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Madam Speaker: I can assure the hon. Gentleman that a very senior staff member is responsible for those issues in the interim. The House of Commons Commission considered this matter most thoroughly when an appointment was made. As well as referring the hon. Gentleman to the House of Commons Commission report, perhaps I might refer him to the debate in this House on that precise issue that took place about two weeks ago. I do not have my diary with me, but the debate could not have been more than two weeks ago. I assure him, and every hon. Member here, that this issue will be taken care of in the interim.
BILL PRESENTED
Local Government Bill
Mr. Secretary Prescott, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr. Secretary Michael, Mr. Stephen Byers, Ms Hilary Armstrong, Mr. Nick Raynsford and Mr. Jon Owen Jones presented a Bill to make provision imposing on local and certain other authorities requirements relating to economy, efficiency and effectiveness; and to make provision for the regulation of council tax and precepts: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time tomorrow and to be printed [Bill 5].
Orders of the Day
Debate on the Address
[Fifth Day]
Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Question [24 November],
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as follows:--
Question again proposed.
Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.--[Mr. Ashton.]
Constitution and Parliament
Madam Speaker: We now come to the main business, and I have had to limit speeches between the hours of 7 and 9 o'clock to 15 minutes. I have selected the amendment in the name of the Leader of the Opposition.
4.33 pm
Sir Norman Fowler (Sutton Coldfield): I beg to move, as an amendment to the Address, at the end of the Question to add:
- 'But humbly regret that the Gracious Speech makes no mention of the Government's determination to remove the right of electors to vote for the candidate of their choice in European Parliamentary Elections; deplore both the Government's plans to turn the House of Lords into an enormous quango and also its intention to legislate prior to the conclusions of its own Royal Commission; and further urge the Government to accept the recommendations of the Neill Committee to introduce new rules for the fair conduct of referendums.'.
On political asylum, the Government say that they will improve the appeal process, but they have done nothing to discourage the influx of bogus refugees in the first place. Rather than numbers reducing, this year they have increased. I say this to the Government: I do not believe that it is a solution to say that the backlog has been reduced by giving permission to stay to thousands of people who are evading the proper immigration procedures. We will want to debate those issues further, including the issue raised today in the Daily Mail of crimes which have been committed by bogus asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
In the same way--obviously, Madam Speaker, I take note of your ruling of a few seconds ago--we shall want to debate the case of General Pinochet. Even the most fervent Government supporter cannot claim the handling of that case by the Government to be a triumph. He was given a VIP reception by the Foreign Office; he was backed by the Ministry of Defence; he was arrested with the knowledge of the Home Office; and then he was publicly lobbied against by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry--quite contrary to the rules of justice in a case where the Home Secretary is meant to be acting in a quasi judicial capacity. It is quite wrong that a fellow Cabinet Minister should have acted in that way. I hope that the Home Secretary will note that.
Madam Speaker:
Order. I remind the right hon. Gentleman that it was announced on Thursday that, with the agreement of both Whips, today's debate would be on the constitution and Parliament. "Erskine May" makes it clear that, once an amendment has been moved, the scope of debate is restricted by the normal rules of debate, which are that a Member must direct his speech to the question under discussion or to the amendment. The right hon. Gentleman has moved the amendment, so may I suggest that he concentrates his remarks on that amendment?
Sir Norman Fowler:
Certainly, Madam Speaker. That is what I was about to do.
Those three issues show how things have changed for the Home Secretary in the past 12 months. Each issue has gone wrong, and for each issue the Home Secretary has direct responsibility. We still have the slogans--no one would accuse the Government of being short on slogans. Our concern is not about a lack of words, but about a lack of performance.
The Government's proudest boast is about their flagship. They may have put their radical plans on transport into the long-term car park, and they may have buried their radical intent on welfare reform together with two reforming Ministers, but on constitutional change their plans are still shining bright.
What are those plans? For European elections, they intend to introduce a system whereby power is taken from the people and given to the party.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Norman Fowler:
I shall give way in a moment.
On reform of the House of Lords, they intend to introduce an assembly of appointees and placemen: a giant, ermine-clad quango. On referendums, they simply dither about the way forward.
Sir Norman Fowler:
I shall come back to that point.
