Parliamentary Standards Bill

I shall be brief. There are two fundamental points. The first is that, as soon as one took up the first Marshalled List, it was apparent that a gap had been left by Amendment 1. That gap, I thought and still think, was closed by the amendments of my noble friend, which I supported then and still do. Secondly, we are concerned with parliamentary privilege and, equally, with the supremacy of Parliament and the question of whether what has been acknowledged by our judiciary, who decline to enter into deciding issues concerned with parliamentary privilege, is in effect given statutory provision by these amendments. However, that leaves the further question of the position in the European Court of Justice, and it is right that that should be met as a problem. It should be dealt with in the Bill and should certainly be considered by the Government. We have and retain residual sovereignty, and the question is whether we can and should assert in the Bill that in this context the European Court of Justice would assuredly have no jurisdiction. For those reasons, I support the amendments. Without them, the situation is wholly unclear, and one cannot be certain what the position would be other than in our courts, which, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, explained, accept parliamentary privilege and the supremacy of Parliament. The practice of the courts is to acknowledge that and to decline to adjudicate. We must take steps to seek to ensure that that would be carried forward in the European Court of Justice. Certain other reservations about the European Court of Justice were shared by Lord Kingsland.