Elections Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to return again to the issue of overseas voters, following in the footsteps of my noble friend Lord Altrincham. Exactly a century ago, his forebear Sir Edward Grigg, a brilliant man, was working as Private Secretary in No. 10 to Lloyd George—but no one should imagine for a moment that the peerage was bought from that notorious famous seller of honours.

Patience is sometimes rewarded—not often, in my experience, but occasionally. It is exactly 10 years ago that, as a fairly new Member of your Lordships’ House, I called, along with other noble friends, for the removal of the 15-year limit on the voting rights of our fellow country men and women living beyond our shores. I set out the case for this extension of the franchise in detail during the passage of what became the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013.

Back then, I was told very politely by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, the Minister with responsibility for electoral issues during the coalition Government, to go away and do some work on the important practical implications of this significant change: the means by which registration to vote could be made as easy as possible, whether votes could safely be cast electronically, the part that our embassies and consulates might play in assisting overseas voters, and so on. These matters were studied by a cross-party group under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth. Our report was well received when it was debated in Grand Committee before the general election of 2015. So considerable patience has been displayed by our fellow country men and women living abroad—but at last the promise, thrice delivered, will be fulfilled under this Bill.

The principle that this Bill enshrines is entirely right. I reject the charge that it is a partisan measure. Implementing it will give rise to practical issues, which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, outlined in his characteristically measured way and which the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, described with characteristic and enjoyable gusto. We will no doubt return to them in Committee.

This legislation will bring us into line, belatedly, with other major democracies. The United States of America, France, Italy and the Netherlands, among others, all provide lifelong voting rights for their citizens living in other countries, as do Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It really is high time that the United Kingdom joined the international consensus—rather than “madness”, as my noble friend Lord Balfe suggested.

I have seen for myself the strength of support for lifelong voting rights at meetings that I have addressed in other countries under the aegis of the excellent organisation Conservatives Abroad, chaired by my friend Heather Harper. I have also received much correspondence from those who have lost their votes after 15 years. One lady in her late 70s wrote to me: “Even though I expected it, when I received a letter from Corby Borough Council telling me I was no longer eligible to register as an overseas voter, I was devastated and still am. Since reaching voting age back in the 1950s, I have never, ever not exercised my democratic right to vote. But now I have been disenfranchised.” Never again will such distress arise, thanks to this legislation. The 15-year limit is wholly arbitrary, and I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Cormack is so far unpersuaded that it should be removed.

With very few exceptions, British citizens abroad are debarred from voting in the national parliamentary elections that take place in the countries where they reside. The world over, the parliamentary franchise rests on nationality, not on residence or the payment of taxes. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, who had responsibility for electoral matters in the last Labour Government, said in the course of our debates in 2013 that

“taxation has never been a criterion for voting in this country and it is not now.”—[Official Report, 14/1/13; col. 484.]

If it had been, Disraeli, who has been extolled in this debate by my noble friend Lord Willetts, would have been unable to extend the vote to the urban working class in 1867. Few if any of them paid taxes.

I have a remarkable man at the front of my thoughts today. Harry Shindler, a Labour supporter in his young days, has lived in Italy since the Second World War, when he helped to liberate that country from fascist control. He has devoted himself to two causes: the development of Anglo-Italian relations and the right to vote in elections in his native land. Last year, when he celebrated his 100th birthday, Harry was invested with the OBE by the British ambassador to Italy. It gave him enormous pride. Harry is the chief hero of the long campaign which this Bill brings to a conclusion. I shall always think of the clauses in it relating to overseas voters as the “Shindler clauses”.

Finally, I too applaud the arrival of the noble Lord, Lord Moore. I have known him, though not at all well, since the early 1980s, when the greatest Tory I have ever met, TE Utley, dispatched him to Northern Ireland as a reporter on the Daily Telegraph to acquaint himself with the affairs of that wonderful part of our country. He has long been a staunch champion of the union. I anticipate some tremendous speeches from him on that subject, which is dear to so many of us in this House.

