I am afraid that I was receiving instructions to be brief while the hon. Gentleman was speaking, so I did not really gather the purport of his remarks, which I shall have to read in Hansard—I do apologise.
Even from a theoretical point of view, it is not proper for us to think that we should not make incremental changes that are to the benefit of the constitution simply because they do not achieve everything that could be achieved through full constitutional change. The reason that I do not think that that is true theoretically is that it is not how British history has proceeded. The whole of our history has been a process of incremental change of our constitution. There has not been a thoroughgoing review of our constitution since 1688, and even that was pretty ramshackle. Certainly, 1216 was extraordinarily ramshackle. If Members actually read Magna Carta, as opposed to the propaganda about it, they will see that it did very little other than enforce that the actions of the king be done through his court rather than by sole fiat. Some significant changes were made in 1688, but an awful lot was left undone. We then went through a whole series of incremental changes to create the universal franchise, which took a very long time indeed. On the arguments of the hon. Member for Newport West, we never would have had any of those changes, because we would have been waiting the whole time for a proper Bill that would have moved us immediately to a full universal franchise, which was obviously the right thing to do from the beginning.
The fact is that our constitution has evolved by slow, incremental change. I do not welcome that fact. I think that the United States is blessed in having had a constitution that was more or less fully formed from the beginning. By creating the Basic Law all in one go, I think that we did a better job in Germany after the war than we have done in Britain, but alas, that ain’t how things are done in the UK. It is in the spirit of our constitutional tradition to make incremental changes that make things fairer and enable us to proceed. That is what the current proposals do. The Bill would prevent us from doing that, so I support the Government’s rejection of it.
12.9 pm