My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of Amendment 76, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, cannot be in her place. I made all the arguments in relation to Amendment 58, and I do not intend to repeat them. I await with great interest the ingenious answer that will come out this time for treating the nations with inequality.
I will take one minute to support Amendment 62 most strongly. So far, we have been dealing with known knowns: we know that there is legislation. There is a bit of the known that needs due diligence, but that falls within the same category, and we should get there on legislation. But I will not be satisfied about that until I see how it has been searched for. However, in this area, we move into the known unknowns. The Bill shows a profound misunderstanding of the genius of the common law and the huge benefit of it and our way of doing things in this country. We are like magpies: we take good things from places and adapt them.
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On what this clause seeks to do, this amendment is so important because you do not know what you are doing—you do not know which bricks you are taking out. I implore the Government: the one industry that
is extremely internationally successful in this country is our legal services industry. Please do not damage it by a failure to deal with these very general areas of law. A solution is provided for you; please take it. No ideological fanaticism should prevent a sensible approach to dealing with the genius of our common law.