My Lords, this has turned out to be a rather more interesting discussion on the amendments than I had anticipated. I do not want to repeat my Second Reading speech, but I remind the House that particularly this third arm, if you like, was added by our party with great support in the other place. It was not added because of some of us wanted to be Ministers. In fact, when some of us supported it, we were not even in this House. It was because those outside Parliament were deeply shocked when they saw MPs doing things which, if they were in any other profession, would have lost them their jobs. They saw these people still turning up at their place of work the day after they had done things that any other employer would have dismissed them for.
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I have absolutely no problem in standing here and thanking the Minister for tabling these amendments, which put in the final consequentials to the third limb of the Bill and implement what my party and others wanted adding. It was in our manifesto and had been agreed on, having been through our party procedures.
There is a difference between recall and automatic expulsion. As was said at Second Reading, for imprisonment of over a year the penalty is automatic expulsion; for imprisonment of under a year, there is the chance for people to fight a by-election. As I think we felt then, many MPs who might have been imprisoned for a political act will indeed survive the recall petition or, even if they do not, will win the by-election without any problems at all.
I think that this is a Bill that none of us, once it is an Act, ever wants to see implemented, because we hope that the circumstances will never arise for it to happen.
We hope that the things that happened in the past are in the past and that the Bill may have to sit on the statute book, with no one ever having to reach for it.
I thank the Minister for introducing and explaining the background to the amendments. Other such technical amendments will come up in different groups, to which we have signified our support by adding our names to all but one of them—that amendment will be dealt with by my noble friend Lord Kennedy in its place. As for the others, they implement changes that were endorsed by big majorities in the other House. We will not speak to them as each of them comes up, but I hope that our signature on them shows our support for the tidying-up that will happen.