Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

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.

EU: Future Relationship

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, the Committee will now resume. I call the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I hope you can hear me. Good.

In his opening speech, the Minister talked about the Government’s well-established position on state aid. I am puzzled by that and I hope that he can explain. My understanding is that the European Union rules to which we now object were largely drafted by British Ministers and officials under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government and that the Government’s current position on state aid has changed radically since last December, largely under the influence of the Prime Minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings, but is not yet entirely clear. Perhaps he can explain.

We are now approaching the end of the transition period. That means, as the City of London briefing spells out, that we have to focus on what it describes as

“the necessities of the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU”—

and not just the trading relationship. Britain cannot escape its geography, for all the nonsense put out by Brexit Central and others after the referendum about the irrelevance of geography to Britain’s future. The number of British citizens who travel abroad for holidays, study, or work to the European continent dwarfs the number who travel to Australia, New Zealand and the western Pacific. The City memorandum points out that 75% of the data flows across the UK’s borders are with European countries. Cross-border crime is predominantly a matter affecting neighbouring countries. Britain’s security, society and economy will all continue to be profoundly affected by the ease or difficulty of interaction with our neighbours across the channel.

The maintenance of close relationships requires a legal framework that is treaty based, as again the City memorandum stresses. Treaties limit national sovereignty: they build relationships of “shared sovereignty”, as Sir Geoffrey Howe—that great and true Conservative—used to argue. The closer the levels of interchange, the denser the network of legal agreements that is needed to ease cross-border working. British Border Force personnel work in France under a bilateral agreement. British police exchange data on criminals with their counterparts in the Netherlands and Spain within a legal framework that safeguards confidentiality. British researchers collaborate with respected counterparts in Germany, Sweden and Finland. British holidaymakers have benefited for the past 40 years from access to a European health card in case of illness—a mutually advantageous arrangement, from which a large number of Conservative voters have benefited over the years and which the Government are now, sadly, determined to abandon.

To manage this future relationship, from 1 January 2021 —three months from now—we need a legal agreement: a partnership, spelled out in treaty form. One of the most dishonest statements that the Government keep making to the public is that we can opt for an “Australia-type agreement” with the EU, when no such agreement exists. A no-deal future relationship threatens damage not only to our economy but also to our security and to the openness of our society.

Successive British Governments, from James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher onwards, have negotiated agreements with our neighbours to manage the rising intensity of interactions between us—within the framework of the European Union. Our current Prime Minister signed up to a declaration 11 months ago on our future partnership, which envisaged a network of agreements to manage our unavoidably shared interests. Since then, however, he has retreated, under pressure from the ultras in his party and those now in the Cabinet who were previously in the Referendum Party or UKIP. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, has spelled out a doctrine of sovereignty that would suit North Korea but makes no sense for a democratic country with an open economy.

Worst of all, the level of hostility expressed by Ministers, Conservative MPs and the right-wing media towards the Governments of France, Germany and the other members of the EU has risen alarmingly. The City of London briefing that we have all received expresses

“growing concerns that acrimony between the UK and EU may result in a failure to reach an agreement … a no deal outcome would be likely to engender ill will on both sides and damage the future UK-EU relationship.”

Even if the Government reach a last-minute deal, the image of a Government who distrust their neighbours and break international treaties when they feel like it will damage Britain’s ability to sort out the unavoidable problems that will follow from our more distant relationship. The Prime Minister talks about a global Britain and an independent foreign policy, but the failure to maintain close co-operation with our European partners in international organisations and negotiations across the world would leave us dependent on the limited good will of whoever comes out of the contested American presidential election and our distant friends in New Zealand and Australia.

Before the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, repeats yet again her accusation that any criticism of the Government’s stance flows only from remoaners who never wanted to leave, I stress again that we are now debating the future, not the past. We are debating the framework within which our holidaymakers will travel next summer, the difficulties that British banks will encounter if agreements on data flows and financial flows have not been reached, and the obstacles that British police and intelligence will face if there is no clear legal structure within which to maintain the co-operation that they have built within Europol.

The noble Lord, Lord True, is a real Conservative, not one of those who have entered the party from more right-wing groupings as more moderate Conservatives have left or been expelled. I hope and trust that if the Prime Minister deliberately crashes the final stages of the negotiations and leaves without a deal, the noble Lord will follow other colleagues and resign. The national interest requires a deal, and the Government will betray the national interest if they fail to agree one.