Parliamentary Standards Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. None of us wants to do damage to the sovereignty of Parliament. However, we will not help the reputation of Parliament if we respond to every measure to try to restore credibility and public confidence by simply boasting about the sovereignty of Parliament. I have heard more from some hon. Members about the sovereignty of Parliament and about standing up to the Executive and not being cowed in relation to this Bill than I heard in relation to measures such as the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, when Parliament really should have asserted itself and when a lot of people should, in good conscience, have known that something was wrong. The same goes for identity cards. I have heard people today celebrating what has happened, yet they were willing to be whipped into voting for them and all the rest of it, so let us be a bit more real about some of these issues. It seems that some people are a bit more assiduous in protecting the sovereignty of Parliament in relation to parliamentary standards and the privileges and rights of Members than they have been in relation to the wider interests of their constituents and the citizens of the United Kingdom. So let us get real all round. It is not just the Executive who have questions to answer; all of us have questions that we should perhaps ask of ourselves and that we should answer. Amendment 32 is sensible. The idea of the authority making recommendations and just giving them to the Standards and Privileges Committee on a hand-me-down basis seems crude and excessive. Amendment 32 would deal with that, thereby obviating the need for amendments 17 and 65, which would seem to be sensible. Some of the other amendments, however, I am not so sure about. Amendment 34 would mean leaving out clause 8(4), which would in turn mean leaving out subsection (5). I do not know that it would be right to leave those two subsections out. There would then be a hole in the procedures and a hole in the Bill, although some fine-tuning may still be needed.