Parliamentary Standards Bill

I very much agree with what the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) had to say, in particular his concluding point about the remarkable series of cross-party alliances that we have discovered during this brief debate. If parliamentary debate is to mean anything, this must cause the Government to pause and to take this Bill away and think again. If they must legislate quickly, they should confine any legislation to the issue of allowances and possibly the issue of pay, leaving the complex constitutional matters for further and mature deliberation. This is indisputably a constitutional Bill, and the Justice Secretary described it as such early in his remarks, but he also described it as an emergency Bill. That should be a contradiction in terms. The British constitution is highly complex. It is partly written and partly unwritten, and it contains complex links between its various parts—the judiciary, the Government and the House. I recall going around a historic house that had a wonderful silver set laid out in one of the rooms. In order to examine more carefully—or possibly "borrow"—one of the silver forks, a member of the public pulled it towards him. What he did not realise was that an invisible thread linked all the items and they all started to move towards him. He desisted very quickly, and the Government should do likewise. Tampering with the bits of the British constitution will lead to unexpected consequences. The question of freedom of speech and the rights of the House as against the judiciary—and, in days gone by, the rights of the monarch—have at times been fiercely contested, and the civil war was partly about such matters. So the issue should be approached with humility and great care. Remarkably, the Leader of the House who is not in her place—although she appeared briefly—has denied that the Bill contains any elements of parliamentary privilege. When we raised that with the Justice Secretary, he said, "Well, it didn't last week." All the clauses that deal with parliamentary privilege must therefore have been added since then. As the Clerk of the House says in his striking memorandum, many parts of the Bill have to do with parliamentary rights and privilege, so I do not believe that all those have suddenly appeared in the last week. If that is the case, it makes me even more alarmed.