Lord Deben (Con)

My Lords, as a fellow Catholic, I make a confession. I have learned an enormous amount from listening to almost every moment of the Bill. The argument that most distresses me is that which suggests that this has been subject to a filibuster. I have learned a great deal, and I am the better for it, although not the happier for it. I want, therefore, to explain something that I find extremely difficult and that we have not really faced. The problem is not the problem that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has raised; the problem is the nature of the process right from the beginning. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said that this could not be a government Bill. It is perfectly possible for the Government to have said in their manifesto that a Bill would be prepared, but people would be able to vote on it as they believed to be right. That would have meant that we had a Bill that answered the fundamental problems that many of us have. The noble and learned Lord knows that, in principle, I disagree with the Bill, but my fundamental problem with it is that I cannot ask about or understand a whole range of things, because they are not in the Bill and are left to a Government to decide how they shall be done. That is why the Minister, with commendable and continuous patience, has had to say, “I cannot answer that, because that depends on what the Houses say, and we will have to answer that afterwards”. This is not a satisfactory way to proceed and nor is blaming the House of Lords in our debates, when the fundamental issue is that what really happened—and we know what happened—was that the Prime Minister made a promise and then did not do it in the way it should have been done. He arranged for a Private Member’s Bill to be produced. That Bill has been produced. Now, we are told, it is a very good, robust and safe Bill. Well, a robust and safe Bill would not be the only Bill I can remember in 50 years in politics that is opposed by every representative of the disabled movement. What other Bill would we bring forward, saying that it is a suitable Bill, even though every disability organisation is opposed to it?