My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot support the noble Lord’s amendment because it would be almost impossible to enforce, even if it was desirable in the age of blogs, the internet and everything else. I understand where he is coming from, and at the risk of repeating myself, I think that any Member of Parliament who finds himself subject to a petition is already dead in the water.
I was rather intrigued by our earlier discussion. If someone is present at the count of postal votes in any election and then inadvertently tells someone else what the position is, they could very well find themselves facing a prison sentence and a recall petition of this
kind. That is a good example of something which might be regarded as a matter where one could win the argument, but in practice it would be very difficult to stop the kind of comments that are made.
However, the noble Lord has done the Committee a service by underlining the key point in all this: once you get to the point of a petition being launched, it will not be about the issues surrounding the Member of Parliament, it will be about 1,001 grievances, political views or whatever. That is why I think that the Bill is fundamentally ill conceived. If the House of Commons thinks that where the committee has decided that someone should be sent away from the House for more than 10 days, that should start the procedure, it would have been better simply to have gone to the point of creating the by-election that will inevitably follow. It would save a lot of time, bureaucracy and cost, as well as a lot of grief and further damage to the standing of the House of Commons and the status of Parliament.