I note what my hon. Friend has said and I am very grateful to him for the way in which he put it, but I happen to disagree with him. If he listens to me he will understand why I think that I am right on that point. The consequence is that we completely lose sight of what the key issues are, and if I may say so before I move on, that matters a lot, because in the course of this, we also lose sight of the fact that we are the Parliament of a deeply divided country on this issue. When I go and lecture to sixth-formers occasionally and talk to them, I point out that the parliamentary process is not just about the imposition of the will of the majority on the minority; it is the process by which we obtain consent for what the majority chooses to do. The difficulty with this referendum is that, having invoked the public will, which, I regret to say, is not entirely tempered in its expressions of view by some of the courtesies that we extend to each other here, we run the risk of losing sight of the fact that 48% of the electorate did not wish for the policy that we are currently pursuing and have deep concerns about, not trying to reverse it, but the extent to which it will have an adverse impact on their well-being, and request us as a Parliament to pay as much attention to what they are saying as we undoubtedly have to do to those who voted in the referendum and said that they wanted to leave. The most worrying aspect of the debate, as it has progressed, is how we become polarised and so fixated on ends that we fail completely to look at means. We look at the top of the mountain, but not at where we are going to put our foot next. As a consequence, we run serious risks of badly letting them down-all of them, collectively-by enacting bad legislation and taking very foolish decisions. Of course, when this confrontation comes along, the negotiations immediately stop, the conversation ceases, the Government's steamroller is invoked, and the atmosphere can suddenly get really quite unpleasant; and I regret it. As a consequence-I will come back to this in a moment-I have to tell my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench that I think they have lost a series of opportunities in the dialogue we have had on this to come to a sensible outcome. With that, I turn to the issue that is, in truth, under debate.