill. There should not be a guillotine imposed in both Houses on legislation of this sort.