Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Lord on his amendment. I do not think that the constitution, or even our politics, is broken, but a certain amount of damage has been done. In my lifetime I have seen a tendency for participation rates in voting to fall, along with an increasing sense of weariness with modern politics and disrespect for politicians. I am on the record as saying, when the Constitution Committee published a report on referendums last year, that there is a place for them in building confidence. Interestingly, the participation rate in the recent referendum was really rather encouraging. It was higher than we thought it would be in the lead-up to it. A cautious but proper rediscovery of the place for referendums has a part in rebuilding political life in this country. More substantially, I should like to try a thought experiment on your Lordships. Let us imagine that we had a Bill before us that proposed to extend the life of a Parliament from a normal term of five years to six years. Would we think that that required a referendum? We would probably think that it did because it would extend the maximum term from five years to six, but in practice we are going to extend the length of Parliaments by an average of about a year. Why is this not an issue on which there should be a referendum?