Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I am delighted to hear the noble and learned Lord say that he did not agree with the amendments, and I agree with him. We have had a magnificent and wide-ranging debate lasting some three hours. Nearly three hours ago, the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, accused me of spraying innuendo. I had no idea what he was talking about, but it is rather a delightful phrase and I should like to keep it. I shall find an opportunity to use it in the weeks and months ahead. We have had a bit of coalition philosophy. I did not follow much of it, but I am sure that we will hear about the terrible things it means for the Opposition in the near future. I welcome the offer made by the noble and learned Lord to discuss and to negotiate. If only he had done that at the beginning of November when I talked to him about the number of days that we should sit; but the noble and learned Lord got batey with me when I suggested that we should negotiate. So I welcome the change of tone. It is immensely good news. We have had several different strands during the course of the debate, some of which had something to do with the amendments and some that did not. There was a strand on Lords reform and that there should be no change to the House of Commons until reform of the Lords has been completed. There was a strand that there should be no change to the House of Commons under any circumstances for a whole variety of reasons. We then had a long debate by various noble Lords on the process. Somehow members of the Opposition have turned themselves into great victims of the coalition. I am not a psychiatrist, so I need to speak to my noble friend Lord Alderdice about this. There is now a sort of victim culture that speaks of how, ““We have all been put upon by the Government””. I feel put upon by the Opposition, but the Opposition feel put upon by the coalition as though there was something immoral about it. It is as if uniting in the House of Commons and uniting here is a dreadful thing. They do not accept the changes and it is an extraordinary thing. There is also a new view, which is that the Opposition somehow have a right to what they call compromise, even if—or, in fact, especially if—they have not won a vote. This is a most bizarre concept that I have never heard before, but I recognise that members of the Labour Party in the House of Lords have talked themselves into believing it. We had a self-proclaimed dinosaur, the noble Lord, Lord Peston, for whom I have tremendous affection. He knows that, and I have known him for a very long time. I thought that he was going to make a rather different speech and wax lyrical about the old days when he and his colleagues ran a most effective Opposition in this House with considerably fewer Members. They were not the largest group in the House, as the Labour Party is currently. As a smaller group they were able, without endless debates going on into the night, to effect change in a most dramatic and able way. The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, was Chief Whip. I was hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, would set some of his colleagues an example of how he used to do it.