My Lords, I will make three brief points in support of the amendments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. The first follows a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett,
who has just made a forceful speech. As my noble friend Lord Cormack mentioned in an earlier debate, I was my party’s spokesman and I was in the shadow Cabinet of William Hague, now my noble friend Lord Hague, when the Bill establishing the Electoral Commission went through. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, implied, had the Blair Government sought to include these two clauses in that Bill, my party would have strongly opposed that. They conflict with the recommendation of the Neill commission’s report that
“An Election Commission in a democracy like ours could not function properly, or indeed at all, unless it were scrupulously impartial and believed to be so by everyone seriously involved and by the public at large.”
If it was right for my party to oppose those clauses then, it is right to oppose them today.
Secondly, I respectfully disagree with the argument in defence of the Government’s position put forward by my noble friend the Minister on March 10:
“It is entirely appropriate for the Government and Parliament to provide a steer on electoral policy … By increasing policy emphasis on electoral integrity … the Government are seeking to prevent interference in our democracy from fraud, foreign money and hostile state actors.”—[Official Report, 10/3/22; col. 1643.]
It is not the Electoral Commission that requires a steer, for example, on the importance of protecting our democracy from foreign money; it is the Government. The steer that my noble friend described—the statutory requirement to
“have regard to the statement”—
should be in precisely the opposite direction to the one in the Bill.
My third and final reason is related to the first. I have left the Government five times, which is more than anyone else in the Chamber—even the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Once was at the request of the electorate in 1997 and three times were, sadly, at the request of the then Prime Minister, but the last was of my own volition, one month after the current Prime Minister took office, when he illegally prorogued Parliament. That was the first of a number of steps that injure out democratic institutions—in that case the House of Commons. It was followed by the failure to defend the judiciary from the “Enemies of the People” attack by the Daily Mail, the attempted interference with the verdict on Owen Paterson, the resignation of the Prime Minister’s independent adviser Alex Allan—instead of the Home Secretary—and the evident disregard, shown from time to time, for the role of your Lordships’ House and the Ministerial Code. These clauses are another step in the same direction; they are disrespectful of the ground rules of our constitution, and they should not be in the Bill.