The country faces the prospect of referendums on proportional representation and on the single currency. By any standards, those issues go to the heart of our democracy. It is vital that the rules under which referendums are conducted are fair to both sides. It would be a travesty if the Government, and the Government alone, were to control the publicity, and were the only recipients of public money for such a campaign.
As the Neill committee makes clear, no Government can be truly objective in providing information for a referendum if they support one side of the argument. I am glad to see the Secretary of State for Wales, because we remember when he was the Minister of State, Home Office. We congratulate him on his elevation. There has been widespread criticism that the literature distributed to every household in Wales set out only the Government's case. The Neill Committee said:
Sir Norman Fowler:
The Secretary of State for Wales shakes his head, but those are not my words: they are the words of the independent Neill Committee.
We expect the Home Secretary to give a clearer statement on policy than he gave in the debate on the Neill Committee's report. In particular, he should recognise that both sides of the argument should be
given a proper voice during a referendum campaign. We also hope that the Home Secretary will take this opportunity to announce a way forward in the debate on the voting system for the European elections.
One of the refreshing things about the European elections debate was that, in spite of the number of times that we debated the issue, there were always new facts to illuminate the picture. The new fact this time will be last Thursday's European by-election in Scotland, and we all know the result of that. Despite having flooded the area with senior Ministers--and despite the Prime Minister's having lectured Scotland on its duty to the Prime Minister--Labour was pushed into third place.
Why was that? I do not want to rub salt into the wound--[Laughter.] Certainly I do not. I am a generous and kind man. Let me put the point as kindly as it can be put: one factor was that the electorate did not quite take to the candidate, Mrs. Walker-Shaw. In particular, they were understandably concerned about her claims to have been born in Scotland. At one stage, she told a reporter that she had been born in Aberdeen; but, unhappily for her, a Sunday newspaper found a copy of her birth certificate, which recorded that she had been born in Staffordshire. Mrs. Walker-Shaw then issued a statement regretting that she
Not surprisingly, the North-East Scotland constituency was by now becoming just a little sceptical about the position. Most commentators agree that the performance of the candidate had a direct bearing on the vote. Incidentally, help may be at hand for her: she is high on Labour's list of candidates for the European elections in June, and it will not be necessary for her to go into the complications of her birth certificate for that purpose.
The example that I have given demolishes the case made by the Home Secretary in debate after debate. He has argued that the candidate does not matter, that people vote only for parties and that, if a donkey were put up for election in Blackburn, the electorate would still vote Labour. Those claims have been proved to be nonsense. The fact is that Labour did not expect to come third. It did not plan to come third. It said--it span--that it was neck and neck with the Scottish National party. One of the reasons why it did come third was the electorate's view of the candidate.
Not even that is an end to the matter, however. My example illustrates another defect in the system of voting that the Government are introducing. Under the Home Secretary's system, by-elections themselves are on the way out, so if an MEP dies or, say, a Labour MEP becomes disillusioned with his party and resigns, that will normally not be followed by a by-election: the public will simply get the next candidate on the party list. The Minister for Arts, who was then a Minister in the Home Office--I am glad to see that he is present, ably defending the Home Secretary as always--explained the reasoning thus, during the Committee stage of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill:
"We were disturbed in particular by the evidence we heard in Cardiff to the effect that the referendum campaign in Wales in 1997 was very one-sided."
It added that
"a fairer campaign might have resulted in a different outcome."
The Secretary of State for Wales (Mr. Alun Michael)
indicated dissent.
"went over the top in my answers to repeated questioning by a reporter".
She said that what she really meant was that she had been conceived in Aberdeen.
"There is a difference between the utility of by-elections for this Parliament and their utility for the European Parliament. The purpose of the regional list system is to provide an element of
30 Nov 1998 : Column 562proportionality . . . A by-election would disturb the element of proportionality that the regional list system brings to the result of the election."--[Official Report, 5 March 1998; Vol. 307, c. 1247.]
To those who say that no serious issue is at stake in the reintroduction of the European parliamentary legislation on Wednesday under a guillotine, I say, "Look at what is proposed." What is proposed is this: no opportunity for the public to vote for named candidates, party-only ballots, no administrative inconveniences such as by-elections and, of course, no constituencies.
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