European Union Bill

My Lords, we have heard two speeches from the Liberal Democrat Benches— from the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson—both seeming to blame the malaise in European politics on the absence of referenda. However, I suggest that if we want to know what created and exacerbated the disconnect between the electorate of this country and the European elections, which the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, talked about, the answer is that it was the rather misguided action of my own party, when in government, in changing the electoral system to the European Parliament. Creating multi-Member regional constituencies, which guaranteed the first three or four people on the party list a place irrespective of their contact with the electorate, was a totally misguided act. It has taken European politics further and further away from the people. Under the old system, constituencies had European information systems available in their party offices. However, they have all disappeared and have become the prerogative of regional parties. You can see in the consistent decline in participation in regional elections that people have no interest in Members who gain their places almost automatically under this system. There is scepticism and cynicism in relation to European elections but it is not that people regard them as unimportant. In my former constituency of Birmingham West, the turnout at the last direct elections that we had with single Member constituencies was just short of 40 per cent. In the first election conducted on regional lists, where there was an attempt to link places such as Walsall and Ludlow, the poll dropped to 13 per cent in my former constituency. That was a sign of the scepticism and cynicism. I was provoked into getting to my feet by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who took me on a walk down memory lane regarding the 1979 referendum. I remember that referendum well for two reasons. One was that I was so confident of getting a successful yes vote in that election that I went to the then parliamentary bookmaker in the House of Commons, Mr Ian Mikardo, and asked him what odds he would give me on a yes vote in every constituency in the United Kingdom. I gave him £10 of my hard-earned money in return for odds of 200:1. So uniform was the result of that referendum that it was only the outer fringes of the United Kingdom—Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles—that led to Mr Mikardo keeping my £10 rather than me getting £2,000 back from him. There was an enormous spread. The other thing that I remember most about the 1979 referendum which is pertinent to this issue was the number of people who told me that that referendum would produce the settled will of the United Kingdom for a generation. However, it did not produce it for a week after the election. As soon as one referendum was lost, there were all sorts of demands for other issues to be looked at. The referendum mechanism failed to settle anything, other than the position of the Government, which is what it was intended to settle in the first place. The noble Lord, Lord Williamson, was at his persuasive best in moving his amendment. He was reflecting what, I hope, is the settled will of your Lordships' House concerning the 40 per cent threshold. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution got it absolutely right in its report at paragraphs 37 and 38. As so many people have spoken since the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned those paragraphs, they bear repeating into the record. They state that, "““the European Union Bill is a radical step-change in the adoption of referendum provisions … In our judgement, the resort to referendums contemplated in the European Union Bill is not confined to the category of fundamental constitutional issues on which a UK-wide referendum may be judged to be appropriate. Furthermore, many of the Bill's provisions are inconsistent with the Government's statement that referendums are most appropriately used in relation to fundamental constitutional issues””." The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, says that the Government have replied to that. They would, wouldn’t they? More important is the advice and guidance that we got from our highly respected Select Committee on the Constitution and I believe that we discard that at our peril. I hope that the House will support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson.