The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. I hope that is taken up in the other place as well. As Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, I want to discuss that further with him and with Ministers in the Home Office or the Northern Ireland Office—directly with the Home Office would probably be the best way forward.
That opens up the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) about the interaction of Scots law with all this. She is not wrong to remind us that Scots law looks at parliamentary sovereignty differently from the law of England and Wales. We cannot get around that. However, I would qualify her remarks by saying that that is overcome by having a United Kingdom Supreme Court, which has at the moment two very distinguished Scots lawyers, in the form of the president and vice-president, who understand these principles deeply. At any time, the composition of that Court will include senior Scots lawyers, and it also has a senior judge from Northern Ireland, Lord Stephens.
The whole function of the Supreme Court is to bring together the slightly differing concepts of constitutional law that undoubtedly exist in our jurisdictions and strike the right balance, based on restraint—we come back to that word again. I will not labour the point I made yesterday, but my hon. and learned Friend the Minister knows that he is walking a tightrope to get this
legislation right. Anything that smacks of a lack of restraint, such as the amendments tabled by hon. Friends—I said obliging things yesterday and I will repeat them today—does not follow that sense of restraint and balance.
It is about the risk of an imbalance not just between the courts of England and Wales and this Parliament, but between the differing jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. That should give us all pause for thought, particularly those of us deeply committed to our Union and who believe in this United Kingdom. I am not saying that my hon. Friends are deliberately trying to undermine that, but I am sounding a word of warning about treading too heavily down this path of exceptionalism and going too far in normalising what were the exceptional circumstances of withdrawal from the EU. I should know about that because I sat on that Front Bench making the case for many of the provisions in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act that are cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and others. Those were exceptional times.
I know that this is an exceptional global challenge, but before I conclude my remarks, I will simply say that we need to tread carefully. If we do not do so, in trying to deal with an external problem we will create internal, constitutional and legal problems of our own. I do not think that any self-respecting Conservative Government would want to do that, and no self-respecting Parliament would want to follow that. For those reasons, I urge right hon. and hon. Members to reject many of the amendments that complicate the Bill, and to follow the maxim that less is more.