Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Golding and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, my noble friend has raised two interesting points. The first concerns the prohibition against police officers canvassing. One can understand why, historically, this might be regarded as an appropriate provision. In some other countries—one might cite Egypt at present—democracy is highly imperfect and people may have real grounds for apprehension that the police might not be interested in improving democracy, so one can understand why there might be such a provision in electoral law. However, it seems to me that it must be a very long time indeed since that was a realistic apprehension in this country—at least I hope that that is the case. My noble friend makes a very good point that this must be a difficult provision—indeed, a discriminatory one—for members of police forces, who are entitled to vote as citizens and to talk about political issues with their friends and families. While conversation within the family might not be regarded as canvassing, there must be a rather imprecise definition of what this prohibition amounts to.

[Baroness Golding]

In my constituency we have a police officer who is now retired. He was advised not to join the Labour Party or to show any bias towards it while he was a policeman. That means canvassing.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

One can understand that. It is a little difficult in legislation to draw the line between what people do in their public official capacity and what they may do in their personal capacity. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s thoughts on whether this legislation is well framed to meet the circumstances of today.

My noble friend also drew attention to the prohibition against paid canvassers. I must confess that even after decades of political activity, I was unaware of this prohibition. It seems to me that it is quite commonplace, in all political parties, for people who are paid employees—paid functionaries—of the political parties to engage very actively indeed in canvassing and in the organisation of canvassing. Again, it would be helpful to hear from the Minister whether he has any concern that this prohibition, which has been long established in election law—at least since 1983—is in fact regularly and routinely ignored and whether it is sensible simply to re-enact it for the purposes of the referendum by transferring it from the 1983 legislation.