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Lord Anderson told the Lords: “Amendment 3J, in my name turned out to be the last one standing, so let me say a few words at its funeral.
“It was not much, perhaps, compared to some of the amendments that had already been defeated. Indeed it survived so long precisely because it was so modest and so unthreatening to the Government’s policy.
“But it did indeed touch on a central disease of this Bill and perhaps on our body politic more generally… To reduce the possibilities for challenge, and the pretence that by asserting something to be true, even in the teeth of the evidence, you can not only make it true but keep it true forever.
“Many people, some of them perhaps still watching even now, will have wished us to keep on fighting. But without the threat of double insistence, which remains part of our constitutional armoury but did not command the necessary political support on this occasion, there would have been no point in doing so.
“The purpose of ping-pong is to persuade the Government through force of argument to come to the table and agree a compromise. They have refused pointedly to do so and after four rounds of ping-pong their control of the Commons remains as solid as ever. The time has now come to acknowledge the primacy of the elected House and to withdraw from the fray. We do so secure at least in the knowledge that the so-called judgment of Parliament was not the judgment of this House and that we tried our hardest to achieve something more sensible.”
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