Parliament (Participation of Members of the House of Commons) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, on his excellent, amusing and interesting speech presenting the Second Reading of his Bill. It is not one that I would agree with at all. I have tremendous sympathy with the predicament that the noble Lord and others find themselves in, described as the West Lothian affair. But the solution that he has come up with is, in my opinion, totally unworkable. The Bill would mean that the other place would have to have a system of majorities: a majority for the government of English affairs, a majority for the government for overall UK affairs and a majority for the government of affairs which may need to be dealt with in Northern Ireland. It is a bit like a kaleidoscope—every now and again, you would have to shake the bits and look to see what the pattern was. It could well be that the only reason why the Labour Party, for example, was in power was that it was relying on 39 Scottish votes. You would therefore have a situation where the Tories might hold the majority of English seats, but the Labour Party was in power because of its Scottish seats. That does not seem terribly sensible. What about budgets? We are, in a sense, one unit. When you start cutting up moneys, you take moneys away from one district and give them to another. I am not well versed in the intricacies of the Barnett formula, but it seems that when you vote on one bit, you vote on the lot because it all has a knock-on effect. What about the Lords? Would the same thing not apply to us? How do you set about who we are in the Lords?