My Lords, I do not want to disappoint the noble Lord opposite but it does not need to be a particular party to see that there is something deeply wrong with what is being presented today. I am sorry about the tone that he adopted. I think it was entirely wrong and he may have done his cause and my cause a great deal of harm as a result.
The Government have not distinguished themselves by the way in which they have listened to this House or by the way in which they have thought through what they have presented. I remember the comments of the late Harold Macmillan that it is a mistake to revolt on more than one thing at a time because it confuses the Whips. I am concentrating on this particular issue because it is the most important issue of all. I think my noble friend misunderstood something I said earlier as criticising him. I do not criticise him at all. I think he has presented the case in this House as well as humanly possible, with a courtesy which one would expect and which he has fully expressed. The trouble is that there is not a case for what is being proposed. That is the difficulty. I do not think I have ever heard so damaging an apology as the one which was revealed during the course of the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—that the Minister got wrong the only argument of any importance that he presented and then tried to uphold in this House the decision of the other House which would not have come about except with the exercise of the Whip. That would have done credit to the Chief Whip on the Benches opposite during his period in the House of Commons. It is very serious indeed. We have to say no to the Government’s determination. We have to support the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, because we have to give the other House an opportunity to reverse the decision that it made when it was not in full possession of the facts. That is the first thing we have to do.
My noble friend said that all that is happening is that the bar is being raised slightly higher. I am not a lawyer. I am proud of not being one and am keen to
enter into this discussion because sometimes it seems as if the only people who understand these things are lawyers. I think that most normal people understand these things and they understand them very simply. With the greatest of respect, the bar is not being raised slightly higher. Its nature is being changed. What is being asked now is that judges must make a decision which does not seem to be a proper decision for the courts in any case. Decisions of courts should fundamentally be on the facts of the law—on what something means. But that is not the decision that is being asked for here. The judge is being asked to decide that somebody’s unlawful act was highly unlikely to have affected the people who would otherwise have been affected. That is a curious thing to ask a court to do. Surely a court ought to be asked to say whether a proposal is so unimportant or vexatious that it should not occupy the time of the court. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. If judges had constantly allowed people who wanted to argue how many angels danced on the point of a pin, then I would have accepted that we needed to do something about it. However, when my noble friend was challenged for the statistics on which this very serious proposal was based, he honestly said that he had not got any.
Your Lordships might reflect that if I were presenting a proposal to a board of directors of a public company and I said I wanted fundamentally to change the product they had—its constituents, the way it was advertised, the market for which it was being manufactured—I would have to present some figures. I would have to say how many people did not like the product and thought that it needed to be reformulated. I would have to say how often the product had poisoned people or upset their stomachs. I would have to produce some kind of basis.