European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Friday 24th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I am grateful for those interesting interventions, which clarified quite a lot. As my noble friend Lady Quin rightly said, it is unprecedented for a Tory Chief Whip to use her position as a government Whip to put Tory party Bills high up the agenda. Perhaps she can give me an example of where a particular Private Member’s Bill has been given precedence over every other Private Member’s Bill. All the others have been kicked to the sidelines. I understand that she is making promises to promoters of Private Members’ Bills that their Bills will be given priority next year because they have been kicked out in the current Session.

The other outrageous matter is that because of the procedure here and in the other place, and because this is a Private Member’s Bill, not a government Bill, we are told that we cannot discuss it in the detail that we should discuss it in and we cannot scrutinise it in the way that we should scrutinise it. An artificial deadline has been imposed on us that we have to finish it by a particular time. This is no way to treat a major constitutional issue.

That brings me to the first group of amendments. My amendments, like others, say that the key issue of the question on the ballot paper should be based on the impartial advice of the Electoral Commission. We have set up the Electoral Commission to give advice on these questions. The Scottish Government have accepted the Electoral Commission’s advice regarding the question in the Scottish referendum. This Government should do the same and accept the advice of the impartial Electoral Commission.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who is today a proxy for the Government—that is what he is; he is a government stooge—that if he refuses to accept this amendment, it will be clear confirmation that this Bill is a party political ploy and not a serious attempt to legitimise and legislate for a fair and genuine referendum.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, I have put down my name to two of the amendments in this group but I shall be brief—pedantic, but brief. Our verb “to be” is highly irregular, drawing strands of form and meaning from four different roots. They are represented in today’s English by, for example, “is”, “are”, “was” and “be” itself. I put this list before the House because “be” is, as your Lordships know, always tinged with the future. Indeed, as your Lordships will also know, “be” is actually cognate with the word “future” itself. When somebody calls out, “Please remain seated”, we know that she accepts that we are all seated. By contrast, the injunction, “Please be seated”, acknowledges that most of us are not. So it was that when, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has just reminded us, the Electoral Commission was advising on this year’s referendum in Scotland, it did not suggest that Scotland should remain an independent country because, of course, it is not. Instead, it recommended the wording, “Should Scotland be an independent country?”. The Scottish Government sensibly accepted this advice.

When this same Electoral Commission advised the promoters of the Bill before us today, it saw, of course, that the boot was on the other foot. In this case, it favoured the wording, “Should the UK remain in the European Union?”, because we already are, and stoutly rejected the wording, “Should the UK be a member?” because this might imply to voters that we were not. It may seem absurd to suggest that, after 40 years, any British voter might not know that we were a member of the European Union. However, let us remember that we have a hostile press and that successive semi-hostile, or at least semi-detached, Governments have belittled, demonised or at any rate done their best to ignore the EU and its relevance to British lives. It is not just the EU itself, of course. Think how much better our school system would have been if Governments over the past 40 or 50 years had bothered to notice how much better they do things on the other side of the North Sea.

But back to the present: at Second Reading, the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, supplied telling examples of public ignorance of trans-Channel institutions. For example, she referred to people confusing the EU with the Council of Europe. She might well have added that since 2000 there has been an even more dangerous source of confusion—the existence of the eurozone. How many British voters faced with the question in this Bill might interpret it as asking, “Should the UK be a member of the eurozone?”.

It beggars belief that one with such a command of subtle nuance as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, could possibly be unaware of all this. But he is a busy man. Now that he most certainly has had dispelled for him any cloud of unknowing that has interposed, I have no doubt that he will be on his feet and, through grateful tears, hasten to accept these amendments.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I regret that I was not able to participate in the Second Reading of this Bill, but I want to make one very short preliminary point, coming to what I hope is a speech of substance. I hope that all the speeches we will hear today will be speeches of substance because we are not about some political game here. We have a piece of legislation before us. It is our duty as a House to scrutinise it and, if possible, improve it, and that is what we are doing. We are not trying to overrule the House of Commons. Of course, it can restore its Bill in its original format, as its procedures allow. We are going through a process of scrutiny.

I want to make the preliminary point that I do not do so as a Euroenthusiast or Eurofanatic, as some of us have been branded in the press. As a matter of fact, I voted no in the 1975 referendum and I would expect—although I do not make that final judgment now—to vote no in the referendum proposed under either this Bill or more sensible legislation. I may well change my mind and, in any case, it is unlikely to affect the result because Renwick’s rule, named after Dr Alan Renwick of Reading University, shows clearly that during a referendum campaign opinion in virtually every country in the world and in virtually every case moves towards a no vote. The fact that polls now suggest that people will vote to get out is no indication of the likely result. So I would expect a no vote, but I may be in the minority. I hope that noble Lords will feel that it is acceptable to say that because I do not want us to be characterised in a way that does not fit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

I have not myself been a Member of the House of Commons, but as I understand it our Constitution Committee, which knows much more about these matters than I do, has said that it is likely that if we pass amendments, this Bill will fall. That is a fact as stated by the committee. The noble Baroness has said that I am saying that the Bill has no purpose at all. I do not say that for a moment. The purpose of the Bill is that it gives the best assurance to the British people that they will get an “in or out” referendum in due course. However, it is only an entitlement and the full—

[Lord Quirk]

If the importance of this Bill is to guarantee the great British people a referendum, can the noble and learned Lord explain why its devisers have gone out of their way to put down the question in such a tendentious form—a form that actually goes against the advice of the Electoral Commission?

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

First, as I said, the Electoral Commission’s advice so far is provisional. Like me, it realises that the actual question will depend to some extent on the circumstances that obtain at the date of the referendum. I do not regard the question as particularly tendentious. The idea that those who are going to vote will not know, at the end of a referendum campaign, whether we are in the Union or out, is perhaps not the most—