Parliamentary Standards Bill

My hon. Friend could not be more correct. There is, I think, little danger of my appearing as an advocate, but if I tried to appear as one, there would certainly be a very immediate danger of my appearing as a defendant. Let me explain to the Secretary of State just how flawed is the system that he proposes to introduce. We were told that the whole issue of professional confidentiality would be dealt with under the regulations. We were to say not only how much we earned and when we earned it, but normally to provide a statement of who paid us. It was also said, however, that special provision would be made to respect client confidentiality in respect of the professions. Unfortunately, in their practical application, these rules will not do that. The requirement for me as a barrister is to say that I received £X from a solicitor for advising a client and a court appearance and that I carried out Y number of hours' work. The problem is that I did only one case in July last year. It was quite widely reported and it concerned the definition of the word "garden" in the Forestry Act 1967—a very interesting and rather esoteric matter. The fact is that I did only that one case. If I were to report that I had received £X from the solicitor who instructed me in that case for Y hours, there would be no difficulty in establishing how much the client had paid me. For those reasons, if this case were taking place in three days' time rather than a year ago—on 3 July last year, I believe—I would be unable to comply with the rules. Whatever law may be passed in this country, I am afraid that my professional rules would have to take precedence as a matter of conscience and I would simply not be able to observe the terms of this declaration that the House required. At the moment, that would land me in serious difficulty with the House. That would be bad enough, and it might bring my career to an end, although I would have to accept that cheerfully because I would not be prepared to subvert my professional requirements of confidence to clients. However, the Bill would also turn that into a criminal offence. I urge the Committee, when we consider criminal offences tomorrow, to take a little time to consider the extraordinary architecture of oppression that we would be creating for ourselves. I do accept that we appear to have created an architecture of oppression for many other people in recent years—