Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Mawhinney Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, we are talking about a referendum on whether people wish to have AV. During the course of the campaigns people will no doubt make that point—as the noble Lord will and perhaps even as I will—but that is not what we are discussing today. We are discussing today whether there should be a referendum and whether it should be done by clean majority. I support the idea of a referendum; I am happy to trust the people on this. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, talked about this earlier. Was he not the architect of the CRaG Bill before the last election, which proposed an AV referendum with no thresholds anywhere across the United Kingdom—no voter thresholds, turnout thresholds, outcome thresholds or any kind of threshold you could possibly imagine. There has been a change of mind.

[Lord Mawhinney]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend. He just said that we are talking today about a clean referendum with a clean majority at the end. Does it remain the Government’s view that any size of majority, no matter how small, would be legitimate, given that this a constitutional measure?