My Lords, as the House may be aware, I am always unhappy if we have debates that become either a military-fest or a legal-fest—in other words, that the only people who discuss these things are lawyers. I suggest to my noble friend that we have already had sufficient evidence in Committee that there are in the Bill very serious matters over which the House has had very considerable disagreement. I suspect that he knows that Report stage will not be easy on a number of these issues, which reach way beyond party and which are about the nature of civil liberties and this country’s legal system. Therefore, I look at this particular proposal with a considerably jaundiced eye.
I want to say something that he may find inconvenient. There was a time when the Lord Chancellor was very manifestly not a political figure. Yes, he was appointed by the Government and he sat in the Cabinet, but he was seen very clearly as a legal figure. For reasons that I wholly disagree with and are all about a mistaken understanding of these things under the previous Government—this is not a criticism of him or present company—we now have a different situation.
Parts of the article read by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, point to the position where the Lord Chancellor feels he is able to make statements that can be seen only in a context that is very strongly political. That means that the natural willingness of this House to accord to the Lord Chancellor a different kind of approach from that which one would to the Secretary of State for this or the Secretary of State for that is very much diminished.
Having debated this Bill in such detail and having shown so many moments when noble Lords of very different political views felt unhappy, we then come to this catch-all clause. My noble friend may explain that it does not really mean what it seems to mean. In that case, can we please write it so that it does seem to mean what it ought to mean? But if it does mean what it seems to mean, the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State can—depending on what the situation is—make changes subject to the most exiguous parliamentary control.
Having been a Secretary of State, I know very well that once you get a properly worded document and present it in accordance with the rules, it is quite difficult for it not to pass—let me put it as delicately as that. That same element is in this. I thought the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, was more than polite when he reminded us that there was this “saving” bit, because it does not seem to me to be a “saving” bit at all—that it not what happens. Given the mechanisms of the two Houses, if such supplementary legislation is put properly and is not wrong, it will, in normal circumstances, pass.
If my noble friend cannot give the House the assurance that the wording means something wholly different from what it appears to mean, most of us would prefer not to have it at all. We would therefore want to support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in his contention, if not now then on another occasion.