Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) (Amendment) Order 2009

I, too, give a general welcome to this order. I regularly used to tease the Minister’s predecessors whenever there was a Scottish order before us, and say, "Well, where is the Advocate-General?" We have a Scottish Minister of the House but some unfortunate Minister is always left to introduce Scottish orders. I repeat my query as to why the Advocate-General does not present these orders himself. However, relief is at hand because the Calman commission has recommended that administration of Scottish elections should be transferred to the Scottish Parliament, which is a long overdue reform. Therefore, I hope that this might be one of the last of these orders that we see in this House. I entirely go along with three of the four purposes of this order; that is, increasing the time between the close of nominations and the date of poll from 16 days to 23 days, removing the option of having one ballot paper for both the constituency and regional polls, and removing the option of electronic counting. These all came out of the Gould report. I agree with the noble Duke that that is right and I look forward to hearing the answer to his queries about other aspects of the Gould report that do not yet appear in this order. The one part of the order about which I am still slightly unhappy is the use of the registered party name on nominating papers. I do not think that the order goes far enough. It makes a modest improvement to remove what I thought was an abuse at the last Scottish elections. We had a discussion on this on an amendment that my noble friend Lord Tyler and I tabled to the Political Parties and Elections Bill on the Floor of the House on 17 June. What was interesting about that debate was that there was total unanimity on the Labour Benches, the Conservative Benches and the Lib Dem Benches that something more had to be done to stop what I call sloganising on the ballot paper. The word used in the order is the same as that used in that Bill. It talks about a party description, but I do not believe that the Electoral Commission has properly interpreted what is a description as distinct from a slogan. The noble Duke gave us the example of "Alex Salmond for First Minister". Unless we tidy this up, there is nothing to stop the Conservative Party, for example, at the next election running on the description "David Cameron for Prime Minister". I find that objectionable on constitutional grounds. We do not have a presidential election system and I do not think that slogans of that kind should appear on the ballot paper. We have just had a European election where the BNP campaigned on the description "protect British jobs", a slogan which has nothing to do with the real purposes of the British National Party. The Government and the Electoral Commission should look again at whether these slogans should be allowed on the ballot paper. It ought to be stopped. The Minister who was on duty that day did not reply to the debate at all—he just read out his totally inadequate brief. At the end of it, though, was crumb of comfort. He said: ""These matters are of course kept under review, and since this issue concerns the way in which those standing for election communicate with the electorate, it must be right that any change should be made in discussion with all those who have a stake in the electoral process".—[Official Report, 17/6/09; col. 1121.]" I do not expect the Minister to be able to deal with this issue now, but we have the Third Reading of the Political Parties and Elections Bill tomorrow on the Floor of the House. I would be grateful if the Minister would take back to his colleagues the fact that there was no satisfactory response to the debate in Committee and that I intend to raise the matter again tomorrow on the Floor of the House. However, with that one caveat, I accept that we should agree to the consideration of the order.