division_name: House of Lords Bill
motion: <p>Order for Third Reading read. 
  
   
  
  <p>
   I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
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   In my speech on Second Reading, I described the Bill as exquisitely simple, although momentous in its effects--a description which, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to trouble some commentators, as though simplicity were incompatible with significance.
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   The Bill is a clear fulfilment of our manifesto pledge to remove, by statute, the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords, as an initial self-contained reform. It deals only with that point and with its essential consequences, most notably conferring on peers who leave the House of Lords the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons, and indeed to stand for election without having to relinquish their title.
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   After a two-day Second Reading debate, and four full days in Committee, the Bill reaches its Third Reading with its simplicity unimpaired. It has been fully--some might say extensively--debated, and those debates have been, for the most part, good-humoured and constructive.
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   There were one or two slightly desperate attempts to pretend that the Government were trying in some way to curtail or obstruct debate, but those claims foundered on the clear evidence to the contrary. There were also attempts to take our discussions beyond the Bill itself--to draw in proposals that might be made at a later stage in Parliament's consideration of the Bill, and that, if made, would be the focus of further debate in the House--or to dwell on other issues raised by our White Paper, including those now before the royal commission. I take the opportunity now to assure the House that the Government do, of course, intend to provide time to debate the White Paper later in the Session.
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   One evident feature of our debates so far has been the difficulty experienced by the official Opposition in knowing how they should attack the Bill. On Second Reading, the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) managed--as he did in response to my statement on 20 January--in the course of one opening speech to accuse the Government first of undue delay and secondly of undue haste, or perhaps it was the other way round.
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   The hon. Gentleman complained that the timetable for the royal commission was too short, but he also said
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    "that the Government want to scrap the hereditary peers and then kick the whole process into the long grass"--[ Official Report , 1 February 1999; Vol. 324, c. 619.]
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   A moment's thought serves to suggest that that undertaking would take not months, but probably a considerable number of years.
   
  
  <p>
  Why not? Why do we want to keep in existence privileges and precedents attaching to membership of the aristocracy? Once the right of a peer to sit and vote in the House of Lords has been done away with, as I very much hope that the Bill will do, all the rest will disappear like a house of cards. There is nothing to the aristocracy other than the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.
   
  
  <p>Question put,  That the Question be now put:--
  <p>The House divided:  Ayes 326, Noes 152.
  