The debate has raised a certain amount of emotion. As a result, it has produced some outstanding speeches, particularly those from my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Newton (Mr. Frederick Lee). Each of them expressed the sincere revulsion that they felt as trade unionists about both the Act and the way in which it has been applied.

Nevertheless, the debate is a tragedy brought about in some measure by both sides. It is a tragedy mainly brought about by the Government. For that reason, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the motion. The Government must learn, as they apparently have not, that law is no sacred white elephant. We live in a society which has to be based upon a respect for law. As a lawyer, I know full well that law is not necessarily equated with justice. But equally, I do not believe that in a civilised society we can have justice without law. There would be only anarchy, in which the strong would rule the weak. I do not want to see our society become like that.

Therefore, I subscribe to the view that we ought to do all in our power to try to encourage respect for the law and to abide by the law. But that means that we as legislators must be sensitive to the will of the people for whom we are legislating. It is not enough to say that we come to power with a majority won at a General Election and that that gives us a mandate to do whatever we wish to do despite the ingrained resistance sincerely felt by many people who may represent a majority of those to whom the law is intended to apply.

For just that reason, when the Labour Party was in Government it was not able to legislate for spot checks in relation to road safety. The vast majority of motorists who would have been affected by that felt deeply that it would be going too far. Therefore, even though we had the democratic right as the majority party in the House to pass such legislation, we felt that it was wrong to do so.

The present Government came to power with their mandate to produce the Industrial Relations Act. There was, I fear, a misunderstanding about the kind of people with whom they had to deal. I was cured of that a long time ago. I remember a Labour Party meeting at which I sought to try to explain why the stipendiary magistrate of Leeds had fined a political agitator, who was not even a member of the Labour Party, for standing outside Leeds town hall, gathering a crowd and refusing to move when a policeman asked him to move on. I tried to explain to the impassioned audience of 300 members of the Labour Party the legal reason for that. They did not want to listen to the legal reason. It offended so fundamentally against everything that they believed about free speech that they wanted to put aside any kind of legal objection.

The same thing is true of the Industrial Relations Act. I give the Government the credit for believing sincerely that if the Act had worked effectively it would have improved industrial relations. But the Act never had a chance of acceptance. It was so deeply offensive to the kind of people to whom it was to be applied that one could not have expected them to accept it.

Therefore, it was a mistake to have it and it is a mistake to keep it on the statute book. Everybody, including the Government, recognises that it is unworkable in present circumstances. The Government do not try to operate it and nor do the employers. The only people who want to operate it are one or two lunatics such as Con-Mech, who seek to use the courts for their purposes.

What I find a tragedy from this side of the House is that this whole issue had to be ventilated by means of the Early Day Motion, couched as it was. I do not blame my hon. Friends. They were advised, and rightly advised, that the only way of criticising a judge in this House was by that kind of motion. But I think that it is deeply to be regretted. In my view, it is right that judges should be criticised from time to time. It is right that they should be brought up against the kind of criticism with which politicians are faced on occasion when their judgments are markedly out of line with popular feeling at any given moment. There ought to be some method whereby they could explain their judgment, and that method ought to be a formal one—perhaps a statement in court, if need be. Therefore, I am not so sensitive about criticism of judges as some people.

But I think it is wrong to encourage the view that if one dislikes a law intensely, as clearly my hon. Friends and members of the trade unions do in this case, one should be able to break the law ; that one should be able to criticise a judge when he inflicts punishment for breaking the law ; and that, if he then responds in a way that is perhaps unusual, one should be able to move that he be dismissed. I understand why that happened and I sympathise with the feelings that caused it to happen. But this adds to the growing feeling in the country, which worries me immensely and which makes democracy unworkable, that in the final analysis it is left to the individual to decide which law he will accept and which law he will not accept.

Of course there is an honoured tradition in our country, which should continue. When a man feels deeply that to accept a law goes against everything he believes in, when a law offends his basic principles, when a law offends his conscience, then we have no monopoly of John Hampdens from the Civil War. Of course he must say that, in those circumstances, he will not obey the law. But if he—