Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it was indeed debated in the case of Scotland, but without any consensus in this House. I support strongly what my noble friend Lord Heseltine, said: that this is not the Bill to tack it on to, nor is it for us in this House, with a Bill beginning in this House, to send it to another place with this stipulation in it. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and I have crossed swords on many occasions on this issue, so what I am saying will be of no surprise to him. He knows that I respect his point of view; he knows that I fundamentally disagree with it.

This is my first intervention on this Bill, and I apologise for that, but this is not the time and this is not the place. I completely concede the one powerful aspect of the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and he knows that, because, when we were first confronted with the idea of votes for 16 year-olds in the Scottish referendum, I was one of the first in your Lordships’ House to argue that it should not have been agreed and conceded by the Prime Minister. I believe that it was changing the constitution in a very difficult way and creating a precedent which it would be difficult to resist. However, as the noble Lord knows only too well, we have not had a wide-ranging debate on this issue and my noble friend Lord Heseltine is entirely correct in suggesting that there should be some form of inquiry, commission or whatever to look at the whole issue of the franchise.

I believe that it is illogical in a country where it is not legal to drive a motor car, to consume alcohol or to smoke cigarettes at the age of 16 for young people to have the vote. I also believe that there is some danger in giving the vote to those who still have, in most cases, two years of full-time education ahead of them. There is all the difference in the world between a sixth-former who is to some degree under the influence of a school teacher, and a young undergraduate who has left school and is beginning to enter the wide world. Therefore, whenever this debate is rehearsed in your Lordships’ House or any other place, I will take a lot of convincing—and I doubt that I will be convinced—that we should make this change.

In the past couple of years we have made constitutional changes without linking them up. We had the ridiculous business earlier this year, in the last Parliament, where certain things had to be settled by St Andrew’s Day and other things by St David’s Day. Artificial deadlines were set up, and there was no cohesive argument or proper plan. Now we are falling into the same danger again if we seek to insert this measure in a Bill which has not yet been to the other place. The other place, if it wishes to insert an amendment to this effect, is the right place to do so. We are not, and I hope that the amendment will be resisted this evening and that we will have at some stage in the not-too-distant future a proper opportunity to examine the franchise and whether or how it should be widened. I have my own views— I believe that we should have compulsory registration; I even believe that there is a case for compulsory voting; and I believe passionately, as your Lordships know because I have spoken about it many times, in citizenship education—but things must be done logically and sensibly. Although I would never accuse my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, of not being sensible, I honestly do not believe that he is doing this House or the constitution in general a service if he presses this amendment tonight. If he chooses to do so, I shall certainly vote against it.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has done his cause, this House and this Bill a service. I would be very sympathetic to the idea of lowering the participation age in elections, which is an issue that has worried us all for many years ever since 16 became the age for marrying et cetera. However, I also agree that the place to start such a move is not in this House. It may well be in the Bill, and now that the noble Lord has very kindly brought this matter to Parliament’s attention in this way, I feel sure that the people down the corridor will take the hint and, if they are so minded, can introduce the measure, knowing full well that there will be a sympathetic reception to such an amendment when it comes back here.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I rise expressing extreme sympathy for the enthusiasm which it is possible to develop for politics at a very early age but which does not lead me to be in support of the amendment. I was one year old at the general election of 1935. I therefore had to wait until 1945, when there was a further general election. Two and a half Members of Parliament for the Labour Party have played first-class cricket and one hundred and twenty-six and a half have played first-class cricket and represented parliamentary seats in the Conservative interest. The half was Aidan Crawley. I was at a prep school in Buckinghamshire where he was the Labour candidate. It was a matter of total astonishment to me at the age of 11—admittedly, there had been no elections between 1935 and 1945—that somebody who had played first-class cricket for Oxford and for his county, Kent, could espouse the Labour cause.

It was the case by then that my late noble kinsman had won the first by-election after Munich and therefore I had lived with a Member of Parliament in the Conservative interest for the previous seven years. We arrived late at the count in 1945 in Lewisham West, where my late noble kinsman was the Member of Parliament defending the seat. His seat had been announced. It is a seat which has generally gone with the Government of the country, a fact which was further proved by the late Chris Price, whom a number of people in your Lordships’ House will have been very fond of. He told me that he was absolutely sure that the reason why he was elected for Lewisham West as a Labour candidate was the coincidence that the Tory who had won the seat back in 1951 was a Mr Henry Price and that the people of Lewisham West assumed that Chris was his son.

The thing that had the most powerful effect on me in the 1945 count occurred in Lewisham East, where Herbert Morrison retained the seat. The independent candidate—a man called Russell—had been put in prison by Morrison in 1941 and had remained there until 1945, when he was released and decided that he would get his revenge on the Home Secretary by standing against him. He got the best part of 1,000 votes and gave what was, without question, the longest speech of thanks to a returning officer that I have ever heard; Mr Russell spoke for 25 minutes, explaining why he disapproved of Mr Morrison.

In the years immediately after 1945, my late noble relative stood as the Conservative candidate in a by-election in Kilburn. She won the seat by 300 votes and held it again at the next council elections. I have, I think, every ground for thinking that she is the last Conservative councillor to represent Kilburn in all the years since. In 1949, in an era when there had been no Conservative—