My Lords, I wish to send my good wishes to my noble friend Lord True. I hope that if he has got Covid at all, he has it very mildly—he might think that preferable to another day on this Elections Bill Committee. I certainly wish him well, as I am sure we all do.
I made common cause with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on various occasions in the past, and I shall do so again when we get to Amendment 197 in group 6 on donations. However, I am afraid that I part company with him on this occasion, and I take a rather different—some might say old-fashioned—view.
I go back again to my Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement and some of the evidence that we got and lessons that we learned while going through that episode. As good citizens, we all have rights, but we have an equal and opposite number of responsibilities. Unless each of us understands the balance between those two things, our society might become fractured.
One of the things that most obsesses me about our modern society is the increasingly widely held view that to compromise is to show yourself as weak. Modern social media shows us with reinforcing messages that we are right—and we all want to be proved right—and has fed that view in a very bad way. But compromise is the oil that makes our society work,
and without it, as I said, it will become fractured and tense. I am spending a few seconds on this because it shows what a highly complex matter it is to be involved in the detail of a country—the balance that needs to be struck and for which, for younger people, good citizenship education is really key and important.
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Although I will support the Government if they are going to reject the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, I have to say that, after all the work that we have done and all the good words we have heard about citizenship education, today’s White Paper of 60 pages has only one mention of citizenship education in the whole thing. How will we get people to connect with what it means to be a citizen if we do not get that properly taught? I regard this as a very sad and sorry miss by the Government; I hope that something can be done about it as we develop the White Paper and the proposals in it.
I accept that the rights that come with citizenship in this country include a right to vote and, of course, it is absolutely essential that we encourage people to use that right. However, it is also a privilege for which earlier generations have strived, fought and occasionally, unfortunately, died. Having the right to vote is not like getting a driving licence or even a passport. The act of voting goes to the very heart of how our country is run, the philosophy and practices that we follow and the values that we endorse. Put simply, to be entitled to vote, you need to show pretty irrevocably that you intend to make this country your home, by becoming a citizen; then, of course, you are welcome to join the rest of us in deciding how the country is run.
Reading through some papers for this debate, I noticed that this country was described by a US commentator on a final dispatch before she returned to the United States as
“complex, incorrigible, often infuriating, endlessly perplexing, stroppy, ironic and fiercely disputatious”.
We are trying to decide how our Government are to deal with a society that can be described in that way. I am afraid I cannot accept that someone who pops over from, say, France should be able to vote in our elections any more than I should be able to vote if the situation were reversed. In short, the privilege of voting requires a combination of long-term commitment, physical presence and an understanding of current British life and how it is lived therein. I note that Amendment 155 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, seems to be groping towards some further developments in that area and I have some sympathy with what she is trying to achieve, particularly for those resident in a country where there are reciprocal voting arrangements, but I fear that her approach is probably too complex or possibly too open to abuse of this great privilege.
I have two final points to make. First, as I said, I can see the arguments for widening the franchise in cases of reciprocal rights being given by another country. That is an argument to which we shall come in more detail in Amendment 154 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, in support of which I expect to speak. Finally, some noble Lord—probably the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, or the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—will say that my remarks run completely
counter to the provisions of Clause 12 extending the right of British citizens anywhere in the world indefinitely to vote in UK elections. Such an accusation would be correct. I think the Government have misjudged this issue, to put it no higher, and that our manifesto commitment was a plain mistake. For someone to be able to emigrate to Australia or retire to Jamaica and have continued participation in UK elections over tens of years seems plain wrong, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said. What can a person know about life in Britain after an absence of 20 or more years? Why should they have an equal say to a person who has lived here and contributed to the life of this country throughout that period? However, the fact that this is an ill-advised policy does not mean that we should add another ill-advised policy to it, and I am afraid that I regard the policy proposed in Amendment 152 as just that.