European Union Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, we have heard two speeches from the Liberal Democrat Benches— from the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson—both seeming to blame the malaise in European politics on the absence of referenda. However, I suggest that if we want to know what created and exacerbated the disconnect between the electorate of this country and the European elections, which the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, talked about, the answer is that it was the rather misguided action of my own party, when in government, in changing the electoral system to the European Parliament.

Creating multi-Member regional constituencies, which guaranteed the first three or four people on the party list a place irrespective of their contact with the electorate, was a totally misguided act. It has taken European politics further and further away from the people. Under the old system, constituencies had European information systems available in their party offices. However, they have all disappeared and have become the prerogative of regional parties. You can see in the consistent decline in participation in regional elections that people have no interest in Members who gain their places almost automatically under this system. There is scepticism and cynicism in relation to European elections but it is not that people regard them as unimportant. In my former constituency of Birmingham West, the turnout at the last direct elections that we had with single Member constituencies was just short of 40 per cent. In the first election conducted on regional lists, where there was an attempt to link places such as Walsall and Ludlow, the poll dropped to 13 per cent in my former constituency. That was a sign of the scepticism and cynicism.

I was provoked into getting to my feet by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who took me on a walk down memory lane regarding the 1979 referendum. I remember that referendum well for two reasons. One was that I was so confident of getting a successful yes vote in that election that I went to the then parliamentary bookmaker in the House of Commons, Mr Ian Mikardo, and asked him what odds he would give me on a yes vote in every constituency in the United Kingdom. I gave him £10 of my hard-earned money in return for odds of 200:1. So uniform was the result of that referendum that it was only the outer fringes of the United Kingdom—Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles—that led to Mr Mikardo keeping my £10 rather than me getting £2,000 back from him. There was an enormous spread.

The other thing that I remember most about the 1979 referendum which is pertinent to this issue was the number of people who told me that that referendum would produce the settled will of the United Kingdom for a generation. However, it did not produce it for a week after the election. As soon as one referendum was lost, there were all sorts of demands for other issues to be looked at. The referendum mechanism failed to settle anything, other than the position of the Government, which is what it was intended to settle in the first place.

The noble Lord, Lord Williamson, was at his persuasive best in moving his amendment. He was reflecting what, I hope, is the settled will of your Lordships' House concerning the 40 per cent threshold. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution got it absolutely right in its report at paragraphs 37 and 38. As so many people have spoken since the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned those paragraphs, they bear repeating into the record. They state that,

“the European Union Bill is a radical step-change in the adoption of referendum provisions … In our judgement, the resort to referendums contemplated in the European Union Bill is not confined to the category of fundamental constitutional issues on which a UK-wide referendum may be judged to be appropriate. Furthermore, many of the Bill's provisions are inconsistent with the Government's statement that referendums are most appropriately used in relation to fundamental constitutional issues”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, says that the Government have replied to that. They would, wouldn’t they? More important is the advice and guidance that we got from our highly respected Select Committee on the Constitution and I believe that we discard that at our peril. I hope that the House will support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I wish to speak against the amendments. I am grateful to other colleagues for having mentioned the 1975 and 1979 referendums. The EU referendum in 1975 was my first active campaign as a Liberal. I joined the party the year before, and I lived and worked in Scotland in the run-up to and immediately after 1979. I want to talk about the impact of that threshold in Scotland. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, for the comments that he made earlier. He is right to some extent about there being an influence on where the Labour Government was in the run-up to 1979 and again in 1997, but that was not the only thing.

In 1979, my day job was as a very junior studio manager with BBC Scotland. On a couple of mornings after the election, I was the poor soul who was sent out to find vox populi on the streets of Edinburgh to talk about the election results and about the impact of the referendum. It was apparent that the people completely distrusted their politicians as a result of having spoken but not being listened to. There was certainly some shock among those people—I will not describe them as active politicians—who regularly voted. The fallout in Scottish politics in subsequent years was very evident. I have no doubt that that was why there was such a strength of feeling in 1997 when we saw real distaste in Scotland about what was happening in Westminster. The people felt disfranchised.

When a threshold is ignored there is a disconnection with the ballot box, a disenchantment with the political process and, more worryingly, a distrust of politicians. I respect the view of my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell, but we either have to let the people speak—however they may speak—or we can choose to have Parliament speak. There I pick up on the point made by my colleagues, that sometimes we may not have a referendum and then Parliament speaks, but once we choose—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I shall not argue about the vox populi after the referendum—I might have been one of the voxes and I might have been quite populi. We keep hearing about the distrust of politicians and I wonder whether that distrust is greater when a referendum does not achieve 40 per cent compared with when Members of Parliament pledge not to put up student fees and then do the opposite.

[Baroness Brinton]

It is very interesting how many people think they voted Liberal Democrat in May 2010. Had they done so, we might have been the major partners in the coalition Government and not the junior partners. The key thing is not just about those who may have voted in a certain way, but the impact of the voice of the people being ignored. That is my concern and I am concerned about having a referendum overturned by Parliament. That is why I oppose the amendment.