Coroners and Justice Bill

My hon. Friend is entirely right, and he was entirely right when he said in an earlier intervention that this type of thing was bringing the House into disrepute. The standing of the House of Commons is falling as every day goes by. We should be trying to do something about that. We should be trying to arrest the slide in public support for what goes on in this place. We should not be helping it to fall into further disrepute by not debating matters that are of great importance to our constituents. We are already considered an irrelevance by many people; we are making ourselves irrelevant by not debating particular issues because it might be inconvenient for the Government to have them debated. As we have heard, the business has been fairly light in recent weeks, and it will be so next week in particular, when it seems that the Government are scrabbling around trying to find business to put on in order to allow the House to sit. That would have provided a perfect opportunity to have proper debate of these issues. My constituents have raised these important issues and they expected them to be debated. I could not allow this debate to go by without making the point that the Government have prevented their being debated through their programme motion. We have two days set aside on the Order Paper. Given the way things have been arranged, it is entirely possible that we may reach almost none of the key amendments today and finish early tomorrow because the business ends particularly early, when we could have allowed time for some more of these issues to be debated. That would have been entirely possible. This business has been organised in such a way as to prevent debate on matters that are important to Members and our constituents. The Government should be ashamed of themselves. I am delighted that my Front-Bench colleagues have said that they will oppose this programme motion, and I will support them enthusiastically.