Queen’s Speech

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, the title of the proposed electoral integrity Bill is worthy of Newspeak from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother wants to protect us from a virtually non-existent threat.

The offence of stealing someone’s vote at a polling station is extremely rare. It is possible to determine exactly how many people go to vote to find that their vote has already been claimed by somebody else. When there is such a problem, a special ballot paper, known as a tendered ballot paper and printed on different-coloured paper, is issued by the presiding officer. If the number of such ballot papers may make a difference in an election, a determination can be made as to what has happened and which votes should count. Ministers have repeatedly refused to say how many such ballot papers have been issued in recent elections. That is because the answer is virtually none.

When the Electoral Reform Society asked returning officers for such details and made freedom of information requests a few years ago, the evidence was that the offence of personation is extremely rare. The Electoral Commission reports that in all the elections held during 2019, there was only one conviction.

So why are the Government introducing a Bill requiring photo ID when there may be millions of legitimate voters who do not have it? The reason is simply that those people are disproportionately younger, poorer and from diverse ethnic backgrounds—in other words, less likely to vote Conservative. The proposals for photo ID are expensive, irrelevant and a distraction from the things that people really wanted to see. They are unworthy of a British political party that claims to believe in fair elections.

There are many Conservative parliamentarians who strongly oppose the idea of Covid passports being required to visit the pub or other places so I look forward to them joining the former Secretary of State for Brexit, David Davis, and others in opposing the principle that any form of passport should be required to vote. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, himself said in his Daily Telegraph column a few years ago:

“Ask to see my ID card and I’ll eat it”.


They will not be made of chocolate.

Yesterday the former Conservative leader in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, shortly to join this House, tweeted that

“there are bigger threats from agents outside our borders than from someone who forgets to take their drivers’ licence (if they have one) to a polling station.”

I feel that I cannot quite quote the unparliamentary language that she used to describe this proposal in her interview, but the word begins with the letter “b”.

If the Government wanted elections to be fairer, they would be supporting the excellent electoral integrity Bill put forward by Unlock Democracy. They would also now be enacting a measure to halt the farcical process of topping up the membership of this House by holding by-elections amongst the registered hereditary Peers.

It is with some irony that I note how the by-elections now planned for another six hereditary Peers will be conducted by the alternative vote system, just as was the recent election for our Lord Speaker. What is good enough for us should also be good enough for electing mayors and police and crime commissioners. By seeking to abolish any form of preference voting for these positions, the Government are simply setting out to make it easier for Conservatives to be elected even when most voters would prefer to have someone else.

Lastly, the Prime Minister announced yesterday that there will be a public inquiry into the Government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years ago, he delayed publication of the report into Russian interference in our democracy until after the general election. Is the real reason for abolishing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act so that the timing of general elections can be manipulated to avoid scrutiny of such reports during an election campaign?

Prime Ministers should not be able to play games like this. When a Prime Minister can determine the date of a general election, they are playing with loaded dice and obtain an unfair advantage for their party. In football we would never allow the winners of the Premier League to arrange the fixture programme for the following season, and we should not let a Prime Minister be able to fire the starting gun in the race for their re-election.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am unable to call the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, so I call the noble Lord, Lord, Browne of Belmont.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I very much enjoyed the entertaining contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, which he made immediately in response to the gracious Speech. He was himself gracious in acknowledging his own defeat in the general election of 1997 by my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough.

Some time ago, I also enjoyed reading the memoirs of the noble Lord, Lord Lamont. To be precise, I enjoyed the pages in which he blamed his demise in that election on the way in which voters in Harrogate had been inundated with letters in the name of my late, and much missed, noble friend Lord Ashdown. I suspect that the noble Lord is unaware that I was the person who drafted all those letters. These were happier times for my party. We had high hopes that the UK’s constitution would be radically reformed in a way that would greatly improve the health of our democracy.

In the months before the 1997 election, Paddy had asked me to be the joint secretary of the consultative committee between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, established under the joint chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart and the late Robin Cook, to agree a consensus on such reforms. A considerable number of the proposals in that package were subsequently achieved, including the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly with systems of proportional representation, but the promised referendum on a proportional voting system for the House of Commons was never held. Hindsight is easy but I believe that those people within the Labour Party who blocked that referendum then, and a move to a fairer voting system for the House of Commons, must share at least some of the responsibility for events in the last 10 years—and for what may now lie ahead. Things really could have been better and our place in Europe would never have been threatened by a deeply flawed referendum.

During his speech the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, described the recent general election as a second referendum. I think he used the phrase “a second people’s vote,” but over the last three years the position of the Conservatives has been strongly opposed to letting people have the final say on the issue of Britain’s EU membership. Now that people have voted, we are told that the vote is to be considered as the result of another referendum. Ever since the 2016 referendum, the Liberal Democrats have stood up for the 48% who voted to remain. We believe that if there really had been a second referendum, based on the facts, then more than 48% would have voted to remain. It was repeatedly argued by those in favour of Brexit that the views of the 48% in 2016 should be ignored. But on Brexit now, and on every other political issue, we are told that the views of the party which received 43.6% of the vote on 12 December should be imposed upon us all. It was said before that 48% should be ignored, even when they might have become a majority, but it is said now that less than 44% of the vote is to be taken as a mandate to determine every issue. That is both illogical and undemocratic.

The Liberal Democrats want this place to be more democratic but we want the other place to be more democratic too. The recent Conservative manifesto referred to the need to have votes of equal value, but the facts are that in the recent general election it took 38,265 votes to elect a Conservative MP, 50,717 votes to elect a Labour MP and 336,038 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat MP. The present system is not unfair to the Conservative Party but the Government continue to threaten to make it even more favourable to the Conservatives with a boundary review. The principle of roughly equal numbers of voters in a single constituency system is right, but so is the principle that everyone entitled to vote should be registered to vote. A boundary review without dealing with the problem of underregistration is unfair and is clearly intended to further favour the Conservatives.

Electoral processes, we are told, may also be changed to favour the Conservatives by introducing compulsory photo ID at polling stations. There is no evidence that this is based on anything other than the principle of seeking to reduce the ease with which people less likely to vote Conservative can vote at a polling station. Can the Minister please undertake to ask electoral registration officers how many times somebody went to a polling station on 12 December only to find that their vote had already been claimed by somebody else? This would provide an indication as to whether there really is a problem or simply a fear on the part of the Government that they may not be re-elected so easily another time.