European Union Bill

My Lords, we now come to the consideration of the other place's response to your Lordships' amendments to this important legislation. Your Lordships will recall that we examined this Bill in great depth over eight sittings in Committee and three days on Report, so I hope we can deal with these matters thoroughly but also reasonably briefly. Your Lordships' House rightly took a good look at the detailed provisions of the Bill. We did our duty in scrutinising it, and we saw fit to make a number of amendments to the Bill-15 in all. I shall make a brief comment to set the scene before coming to the Motion. There were four sets of issues which led us to focus on these matters today. The Government listened to the well and strongly put arguments on, first, the construction of Clause 18 and proposed amendments in the other place, which we will come to later. We also listened carefully to the arguments put forward on three other sets of issues: the turnout threshold, which is the Motion immediately before us; the proposed changes to the shape of Clause 6; and on the introduction of a sunset-maybe it should be renamed "suspension"-clause. The other place also looked at these things very carefully. On Monday last, the other place disagreed, as do the Government, with your Lordships' amendments on those three latter issues, and it is now for this House to consider and decide whether to insist on your Lordships' amendments or to accept the message from the other House. The first of these issues is the subject of this Motion, which relates to Amendments 3 and 5 that were moved with great eloquence by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton. We had two debates on them, one in Committee and one on Report, and on Report your Lordships voted in favour of these amendments by 221 votes to 216. In contrast, the other place considered these amendments and disagreed to the Lords amendments without division, by consensus. As my right honourable friend the Minister for Europe summing up the core issue said during the debate in the other place, "The outcome of a referendum should, in our view, be determined by the will of those who vote and not by how many turn up to vote".-[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/11; col. 65.] It remains our view that it is vital that in any referendum held in accordance with this Bill people are able to go out and vote in the knowledge that their active engagement in the process will count and that their vote will count. A threshold for any referendum held in accordance with this Bill would stymie the entire intent of the Bill. In short, without going over again all the arguments that we have so carefully examined in your Lordships' House, installing a mechanism whereby the will of the electorate is automatically declared unimportant and the power to decide is passed back to Parliament is not the answer, nor is it the answer in the view of the House of Lords Constitution Committee. I shall not delay the House with a quotation from that Committee about the undesirability of thresholds. We saw that on the single occasion where a threshold was used, in 1979, the clearly expressed will of the people was frustrated. That example was used on Monday last by the shadow Minister for Europe who said that it is why many, "Labour Members have reservations about the use of the 40% threshold".-[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/11; col. 75.] In November last year, Chris Bryant MP, who was Minister for Europe under the Labour Government, said that referendums were not a good idea. What interests me-I think that your Lordships also would like to know-is whether noble Lords opposite share those reservations, which they appeared not to share on Report. Please can we know whether they have changed their view? It now falls to your Lordships to consider whether to insist on these amendments, given the opposition, once again, to the threshold from the other place and given the clear and well informed doubts on all sides about the wisdom, sense and advisability of having thresholds injected into referenda for either these or wider matters. I hope that your Lordships will decide that we need not pursue this issue further. I beg to move.