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

Lord Risby Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne]

Presumably, not everything will be put to a referendum. As has been said, a future Parliament can repeal the Bill as an Act, but once an Act that gives rights to people to be consulted in a referendum has become entrenched, it is much more difficult to take those rights away than not to have provided the plebiscite in the first place. I echo the question of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr: is there any case in which a Government have said in a Bill, “We are not legislating for this Parliament. The referendum lock will never be triggered in this Parliament. We are legislating not to restrict our own actions but those of a future Parliament”? We are going to restrict the decisions which they might wish to take. I believe that that in itself is, as Professor Vernon Bogdanor, an eminent constitutional expert, has declared, fundamentally unconstitutional.

I add to those who are worried about the coalition agreement that nothing in that is infringed by the amendment. The amendment does not restrict this Parliament, to which the coalition agreement obtains. The coalition agreement is not for future Parliaments. Who knows what the coalition agreement for the next Parliament will be? Who knows who will win the election or who the coalition partners might be? As the amendment says, very well, let the Government have this Bill—probably mainly to appease their Eurosceptics—but for this Parliament only.

[Lord Risby]

My Lords, the whole House will recognise the magnificent work over many years that, as a great public servant, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has done for this country but at the heart of the amendment is the fact that he dislikes the Bill in its entirety. It may also be fair to say that his idea of a sunset clause is the very passionate hope that the sun will never rise on it again. I see him smiling.

The whole point about this Bill is that it is meant to provide an enduring framework or umbrella under which future important EU decisions can be made. It comes back to this fundamental question, which is one of trust. People need to feel that they have a longer term guarantee of that sense of ownership of these procedures if we are to give away powers to the European Union. That is simply at the heart of this Bill. A sunset clause would give a limited time frame—providing perhaps for a time when we do not expect a referendum, or taking that right away when there might be a treaty change. That is the possible danger. But I might use the analogy of saying to the noble Lord, “Here is £5, but you can spend it only between four o’clock and six o’clock in the afternoon, otherwise I am going to take it back”. That is the essence of what this is all about.

We all want to build trust, which has been absent in the relationship between the people of Britain, Governments and the European Union. As we have observed already in our debates and discussions, the Laeken treaty, which was meant to rebuild that trust, following through to the Lisbon treaty, has certainly failed to do that, and we are seeing the consequences right across the European Union. We do not want a future Government, who are to re-engage people, to be able to renege on a promise. This Bill does not seek to bind a future Government—that certainly could not be done anyway—but it binds a Government politically to ensure that the people of this country are involved. That is the key and heart of this particular legislation.

A sunset clause can be appropriate in certain circumstances. Most of your Lordships will agree that the Counter-Terrorism Bill was a case in point. There was perhaps, arguably, a temporary situation that had to be dealt with, although I certainly did not agree with it, and then our traditional liberal traditions needed to be returned to in due course after what some people regarded as an exceptional situation. But in practice this amendment would return ministerial discretion to decide whether to revive Part 1, which includes the whole issue of the referendum and parliamentary control provisions. There is a risk that a Government might revive the Bill only if they were confident that there was no chance of treaty change during that Parliament. Of course, should this Bill become an Act of Parliament, which I certainly hope it does, it could be repealed, as the noble Lord said. But it should be repealed on the same mechanism of equal importance as its introduction if a repeal is going to take place. In future, the Government will have to come back and explain themselves about major EU decisions, which is essentially what the Bill demands.

If the noble Lord’s amendment were to improve the Bill, we might consider it in a rather more dispassionate way. But what this is about really is taking the heart out of the Bill—and I am confident that the noble Lord knows that too well.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, one benefit of our largely unwritten constitution is the flexibility that our system gives us; one defect is that we do not have a very consistent set of principles to guide us. We tend to be pragmatic. My experience as a blow-in or holiday resident for 38 years in the Republic of Ireland and my experience of their system makes me attracted to one of the arguments in the speech in support of the amendment by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. It has convinced me that any attempt in this Bill to introduce inflexibility would be a grave mistake. I also think that referenda on complicated and highly technical matters are not a very good idea.

The Irish constitution has been interpreted by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court of Ireland as requiring referenda in quite a number of circumstances. When the treaty of Lisbon was put out for referendum the Irish Government produced an information pack which was completely incomprehensible even to lawyers, since it referred to bits of that treaty by reference to article numbers, paragraphs and specific legislative proposals. They left an information pack in each post office. I took the trouble to try to understand it and, as I say, I found the information given to the citizens of the Irish Republic to be so opaque that I certainly could not understand it.