Thank you very much for your kind comments.
I think the reason there was an abandonment of the remote voting when it was working so well, and the reason it came as part of an abandonment of working by consensus, which is incredibly important with the Speaker, the leader of the House, the procedure committee and all parties, was that the government was very keen to send children back to school, and there was a lot of protest. I think the government felt that if they could say that Parliament is back, people should have the confidence to send their children back to school. We also needed more people going to work because the economy had come to a complete halt. You might have seen today that our economy has fallen by 20%.
The danger with the way parliaments work is that if you do things for a political reason then it doesn't work so well in parliament. Of course it has become a shambles. It was a shame because, actually, there was agreement, and it was working and now we have a rather less satisfactory system.
I put it down to the fact that some people regard electronic voting as anathema because they regard the digital age as anathema, but that's where we are, and that's the future. They also wanted to make a political point out of it, so I was very disappointed with the leader of the House. He should really have been for the House rather than for the government.