I proceed to ask why the Attorney-General should be on this Comimittee, and I attack the idea that the Attorney-General should be on this Committee, on the ground that he is a Member of the Committee to whom in confidence the Committee as a whole turns for advice, and I say that anyone who looks to the Attorney-General for legal advice is relying upon a broken reed, for in all our history I doubt whether we have had such an injudicial Attorney-General and, if I may say so, a more injudicious Attorney-General than we have at the present time. If one reads the Report of the Committee of Privileges during this Parliament, one finds that the Attorney-General suffers from some confusion of geographical location as between Nuremburg and London and between his personality and that of Torquemada.

These are serious charges to bring—that this Attorney-General ought not to be entrusted with any kind of judicial capacity whatever. For in this Committee he acts, not as a member of a judicial body, but as a prosecuting counsel, and anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the proceedings of the Committee of Privileges in this Parliament must have received an extremely unhappy and unfavourable impression of the attitudes and predilections of our present Attorney-General.

I say that the Government should withdraw this Motion and endeavour to bring to us a list of names which would restore the Committee of Privileges to the position that it held in the past. Above all things, the Committee of Privileges ought not to be a party Committee. In the names selected here, we have an automatic majority of one party in this House. I beg leave to remind the House that there was a time when we had to take away from the Committee of Privileges one of the functions that it used to discharge—the function of checking upon Election petitions—and we had to take it away because we found it impossible to get a judicial and non-party judgment from it. We had to entrust that function to a High Court Judge, and I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that if Privilege is to be preserved for this country, we shall have to take away the rest of the functions of the Committee of Privileges and vest them in High Court Judges, too.

If a Suitable occasion arises I will move to the effect that the remaining functions of the Committee of Privileges be taken away from it and be vested in an impartial and judicial form under a High Court Judge. I cannot do that tonight, because it would be out of Order, and therefore, I will say no more about it but will do so in the time when it becomes necessary to move in that sense. I object to the proposed constitution of the Committee of Privileges as proposed in this Motion and I stress my complete and utter want of confidence in it. Question put, and agreed to.