Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I listened carefully to the eloquent case made by my noble friend Lord Lexden, but I want to speak briefly as a former Member of the House of Commons and one who was devoted to his Cornish constituents.

One of the benefits of the single-Member constituency system that we have is that it provides a very special local link between each area and one Member of Parliament. I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Lorton of Louth, speak eloquently in support of that principle, so I am surprised to see him endorse this amendment in its current form. It is true that the countries in the European Union that my noble friend Lord Lexden cited all have different electoral systems; they do not have the same direct link with the individual constituency as we have. I want to put the debate about overseas electors in that context.

If an MP’s primary role is to represent his or her area, and the constituents within it at that time, how does that square with a proposal which would see him or her representing people who live perhaps thousands of miles away in a very different economic and social context? And should we really equate in value the vote of someone who has departed—some would say deserted—this country for 15 years or more in favour of the Spanish sunshine with that of a British soldier currently serving his country in Afghanistan? That would be the effect of the amendment.

In 2020, it will be 15 years since I retired from the other place—in that respect, I sort of left North Cornwall then. It is surely beyond the limit of what is reasonable to ask my excellent successor in North Cornwall to represent after 2020 people who left that constituency as long ago as I did.

I accept, as my noble friend said, that there is some validity in the notional principle here about taxation without representation. In that connection, perhaps we should look at the system used for French national elections, to which reference was made, where representatives of a number of special “overseas” constituencies are elected in national elections by French voters who live abroad but who still somehow have a stake in French society. If more than 76,000 electors registered for such a constituency, it would justify under the previous legislation that we passed in your Lordships’ House having that separate constituency, but we are not in that position. However, that would be much less arbitrary than marrying people in perpetuity to an area with which they have had no direct connection for more than 15 years.

It has been asked whether there should be taxation without representation. Well, perhaps we should also think about representation without taxation. Why should someone who has lived on the Costa del Sol for the past 15 years still vote by post in local elections and therefore influence the local level of council tax in Cornwall for residents of Coads Green or Crantock in my former constituency?

Those of my overseas friends who have urged this change may come to regret raising this issue; they should be careful what they wish for. If all those overseas who have retained the right to vote in the United Kingdom in recent years now find themselves having to pay council tax, higher VAT or fuel tax, or even additional taxes imposed by the devolved Assemblies, the proposers of these amendments may not be as popular as they apparently are with overseas voters at the moment.

Meanwhile, I am particularly alarmed by the proposal under Amendment 54 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lexden for overseas citizens to be able to vote online. While that same convenience is not afforded to our own fellow citizens in this country at the moment, it would seem extraordinary to extend it to those people. As we know from previous experiments, there are real problems about that proposal anyway, quite apart from its unfairness, because it could raise a major risk of fraud.

For those practical reasons, we on these Benches ask my noble friend the Leader of the House and other Ministers to take the problem of taxation without representation seriously, of course, but also to find a solution which is less invidious and which properly recognises that our current system of single-Member constituencies makes it extremely unfair to introduce this particular proposal in this form.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My Lords, as one would expect, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, made a cogent and well researched point in favour of effectively extending the timeframe not only beyond 15 years but perhaps indefinitely, so long as one can still claim British citizenship. Therein lie various practical problems, which I will come to in a moment.

My noble friend Lord Lipsey said that of the 5.6 million overseas voters only 23,000 currently take advantage of that, which suggests that the demand is not very great. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, made the point about the key principle in our country of representing a constituency and those who live within it. We await with interest the result of the determination of the European Court of Human Rights, but I recall discussing this problem with a representative from the country in the European Union which is probably the closest to us—that is, the Republic of Ireland. A friend who was a Senator from Ireland said, “Well, think of all the Irish people who are overseas, the Irish diaspora. If we were to give a vote to them all, there would probably be a Sinn Fein Government in Ireland”. That is the point he was making.

Clearly the intention is obvious—to extend the vote to as many overseas British citizens as possible. I shall be brief because there is an important debate to follow, but there are clearly technical problems and grounds of principle that make one feel very cautious about this proposal. The potential numbers have been mentioned, particularly as more people travel and work overseas. There may be British citizens in Australia, Pakistan, Canada, Bangladesh and of course in all the European Union countries. There is a great range of countries and it will be very difficult to check adequately the bona fides of those who claim citizenship and claim to be eligible to vote. How do we prevent fraud? Those problems will be formidable and there will be also be a great problem in checking whether people are still alive after their last declaration.

On the grounds of principle, I recall the debate in the other place in 1985 when there was a package of proposals. I concede that the length of time is arbitrary but there was a consensus result at that time. Now of course the numbers are very much greater and we have, as has been cited, the reverse of the Boston Tea Party—that is, representation without taxation. We cannot extend that totally because many of the British citizens living overseas will be eligible for British pensions and therefore they have some stake in this country. Perhaps it would be better to say “representation without a substantial stake in this country”? Everyone who is resident in the UK has that substantial stake and those who live for perhaps a very extended period overseas increasingly lose sight of this country and lose sight of any stake they may have in it. Therefore, their stakeholding in this country becomes less and less serious. I will not go any further save to say that in my judgment there are considerable technical problems in the proposal and there are also major obstacles of principle.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I intervene having heard the three previous speeches. First, to listen to a strong advocate of almost any electoral system except the first-past-the-post, single constituency arrangement, fight for this proposal was a surprise, particularly as the noble Lord will go on to support a misuse of the electoral system to ensure that we have an unfair electoral system for even longer. That is a peculiar case to put forward.

Then we heard the internationalist party explain how people who lived abroad might not understand what was happening in Britain. Sometimes I think that a number of people living abroad understand rather more clearly what is happening in Britain than some of those here who do not appear to follow the newspapers or the media very closely.

Then we heard the definition of how people voted. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that those of us who have been elected to the Houses of Parliament know that the reasons why people in this country vote and the logic on which they make their decisions, people who have never travelled abroad, certainly would not meet the conditions which he put forward as reasonable conditions for anyone who is voting.

Then there was the argument that because we might find that people who are at the moment, in their view, penalised because pensions for which they have paid out of taxation and national insurance are, because of their particular place of residence, refused, that they might vote in a different way than that which the Government might like, that evidently is a reason to deny them the vote. That is the argument of totalitarian regimes down history. That is why people did not want the extension of the franchise in Britain. People said, “My goodness, if those who are at the moment misused are given the vote, they might object to that”. I find that an odd argument to come from any part of the House, but to hear it from the party opposite, which is about to say that some voters in this country are to have a bigger vote and more say for a longer time than would otherwise have been the case, seems to me to be an affront.

Although I have no particular view on this—I think that roughly speaking, what we have is perfectly reasonable—I hope that this House will take seriously the fact that we have now heard three speeches designed to say that people should not vote if by their voting they might do something which was inconvenient for noble Lords on either side and should therefore be refused the vote. That is precisely the debate that noble Lords are about to have, which is to say that because a particular reform proposed in this House today would give people a fairer vote but thereby might give a different result, we should not change the voting system to accommodate them. That is an attitude to democracy about which we should be ashamed. Our decision should be on what is fair, what is equal and what is reasonable. I happen to think that the present rules about 15 years more or less meet that, but the three speeches that we have heard show that some people are prepared to use the system to get a particular result rather than seeking to have a system in which the result is the decision of the public.