Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, hearing that the son of the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, is watching, I am reminded that the great and late Les Dawson used to occasionally during his performances turn and say, ““And first a word to our viewer””. The word to our viewer, just so that he should fully understand it, is that the official Opposition is fighting line by line two interconnected reforms. These have been resisted by a party which, as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said earlier today, less than a year ago introduced a constitutional reform Bill with 13 unrelated constitutional reforms. So let us have fewer crocodile tears. We have heard a lot of assurances about the good intentions of the Opposition. The noble Baroness said in introducing that she was insisting on decoupling, but anybody looking at this list of amendments knows that that kind of decoupling works against any rational examination at Committee stage of a Bill like this, or indeed any other Bill. I merely put that on the record. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, suggested, the constitutional historians and experts will be looking at this matter. I ask them to look at the Hansard record of how the Bill has been dealt with and to draw their own conclusions.