Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I beg to move amendment 26, page 17, line 36, leave out subsection (2). The amendment is about bishops and archbishops. The effect of clause 34 is to exempt the archbishops and bishops who sit in the other place from the disciplinary provisions that we have just agreed. I am not a Dawkinsite and I am not against bishops on principle—some of my best friends are archbishops—but I cannot see why they are exempted from the provisions. There is an argument that archbishops and bishops are subject to Church discipline, but other members of the House of Lords are subject to discipline in their professions and parties. There is an argument that the Church should not be subject to state power, but it is an established Church and therefore subject to state power in a lot of different ways. There is an argument that it is not right to cast aspersions on bishops and to say that they are the kind of people who might break rules and act in a way that lands them in jail for a year and gets them expelled from the Lords, but the same applies to hundreds of peers who, to be blunt, have acted honourably in the past decade—they do not deserve to have aspersions cast on them, unlike those who have not acted well.