Thank you for your wise selection of amendments, Mr Bone; it includes a fair number of mine, which I have tabled to help the Bill along its way—how nice it is that we are now doing so.

I have quoted before what Disraeli said in his speech at the Manchester free trade hall in 1872:

“sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas…the first consideration of a minister should be the health of the people.”

As always, it is good to see the Conservatives putting their principles into action by giving due consideration to Bills relating to health. Amending them can ensure that they have achieved their main objective, because health has been a Conservative subject since 1872—before the foundation of the Labour Party—so we have a very good record on this issue.

The amendments that I have proposed encompass a number of different points. First, I thought it behoved us—it was our duty—to remove what one might call politically correct gobbledegook—the sort of phraseology that is so popular in the Left that they look to put fine-sounding baubles into Bills, as if they were a Christmas tree, and make them sound as if they were about motherhood and apple pie and those sorts of things, with which one could not disagree but which have very little legislative effect. How would one legislate that everyone should like apple pie, perhaps with or without custard? That is why I come to the removal of social solidarity.

It is of course a good thing that society should be united and that we are all in it together, as my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has so wisely put it on many occasions. How true that is: we are all in it together. But how possible is it to legislate for this togetherness, this sense of community? A sense of community builds up through the ages: it is a commonality of feeling that comes from a shared history and experience, a shared society.

There was a wonderful exhibition in this House last Thursday in which the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta were brought together. That is what brings us our social solidarity, our feeling that as the people of the United Kingdom came together, we had a sense of being one people and because of that took on great enterprises. We established our freedoms and spread them around the world. Because of this sense of social solidarity we built a great empire and fought world wars; we defeated Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. It is indisputably important and held dear. But in a sense the theory of it is not an issue that you can pass into legislation: you cannot say that the hon. Member for Eltham and I must share social solidarity. I happen to think that he is a very good egg; that is my private opinion. However, we have many differences of opinion and approach and represent very different communities, so although we have a social solidarity in the broadest sense as Members of Parliament and as Britons, do we have a social solidarity that can be legislated for—can an ardent socialist and a die-hard Tory have social solidarity by rule of law? I do not think so; it is something that evolves and develops.

I appreciate that I may be at risk of reducing our social solidarity the more I make amendments to the hon. Gentleman’s Bill and I regret doing so, but that is part of legislative scrutiny. I am generally against putting things into Bills that are not actually legislative. What if this Bill comes before the courts? What is a judge—learned in the law, bewigged, berobed, sitting on a fine plinth looking down on his courtroom—supposed to say? An action is brought before him to say that there is not sufficient social solidarity. How is this learned judge able to interpret that and give it action? Can he send a police officer out to arrest somebody for not being  socially solid? What do we mean by being socially solid—is this about people suffering from obesity, which is a problem that affects the health service, or is it merely something intellectual, theoretical, ethereal and difficult to pin down and make actionable?