Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Newton of Braintree Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, Amendment 22A is grouped with Amendment 23, but I do not intend to move Amendment 23, which is about the relationships between the two Houses, in advance of the publication of the House of Lords reform White Paper. I understand that we will be getting it tomorrow, so having a discussion today is rather pointless.

Amendment 22A refers to the need for major constitutional issues to be ratified by referendum. I am acutely aware that the idea of a referendum at all is not too popular at the moment. I was not very keen on the last one, but I am now that I know the result. I know that my justification for raising this was that a real-world event of some significance occurred between Committee and Report on the Bill. This is a constitutional Bill of some significance, and in between the two stages a very important event took place: the referendum on first past the post versus the alternative vote. It is absolutely right and proper that when the first referendum in 40-odd years has taken place, it should be considered.

I am pretty surprised that there has been no official statement on the result of the referendum to either House, as far as I know. There certainly has been no statement to this House, and I do not think there has been one to the other House either. I fear that I know the reason. Perhaps the Minister can give me a more principled reason than this, but I fear that it is in both sides of the Government’s interest to pretend that the referendum has not happened. The Liberal Democrats obviously do not want to be reminded of the result, and the Conservatives, who may be muttering beneath their breath and punching the air silently, if it is possible to do that, may none the less feel that they had better not say too much about it at the moment because it might upset their coalition partners. I do not have either of those inhibitions. I am very happy to talk about the referendum and its significance for this legislation. I want to make sure that I remain in order.

I have to add, in parenthesis, that there is almost a conspiracy of silence among the media on this referendum. I think of two newspapers in particular—the Guardian and the Independent—which set great store by the referendum and campaigned for a yes vote. I am sure we would have had no end of in-depth analysis if there had been a yes vote, but as far as I can discover, although I cannot claim to read both papers in detail every day, there has been virtually no reference to the outcome of the referendum. There is a kind of a news blackout on discussing it. I do not intend to discuss it at length.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I can hardly believe what I am hearing. In the referendum, the Labour Party was split. I am not sure whether it was split down the middle or at some other juncture, but it was clearly severely split, with its leader going one way and a lot of other people, including the noble Lord, another. Can he tell us what his Front Bench would have said had there been a statement?

[Lord Grocott]

I am responsible for all sorts of things, but I am happy to say that, by my choice—who knows what might have happened now—I retired from the Front Bench. One reason why I wanted to retire from the Front Bench was to have the sheer joy of discussing these constitutional issues without any inhibition.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pannick]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has served a very valuable purpose, because he has identified with precision one of the main defects in this Bill and so many of the proposals for constitutional change that have been brought forward by this Government and are still to be brought forward.

The essential point surely about constitutional principles is that they are intended to be neutral; they are intended to be objective criteria by which we and the people judge the propriety of the conduct of government. They do so by convention, by practice and, if change is proposed, they do so by public consultation, by pre-legislative scrutiny and by an attempt to achieve consensus. The Government’s inability to identify when a referendum is appropriate—the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, asked the Minister to explain the Government’s position on this in Committee and the Minister was unable to do so—is a manifestation of constitutional reform and change that is being proposed on an ad hoc basis; it is being proposed if and in so far as it is politically convenient for the coalition to do so.

Constitutional change cannot command public respect when the public perceive politicians as using constitutional means such as a referendum—means which are designed to control politicians—as a way of holding a coalition together. One has to do better than that. One has to identify a principled basis for using or not using a referendum. To bring forward constitutional change in this way—without public consultation and without any attempt to identify and then to apply objective, coherent principles on matters such as referendums—leads inevitably not only to poorly drafted, inadequate legislation but guarantees that the legislation, when enacted, will not command public understanding, far less public respect, and ensures that the legislation will remain on the statute book only in the short term.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, having rashly intervened on the spur of the moment earlier I decided that I had better stay until the end of debate in line with the conventions. I am very glad that I did because, in an old-fashioned phrase, it has been worth a guinea a minute. I shall associate myself later with some of the latter speeches but, first, I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—who thought that I was trying to embarrass him—that I was congratulating him on his sheer effrontery. I am not sure that the same is not true about the latter part of his remarks about Governments tampering with the constitution with no overall aim because, frankly, this is not the first Government that this charge could be levelled at—and he was a member of the last. However, on the latter point I am in complete agreement with him.

I wish to pick up on the comments of my noble friend Lord Norton, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and, not least, the noble Lord, Lord Reid—who made one of the most excellent speeches we have heard in these proceedings—on House of Lords reform. I agree with every word they said. As a coalition loyalist—well, mostly—I hope my colleagues will stop this messing about with the constitution. They have not got an architect drawing up what they want to get out of it, a great deal of it looks as though it has not been thought through and it does not reflect the basic fact that we have a constitution which, by and large, has served the country well and continues to do so, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and which was implicit in other speeches.

Having made those troublesome remarks—I saw my Whip looking at me and wondering whether I really had told him that I would be docile and loyalist this week—I assure my noble friend on the Front Bench that I will be good on this Bill. However, I am not promising that if we go on getting this kind of stuff.