Elections Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on some amendments in this group. As Members of the Committee will know, I am extremely disturbed by this Bill as a whole and by the way it has been introduced. Of all its provisions, I think Clause 11 is the least justifiable, introduced as it was after a Written Statement by a middle-range Minister last September after the Bill had already begun its Committee stage in the House of Commons, and pushed through for clearly partisan reasons.

On Monday, the Minister was asking us to look at the practice on voter ID in other countries as a justification for what the Government propose. I am sure he recognises that in the Irish and Danish constitutions, any change in the voting system is a constitutional amendment and therefore has to go through exceptional procedures. That is also true in a number of other countries. In this respect, of course, he will probably say that we should pay no attention to other countries. I deeply respect that, privately, the Minister knows this clause is impossible to defend, and I recognise that he nevertheless has to stand up for it as best he can in the circumstances that this was a Conservative pledge in 2017 and someone up there has not forgotten that.

Yesterday, I read a very good article in the Political Quarterly of 2019 entitled “The UK Politics of Overseas Voting” by Susan Collard; I will return to it when we get on to overseas voting. One of the things that struck me about the introduction was that it talked about the package of measures that might have been agreed among the parties in 2016-17 about voting reform. It was discussed among the parties in the Commons that we could have moved towards automatic voter registration to reduce the number of people not on the register—by and large, the young and the marginal. We could have had a major effort at citizen engagement to encourage people to go to the polls. We could also have included votes at 16, which would almost definitely have helped the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and others. In that context, overseas voting and the extension of overseas voting would have been part of the same package. That could have been negotiated as part of a—

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

Were these official interparty discussions or informal exchanges?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

These were exchanges on and off the Floor of the House of Commons.

That would have been a major set of changes to voting rights that might even have included some form of examination of our voting system. I draw attention to Amendment 140, which suggests that we need a citizens’ assembly on methods of voting for different elections in this country. That would be highly desirable, encouraging an intelligent approach and taking out of the control of parties the question of whose advantage is most looked to in this respect.

This Government have mucked about with local government over an extended period. I am not a great fan of metro mayors—certainly not metro mayors without the scrutiny of elected assemblies—but the Government have them. The Government have reduced the number of local councillors, and now they want to muck about with the system, partly because what Michael Gove and other enthusiasts thought they wanted—independently minded people like we saw in New York and Chicago—has not yet emerged very strongly. But some of those who emerged are rather good, or not so good, Labour candidates, who do not please the Government. Be that as it may, we have a current system for elected mayors.

The only argument, in effect, that the Government can make in defence of this change is that the voters of London and other cities are not as intelligent as their counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere and are not capable of understanding a complicated system such as the supplementary vote and therefore we have to go back to the first past the post. That is not a good argument, and I look forward to hearing what alternative argument the Minister may wish to produce.

One of the problems with the first past the post system is that it works really well only when there is a clear two-party system and the two-party system has broken down in almost all democratic countries in recent years, except for the United Kingdom and the United States. In the United Kingdom and the United States, factionalism within both major parties has almost wrecked our politics, partly because the extremists —or less moderate—in both major parties have done their best to take over their party rather than going off and forming their own.

I was very struck by an argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, during our previous day in Committee, which was that you need to be very careful about how the selection process for candidates works because in most constituencies in Britain the selection process decides who will be the MP. The attraction of any form of alternative voting, supplementary voting or proportional representation is that it gives the voter some choice among candidates.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I take the noble Lord’s point, because there are all sorts of polls and this is in the Library briefing, but I can honestly say that I have debated this issue in the past with Labour Ministers who were not for votes at 16 at the time. I think we are getting to a stage in thinking about sophistication and education where we have to coalesce around an arbitrary age. I go back to the criminal responsibility point. The noble Lord speaks very eloquently. He argues “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and that we should not make a radical change without a great deal of consensus. He did not speak like that when he was talking about radically overhauling the refugee convention on another Bill.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I simply venture to suggest that, at the moment, the priority should be to assist and encourage as many of our young people who are already entitled to vote at the age of 18 to get on the registers. We do not have nearly enough of them on the registers. The Government have a number of important initiatives in hand to encourage more of those aged 18 and immediately above to register to vote. My noble friend might be able tell us briefly about some of those important initiatives when he comes to reply.