Do you too suffer from the “Friday Afternoon Syndrome” ?   When colleagues pile up on your desk the tasks for which you have been waiting for weeks, so that they can go off for the weekend – or a week’s holiday – without a care in the world ?
 
That’s what the Government is doing to Peers and MPs just now, only it is on an even bigger scale – hastily drafted legislation, asking for scrutiny in a matter of days, so that everyone can go off for the Summer Recess on 21 July.
 
As a prelude we have a brief Lords debate this evening on “constitutional proposals” currently before Parliament.  Given that the instigator is from  UKIP, I fancy his moan will be based on the illusion that all new laws come from Brussels.  In fact, as anyone who analyses the true audit trail of legislation will tell you, a fraction originate in the national Ministerial discussions there, but the individual EU member states all develop and expand them to suit their own circumstances.   London is famous for “goldplating” directives, and blaming Brussels for the resulting bureaucracy, while other countries take a more sane approach.  I hope to contribute a short reminder of all the reforms on which the Government has delayed action for months, many of them covered by my Constitutional Renewal Bill.  Ministers have still not produced their own Bill, 12 months since our Joint Committee examined a draft, and yet they won’t let me have a Second Reading for mine.
 
On Tuesday the Lords will debate the very controversial issue of assisted suicide.  Scarcely a subject to squeeze in before the “end of term”.  Then on Wednesday we have the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Standards Bill.  MPs have already forced Jack Straw to retreat on many of the most absurd proposals of this cockeyed attempt to defuse the expenses scandal, but much work needs to be done.  How Number 10 could have thrown together such a muddled and misguided set of proposals is mind-boggling.  It doesn’t address the central issue of MPs’ pay or the absurdities of Peers’ allowances, but it does challenge the basic rights and responsibilities of Parliament, which go back to 1688.  Knee-jerk legislation is passed in haste and repented at leisure – witness the Dangerous Dogs Act.
 
After weeks of wondering whether the Government is prepared to toughen up the Political Parties and Elections Bill, the delayed Third Reading on Thursday will reveal all.  So far they have resolutely refused to stamp out the corruption that inevitably follows in the wake of big donations and virtually unlimited spending by the Parties.

As things stand, we may have 24 hours of ‘parliamentary ping pong’ between the Lords and Commons on Monday 20th July, because Ministers have left so many serious issues to the last minute. 

On Friday I am hoping to secure a Second Reading for a bill to prevent driving instructors who have been charged with a serious sexual assault from continuing to teach potentially vulnerable pupils.  This bill was piloted through the Commons over many months by my colleague Willie Rennie MP, after a dreadful case in his constituency.  Hopefully it will not be squeezed out of time by the foregoing debates on equally emotive Private Members’ Bills.

The contrast between the slap-happy drafting of some of the latest Government bills and the long and careful scrutiny of our own proposals is stark.  No wonder many of us are frustrated by the dominance of the business timetable – in both Houses – by the Government of the day.  Reform is in the air again, but has it been left too late in this Parliament ?   Certainly wasting months over the summer on a ‘Recess’ when we should be addressing these issues properly is a scandal.  There will be ten long weeks when MPs and Peers have very limited opportunities even to ask the most basic written questions of the Government, and when we could be looking at all of this last-minute legislation properly.  MPs value the chance to spend time in their constituencies: few take long holidays and most fill their diaries with events meeting people in their areas and feeding back what they hear into their work in Westminster.  But surely all this haste proves it’s time to make the Recess shorter again – as Robin Cook had it – with sittings in September.  And would it offend any great constitutional principle for the House of Lords to stay working for some of the time that MPs are away ?