European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Lord Quirk and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock

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.