My Lords, I made my view on the Bill plain at Second Reading, and I will try not to repeat anything that I said then. I am going to break that promise straight away. I said then that I could not imagine anything that could make this Bill worse, except perhaps for the coercion of the two Front Benches. But these amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, make an appalling Bill even worse, if such a thing were possible.
My noble friend Lord Grocott touched on proposed new subsection 3(f) in Amendment 30, which states:
“subject to the condition in subsection (4), otherwise abused or brought into disrepute the office of Member of Parliament”.
On Second Reading, I said specifically to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, that there was never a great problem in getting 500 signatures in any constituency on any matter at all. Some years ago my noble friend Lord Howarth crossed the Floor in the other place. He will well remember that I attended a meeting in his then constituency of Stratford-on-Avon. The meeting was fairly heated, as one can imagine, and a number of the people there would not only have signed a petition to
achieve the magic 500 but taken him outside and hanged him, I should have thought. They probably would have taken me outside and hanged me, too, for chairing the meeting. So I should think that there would not have been any great difficulty in getting that number of signatures, or getting some of those people together to say that my noble friend, for one reason or another, had somehow brought Parliament into disrepute.