My Lords, I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Deben said in a truly remarkable, powerful and splendid speech. What he did not say—which I think that we can all say—is that the other place, of which I was proud to be a Member for 40 years, was misdirected by the Lord Chancellor. To misdirect a jury is not exactly a trivial matter but the Lord Chancellor has had the good grace and dignity to apologise. The fact is that the House of Commons made its decision having been wrongly advised and made it in a very short space of time. An hour was given up for debates on which your Lordships’ House had spent considerably longer.
Like my noble friend Lord Deben, I was somewhat concerned by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. He is not normally like that but he almost put me into a position where I could do no more than abstain. I say to him that no party has the monopoly over upholding the rule of law. I am inclined to vote for the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, because I am a Conservative and because, like my noble friend Lord Deben, I am proud of the part that the Conservative Party has played over the centuries in upholding the rule of law.
I say also to all my colleagues on these Benches that this is not a question of party loyalty or disloyalty. I was in the other place for the whole of the 16 years that my noble friend Lord Deben was a Minister. Of course, I was not a Minister for any of those years and frequently found myself at odds with things that the Government proposed. On a number of occasions I voted accordingly because I always tried to uphold the dictum that one’s order of priorities as a parliamentarian in the other place is country, constituency and party. In your Lordships’ House, we do not have constituency responsibilities but we do have national responsibilities.
If we believe that something is being done that is not in the national interest, we have an absolute duty to speak and to vote accordingly. If this House has any point or purpose—I echo in slightly different words something said by my noble friend Lord Deben—it is to say to the other place, “You have, we believe in all humility, got it wrong. Please, please think again”. We did that last time and the other place did not. It did not think again because it was wrongly advised by the very man who should have been advising them correctly.
Therefore, we have every right this evening to say, “Please reconsider and take a little longer in reconsidering”. We are not talking about the convenience of governance or about narrow party advantage, we are talking about something that is fundamental to the survival of a parliamentary democracy and to the rule of law. I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister, for whom we all have real regard, will be able to say something that will satisfy us, but I am bound to say that I am not overoptimistic. If he does not, I shall have no alternative but to go into the Lobby behind the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.