Care: Costs Cap
Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(9 years, 2 months ago)
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European Union Bill
Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
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.