Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I have immense respect for the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. Would he accept that bicameral legislatures work best in conditions of respectful mutual restraint? If one or the other Chamber pushes its powers to the maximum, it tends to produce a spiral of escalation that leads to Parliament becoming much less than the sum of its parts. It would be impossible for your Lordships’ House to serve as a Chamber of what Walter Bagehot called ““respected revisers”” if the other place pushed its undoubted financial privilege to the maximum in anything but the most exceptional circumstances. We have, very neatly, great wisdom from the past on this from a remarkable Liberal Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone, who said of the British constitution that nowhere in the wide world does a constitution presume, "““more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it””," and I underline the verb ““work””.