My Lords, I think we would serve ourselves a little better if we did not focus on this as an issue between this House and the other place, or, indeed, between the Executive and Parliament. We need to think about this as a matter which is between all of us, whichever House we sit in, whichever side of the argument we were on during the referendum campaign, and the people who are outside. It is important that we reflect on something that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said on Monday during the debate on the single market. She quoted Lampedusa, saying that for things to stay the same, we have to change.
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I feel very strongly that in this House, as indeed in the other place, there is a huge amount of expertise and wisdom that should be heard over the next couple
of years as we are debating and considering the terms of Brexit. What we have to understand is, for us to be heard and taken seriously by the Government and for those arguments to be persuasive and listened to, we have to ask what it is about us, whatever House we sit in, that needs to change. But right now, by demanding that we enshrine in legislation the right to have a vote on something at the end—which the Prime Minister has said we will get—we will start to fuel distrust and questions about people’s motives. I do not question anybody’s motive in this debate, but we have to reflect that all of us who have some power, wherever we sit and wherever we were in the argument on the referendum, are sometimes questioned. Yes, people voted for greater control and for sovereignty to come back to the United Kingdom when they voted to leave. But they also wanted some kind of rebalancing of power, and we should not assume that when people voted to leave, they wanted all control and power to sit in Parliament. We ought to reflect on that.
In the period between now and next week, when my noble friend on the Front Bench reflects on what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said about how we might consider what needs to be done to make sure we do not end up in the courts again, all of us need to support the Government in making sure that we place Parliament in the best possible place to serve the public best, and that is not necessarily giving ourselves more power.