A completely Synthetic Constitutional Crisis has been manufactured over this issue, and I want to look beyond the proposal beyond its rôle as a distraction from our economic ills or foreign policy failures to examine the principle on which it is based.

When I think of the arguments that we have heard today, of the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, West (Mr. Iain Macleod), who defended the White Paper skilfully by hardly mentioning its proposals, or of the performance of the Leader of the Liberal Party, who addressed us for 40 minutes and has now evaporated somewhere into the stratosphere, who defended it on the grounds that its proposals would not last very long, or the speech of the Attorney-General, so full of contradictions, which I pass over in charitable silence, except to say that only he could have got away with such a speech in the manner in which he did - that is a tribute to him personally and not to the White Paper - I must conclude that this White Paper has precipitated a Synthetic Constitutional Crisis.

Before we all join the Lords resistance army in a Synthetic Constitutional Crisis, will the Leader of the House not acknowledge that the real issue is not the procedural powers of respective Houses in this Parliament, but the spending powers of hard-pressed and hard-working households in this country?