"My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 3, which is also in my name. The purpose of the amendments is to leave out subsections (1) and (2) of the proposed new section. I have tabled them to enable my noble friend the Minister to justify the inclusion of these …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"Well, my Lords, this has been a quite fascinating debate. I say to the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, that I fully accept I am a Lord and not the Lord and therefore am quite capable of getting things wrong. However, on this occasion, I am not sure that I have, …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"Would my noble friend not wish to call in aid Clause 2 where the Government wish to insert the Sewel convention with the words, “But it is recognised”?..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"My Lords, I signed this amendment, and support it. I want to reinforce what my noble friend Lord Forsyth has said. In a way, this will lead into a much fuller discussion on the next set of amendments looking at the content of the clause. But my noble friend is …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"My Lords, these amendments, on the whole, move us forward. They are an improvement on what is presently an unsatisfactory provision in the Bill. I drew attention to this at Second Reading, but in doing so I was hardly doing anything novel. Attention was drawn to the problem in the …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"My noble and learned friend’s argument was that the Bill puts into statute the recommendations of the Smith commission, and in this case, recommendation 22:
“The Sewel Convention will be put on a statutory footing”.
"My Lords, for the past 18 years, we have seen significant measures of constitutional change enacted on an almost unprecedented scale. For most of those 18 years I have drawn attention to the fact that the measures have been disparate and, crucially, discrete. There has been no attempt to locate …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech
"I agree with the noble and learned Lord. It puts us in a very difficult situation because there is a commitment to it, but it creates problems by being embodied in the Bill. It raises a problem that should not be there and should perhaps not have been made in …..." Lord Norton of Louth - View Speech