Business of the House

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock

Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Your Lordships will be glad to know that I will not detain the House for very long, but if your Lordships’ House is not the guardian of our constitution, I do not know who is. There has been much talk, and the case has been made, about how awful these procedures are in introducing this extremely bad Bill to this House as a private Bill. The real concern we should have about it is that it came from the Back Benches in the other place. If legislation of this importance can be initiated from the Back Benches, we are in very serious trouble. As my noble friend Lord Lawson pointed out, we have an unwritten constitution. Like all unwritten constitutions, it is amended by precedent. The idea put forward by the right honourable Lady Yvette Cooper and Sir Oliver Letwin that somehow this is just a one-off is completely misleading. That is not the way our constitution has developed over the years.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The previous five amendments have been defeated heavily—more heavily each time. What purpose is being served by the noble Lord moving his amendment now?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

The purpose being served is that we are able to debate these issues, which are extremely important, and that, with a bit of luck—I do not put an awful lot of money on it—this Bill will never reach the statute book. It is a very bad Bill that creates an appalling precedent. I will not take too many lessons from the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, on talking at inordinate length, making the same points over and over again because, let us face it, we went through that experience with the EU withdrawal Bill, when a very large number of completely pointless speeches went on absolutely interminably. We on this side of the House had to sit here listening to them. We could not closure them because we did not have the majority to do so. I do not need any lessons from the noble Lord on this. If you introduce a Bill this vulnerable, you obviously run an enormous risk trying to get it on the statute book. That is what is being proved now.

Let us concern ourselves with what is happening to our constitution and our arrangements, which have worked for a very long time. I believe it might be that the usual channels are finally getting themselves back into some sort of order again and maybe discussing the future of the Bill. Was it not a tragedy that it was not possible for them to arrive at some solution for the Bill some time ago? We have to be very careful about allowing hard cases that produce bad law. In the same way, when we have a problem of this sort and we start to change our constitutional arrangements, everyone will refer back to what happened and say, “Well, it happened before, didn’t it? Why shouldn’t it happen again?” This indicates to me that the Opposition have given up any chance whatever of being the Government of this country. If they think that, were they in government and we were in opposition, we would not use machinery like this to make life very difficult for them, they have another think coming.

We have got to consider very carefully what is happening now. One reason why this is such a terrible Bill—we will get on to this at Second Reading—is that it inhibits my right honourable friend the Prime Minister from asking for an extension of Article 50, as she had undertaken to do. This makes it more difficult for her than it was before.