Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Bill

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brittan of Spennithorne]

My Lords, I support the amendment. I start by saying that I am an unashamed opponent of referenda and always have been. It is not therefore surprising that anything that limits the operation of referenda inherently attracts me, as the amendment does. It is entirely reasonable that this piece of legislation, if it is to be passed, should be regarded as being wholly exceptional—which it is constitutionally—because it extends the range of obligatory referenda on a massive scale and fundamentally alters the balance of the constitution in that important respect. The Bill should be regarded, if it has to be passed, as a provisional experiment. I would regard it as a rather dangerous experiment that is subversive of the normal principles of parliamentary government.

If it is to be regarded as a dangerous experiment that political exigencies require—although I do not share that view—it is perfectly reasonable that one should mitigate its consequences by providing within the Bill for a rapid and effective procedure for terminating the mischief as soon as possible. It is for that reason that I support the amendment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My noble friend says that he is fundamentally against referenda. Does that mean he is against the referendum that confirmed our membership of the European Union? Should there also be no referendum if we were to join the single currency?

[Lord Brittan of Spennithorne]

I am fundamentally against referenda. I would not have favoured the holding of that referendum, but that does not in any way mean that I do not accept its result, especially as it was one that I politically favoured.

--- Later in debate ---

The sunset clause would give us a long night of further discontent with the British people and rightly so. I urge noble Lords, despite the feeling of frustration that somehow they do not like referenda, to understand that, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, has commented, the British people are thoroughly dissatisfied with the fact that they have not been consulted. This is our opportunity. I think we should grab it and forget the sunset clause.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I will not delay the House for long and I certainly will not repeat many of the arguments that have been made extremely well by my noble friends. But I should like to take up a point made by my noble friend Lady Falkner who was seriously worried that the problem would be one of delay when this Bill has to be renewed at the beginning of each Parliament. I am afraid that I come from a more paranoid side on this. My view is that we do not want a sunset clause because, if we had, say, a non-Conservative Government, it might be quite attractive for them to let this Bill lapse. There would be a bit of a row that would last 24 hours and they would get away with it. It would be much more complicated—indeed, almost politically impossible—to put forward a Bill to cancel this Bill, put it out of business all together and repeal it. So I come from a rather different angle but I reach the same conclusion as my noble friend.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, who has just answered the noble Lords, Lord Dubs and Lord Flight, and has come to the right conclusion. I am no longer bamboozled by this Bill or this amendment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I am not sure that my erstwhile noble friend should take such comfort from that. One of the reasons people join UKIP is that they are worried that they are going to be drawn further into the European Union, and certainly they will be much reassured when this Bill reaches the statute book that that is not going to happen. I suspect that he will see his membership going into reverse, but that will be his problem rather than mine.

I was interested in the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. He said that the whole of this Bill is otiose because it would not have any effect in this Parliament. My noble friend the Minister intervened to say that of course it would in terms of updating the stability and growth pact because it was going to be exempted, and there might be other amendments from the European Union. I am afraid that I do not take quite such a phlegmatic view. The eurozone is in a state of crisis at the moment. That makes one wonder, when one looks at the people proposing these amendments, how many of them would have suggested that it was a good idea to join the eurozone some years ago. We all mistakes in politics, but that would have been a major one. If we had joined the eurozone and we were in it today, I can tell the House now that the asset bubble we have seen over the past few years would have been even bigger because the interest rates we would have enjoyed in the eurozone would have been much lower and this country would be in even greater difficulties than it is today.

Let us return to the eurozone. I believe that it is reaching a crisis point, one where a decision has got to be made. Members of the eurozone either have to let the thing collapse and completely disintegrate with defaults happening one after the other, starting with the periphery countries and moving steadily towards the centre, or they have to completely revamp the eurozone so that there is probably a finance ministry or a massively beefed-up European Central Bank. The reason I am boring the House with all this is that that would need a treaty change. The Government would argue that such a treaty change would concern only members of the eurozone, not the United Kingdom, but I have to say that that treaty change would have come through both Houses of Parliament and possibly could be subjected to judicial review as to whether there were transfers of sovereignty as a result of such a treaty change coming through.

