Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

My Lords, I will address the import of the amendment in a moment, although most of the arguments that I have against it I rather exhausted this morning; but first let me deal with some of these extraneous matters. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, seems to predicate that a Labour Government foreshadow the death of parliamentary democracy. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, has one supreme advantage over many of us here in that if he was not here in 1971 someone connected with the family certainly was, and in 1971 the Upper House permitted the Government to nationalise an important company in a single day. The outcome of that development, as was attested by the Opposition earlier, was regarded as wholly beneficial by the nation and enabled Rolls-Royce to succeed subsequently.