My Lords, I support the noble and learned Lord in his amendments, to which I have added my name. We have a cross-party understanding, I believe, that, whatever their intentions, the Government have got this wrong. When the House has the kind of unanimity that it has in relation to the Electoral Commission’s powers and the strategy and policy statement process, it is incumbent on any Government to listen and to learn.
The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, in his dignified and honourable resignation from the Front Bench—I believe we unanimously regret that he felt he needed to resign—said in his resignation letter that we have to take into account how others see us.
The noble and learned Lord referred to the legislation in 2000. I was a Member of the Cabinet at the time. We had a majority of 179. We could have pushed anything through, but the outrage which would have emerged universally across our media, as well as from the Benches opposite, would have driven us back inevitably to a situation where we would have had to think again. I ask the Government, with less than half that majority, to think again. It is not what might be intended, it is how that intention might be perceived—as well as the real outcome. There is the potential for a Trojan horse to lead us down a path which could be regretted at length as part of our constitution. Crucially, this will be seen from outside the country in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, perceived in relation to the rule of law.
Gideon Rachman from the Financial Times has written a book called The Age of The Strongman. In it, like many others who have written on this subject, he poses the real and present challenge of the international democratic process being undermined by the clash between the strong autocratic leadership of those outside the democratic fold; those within the purview of the democratic fold who are leading their nations into autocracy and the diktat of the centre; and the participative democratic world, which involves people being listened to, not just in parliaments but across the nations, and taken notice of.
I am afraid to say that the clauses with which we are dealing this afternoon are a measure of a Government who have not understood that they should be on the side of the participative democratic processes which defend us against the creeping autocracy we see internationally at the moment. It is as serious as that. The Electoral Commission and the electorate as a whole, who were polled over the weekend, have demonstrated their concern. Most people will not understand the detail of the Electoral Commission—why would they? However, they do understand when a Government start to believe that their party and their place in government are one and the same thing—they are not.
I tried to put this across in recent legislation in other areas of public policy. The Government govern for the nation as a whole; they do not govern for a particular political party. Of course, they will want to implement their manifesto and the mandate they have been given by the electorate. By the way, there is no mandate at all on this; there is no suggestion, as there has been in other parts of the Bill, that the Government had indicated, in their manifesto and during the election, that they wished to deal with the Electoral Commission in this way. There have been suggestions from one or two Members of this House at Second Reading and at Committee that somehow the Electoral Commission attracted the notice of the Government—or the Conservative Party, I should say—in terms of what happened in the 2016 referendum. This was backed up by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox; I was sat next to her at the time, and it was a rather half-hearted effort to defend the Government on this particular set of clauses.
There is no argument for it; there is no problem, as the noble and learned Lord explained. What we have is a solution in pursuit of a problem which does not really exist. Fundamentally, we have a vision and message going out from this legislation that will be rued by us all if we do not get this right. I have a very simple appeal to the Government: take these amendments and accept them when they go back to the Commons tomorrow; withdraw the proposal because it does not have support anywhere in this House, in the other House, other than the three-line Whip, or across the country; and allow us to unify on consulting properly on whatever perceived problems the Government—or the Conservative Party—Labour, the Lib Dems or the Cross Benches might have about the operation of the Electoral Commission. Consult properly, undertake this in a democratic fashion, understand how we are seen as a country and get it right.
I ask the Government to please understand this afternoon that some of us, at least, will go to the wire on this one. So let us be prepared to go into next week if we have to, to ensure that we defend our democratic processes and practices. If we do not, somewhere in years to come, someone should ask each of us, “Where were you? What did you do? Did you understand what you were passing? Were you in favour of it? If you were not, why did you not vote against it?”
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