European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Cormack

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

As I have already said, my grand-daughter is 18 tomorrow and she will be entirely free to vote, as I hope she will, in this referendum and every other election, and at every other opportunity when she can vote.

There was nothing inconsistent—the saying of course refers to foolish consistency as the hobgoblin of small minds, not the hallmark—in saying as I did at the time of the referendum, “You have been given this responsibility; I hope that you will exercise it responsibly; but I do not believe in general that what is being done is right”. I argued that in this House when we discussed the matter. No one who was present when I argued on these things before would be at all surprised by what I am saying. My noble friend Lord Tyler—I still call him that—and I clashed several times on this issue when we were talking about the Scottish referendum and other things. The fact is that it is perfectly possible to say, “If you have been given this responsibility, exercise it, but I do not believe that we are wise”. I certainly did not believe that the Prime Minister was wise to concede this in the case of the Scottish referendum, any more than I think that he was wise recently to say what he did about 16 and 17 year-olds voting in the Scottish general election. One wonders whether they will have to be accompanied by guardians—but that is another matter entirely.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am most grateful to my noble friend for giving way. I am getting bids for alternatives, and the latest is that consistency is the bugbear of a mediocre mind. Perhaps I can help my noble friend with his grand-daughter. Surely the point is that his grand-daughter would have been able to vote in the Scottish referendum but not in the general election that we have just had.

[Lord Cormack]

Yes, indeed: she thought that was inconsistent, and I agreed with her; of course it was. I do not think that one needs to prolong this argument. We should be getting the Bill on to the statute book as soon as possible. I hope that we will have a referendum in which I will be able to campaign for membership of the European Union by the middle of next year. This thing is dragging on far too long. We should look separately at the question of the franchise and the question of maturity and decide whether we have got it right.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am a signatory to Amendment 3, in common with not only the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, but Members on the Conservative Benches and Cross-Benchers. It is genuinely across the House that we now feel that this moment has arrived. Having deployed the argument for this extension of the franchise so often in the past, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, so kindly said, I can be very brief. I certainly do not need to repeat the noble Baroness’s excellent exposition of the advice we have now had from the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators about the practicalities.

In Committee, I thought that the most persuasive contribution of many was from the Conservative Benches, from the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who said:

“So the question I am struggling with is: how can it be right to allow 16 and 17 year-olds to vote in a referendum on Scotland but not in a referendum on Europe? There has to be some sort of consistency”.

We are back there again, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has so admirably emphasised. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, went on to rubbish the official explanation that somehow the extension of the franchise in the Scottish independence referendum did not originate with Conservative Ministers. He said,

“although the coalition Government and the Prime Minister did not specifically approve votes for 16 year-olds, they did acquiesce in votes for 16 year-olds”.—[Official Report, 28/10/15; cols.1227-8.]

He and others, notably now an increasing number of Conservative MPs, have warned that we simply cannot pretend that Scottish young people are somehow more mature, well-informed, responsible or capable of exercising common sense than their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts. Several colleagues from this side of the House have challenged anybody from the other side to produce that argument, without any success.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, referred to the United Kingdom. He is right: in the long term, we have to address the consistency of the franchise, the bedrock of our representative democracy across the United Kingdom, but we have a particular issue at the moment. We have a Bill. We have a referendum coming. It is on that issue that we need specific consistency. That was very much the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, and he had no problem whatever with my quoting his contribution in Committee. As an avid fan of both versions of his “House of Cards”, I am very disappointed that he is not able to be here today. I do not know whether I am being as cynical or conspiratorial as some of the characters in those great productions, but I wonder whether there has been some encouragement for him not to be here today. I wonder whether the Government Whips may have encouraged him to stay away, reassuring him that nothing controversial was to be discussed or decided.

One of the key lessons of the Scottish referendum was that the 16 and 17 year-old age group registered—well over 100,000 of them—and voted in larger numbers than those aged 18 to 24. Why? It is very interesting. The reason why that has been identified is that the younger cohort were often still at school and in their local, family environment, where they had much more encouragement to take the issues seriously. When they got away from home to their first job or further or higher education, they lost touch with some of the issues and concerns that might otherwise been part of their consideration.

There is hard evidence—looked at very carefully by Bite the Ballot and others—that there is a good case for a direct link between citizenship courses and electoral registration. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said, there has been a successful pilot in Northern Ireland in that regard.