It will be for others to draw what conclusions they want to from those crocodile tears.
As the Leader of the House has returned to the Chamber, it is worth reminding ourselves of what the Conservatives believe about programme motions. He has said that
“today I can announce that we will abolish the practice of automatically guillotining Government Bills and give Parliament back the time it needs to make real improvements to the law.”
The manifesto on which he stood—the Conservative manifesto, not the Liberal Democrats one—stated that they would allow
“MPs the time to scrutinise law effectively”.
That is the point that we have been trying to make. Both coalition parties are clearly on the same page as Labour. The Bill before us today should be allowed to be fully debated and there should be no guillotining of debate by the Government.