My noble friend has more experience of this than I have, but he is absolutely right, of course. In any event, the public pressure in a case such as this might be very high, so you have to bear in mind that this will politicise it like mad.
This brings me to my final point: the House of Commons may come to regret this. At best it will be irrelevant; at worst, we will have one or two disastrous cases of the type that I have just described. So, I think we are right. I am always a bit cautious about telling my ex-colleagues in the House of Commons that they have got it severely wrong, but we have a duty to advise and warn. At the end of the day, it is up to the House of Commons to overturn this House. It is a mistake if people say that this House legislates. We only legislate inasmuch as the House of Commons allows us to legislate. If they do not like it, they can always chuck it out.
I end on this note: because I think there will be regrets about this Bill—it will not be the first time that either House has regretted certain Bills or legislation—it may be no bad idea if we put in a sunset clause to send back to the other House. I am willing to do that, but I would quite like to hear whether the Government would consider a sunset clause. We would allow the legislation to run, maybe for five years, and then the Act would cease if we found it to be either unnecessary or very damaging. I end very strongly with the words of Edmund Burke. He was very wise when he said that we give the electorate the absolute power to decide who represents them. Every time we slice away at that, as the case of Phil Woolas did, we do ourselves and the democratic process great damage.
2.04 pm