Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, that cheers me up enormously; I must say that I think it cheers up the people sitting behind the noble Lord even more. I am always willing to believe that I have been misled. I was going to add that the fact that essentially the Opposition were saying that they not going to get involved in scrutiny was unusual, to say the least. I now have to add one or two quite disrespectful remarks to noble Lords opposite. The most cursory reading of any of the major works on politics and government in this country tells us that the Conservative Party is the custodian of the traditions, notably the constitutional traditions, of our country. For better or worse, the Bill removes 300 years of self-regulation in the other place. You would have thought that the Conservative leadership in the other place would therefore have absolutely nothing to do with a Bill of this kind. You would have thought that if the Liberal leadership—sorry, they are now called the Liberal Democrats, but they used to be Liberals—had any sense of history, they would also not involve themselves in this. I can tell you one person who does not want to be involved at all: that is me.