Noble Lords might say that that is not going to happen in this Parliament, but is it not? At the moment there is a guarantee on sovereign bonds within the eurozone that will last until 2013, but we have to ask what will follow after that. I have to remind noble Lords that 2013 comes two years before the time when we are to have a general election in 2015. I give way to the noble Lord.

[Lord Richard]

My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord. Is he seriously suggesting that we should have a referendum in this country on treaty changes that affect the eurozone, of which we are not a member?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

What I am saying is that I am sure that that will be the position of the Government, and I did say that it would be subject to judicial review. It may not necessarily pass the censor within the terms of judicial review that we do not have any transfers of sovereignty involved in such a treaty change. I think that we may well be involved in a referendum, and if we are, I can reassure the noble Lord—I am sure he would like to know this—that I shall very much advocate that we actually support any treaty change of that sort. That is because if the eurozone disintegrates, there might be a bit of schadenfreude from people like me in the Conservative Party, but I have to say that it would give us another major financial and banking crisis on top of the one we have already had. So I will campaign enthusiastically that we should accept such treaty changes.

I do not think we should sit here and imagine that there are going to be no more treaties coming in the life of this Parliament. Things change, and they can change very fast. The eurozone is in a state of major crisis and I am not sure that they can go on putting sticking plasters on it for another four years.

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, a short while ago the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said that the legislation had already served part of its purpose in that it has engaged us in debate. I have to confess to her that I have not run into a huge amount of discussion of it elsewhere. Nevertheless, I do not deny the truth of the point that we have had a major debate, but the points made by many noble Lords still bear testing. It is plain from this legislation that it is not intended that anything other than the passage of the Bill and the discussions on it will happen during this Parliament. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, said in an intervention, but unless I misunderstood it Clause 4(4) provides for an exemption around the stability mechanism, so that will not become the subject of the whole package of a parliamentary decision and a referendum either. So let us start, if we may, with the reality of the position: there will not be an event of that kind.

The tests that may arise would be likely, if they happen at all, to occur either in the Parliament that follows this one or in the Parliament beyond the one that follows this—some way off. Those are exactly the circumstances which my noble friend Lord Grenfell described—I think he was the first person to use the words—as a step in the dark, and the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, made more or less exactly the same point. One of the things that concerns me, and one of the reasons I have added my name to the amendment so that the Front Bench is offering its support, is that inevitably we will have a period during which we test whether these new constitutional arrangements make sense, work well, are deliverable, do not undermine the Government of the day and do not undermine the parliamentary process. But the plain fact is that we do not know. I doubt if there is a noble Lord in this House who could do more than I can do, which is to suppose what might happen, but we do not know. What we do know is that when it is tested, we are more likely to know. Those are the circumstances under which we will gain any kind of authoritative understanding of what this constitutional change may mean. I do not think we do ourselves any favours by pretending that we know when we do not.

There may well be minor issues or whole treaties. On the former, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, may be right to say that referendums would not arise around smaller things. Periodically, if he is right, they could be around whole treaties, which are much larger things. Moreover, I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, that these are likely to be very unusual events in themselves. What is more, I shall go on to assert something which is critical to the clause because I want to try to deal with this as a debate on an amendment tabled at the Report stage. I continue to assert that some of things which might be considered to be large and significant issues, and therefore may well call for referendum conditions after decisions reached by both Houses of Parliament, will not themselves create the need for a referendum either.

I say that because I do not believe that any Government in the foreseeable future will carry legislation in either House about joining the euro—I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that I have never advocated it, so I can say that with a clear conscience. I cannot believe that either House will succeed in persuading a majority of either House that we should relax the Schengen conditions and change our border arrangements. I know from first-hand experience as a Minister in the last Government that there was not the smallest chance of that happening, or of anyone believing that it would be desirable for it to happen. I shall not regale the House with arguments about an island people and so on, but noble Lords will understand the temperamental mindset of this country over a very long time. I do not believe for a moment that either House would carry by a majority the need for legislation which would then go to a referendum on changing the fundamentals of our legal system from what it is now to one based on Napoleonic law or some of the other systems of law in Europe, and I do not believe that either House, whoever is in Government, would succeed in conceding decisions on our taxation regime to anyone else and put that to a referendum vote. The things that really might bite on the people of the United Kingdom, if they were asked to think about them, will not be put to them. I shall come back to the insurance policy that the Bill claims to be in that context and why the sunset clause is a reasonable solution.