Parliamentary Standards Bill

I do not want to stray too far from the clause, but one day, when we have a self-respecting and self-confident Parliament, we will have our own parliamentary draftspeople and our own right to legal advice on going to war or whatever it may be. We will have our own capabilities to transform the legislative framework. At the moment, we have an Executive who are not directly elected by the British people taking the advice of a civil service that has no familiarity whatever with the ballot box. Members of this House are being overseen by people who have no understanding of electoral politics and our democracy, but who decide on the rights of Members. Those rights have been sacred—perhaps too sacred, but they have been in place for many years. I hope that colleagues will press their case to the Secretary of State, and that he will take away the expressions of anxiety that he has heard in the past day or so—and will hear until the end of the day—and rework the Bill so that it does what we all thought it intended to do: create a strong parliamentary standards authority to ensure that abuses that have happened in the past cannot happen in future. As part of that, it should construct a much broader framework, so that our legislature, rather than becoming a quango, an advisory body or a quaint but withered part of our constitutional arrangements, can play not only the role that it fulfilled in years gone by, but an important role in rebuilding our democracy and people's trust, which has been so sorely tested in the past month or two.