| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Dr. Liam Fox (Woodspring): This debate began in a most interesting fashion, with the Home Secretary detailing what he described as the Government's detailed and thorough constitutional changes. However, they must have been different constitutional changes from those that have been presented to the House, which could not have been described as either detailed or thorough. The parliamentary Session began with the Government's devolution proposals, which laid the ground for the further constitutional changes that have since been proposed. To understand exactly what stage we have reached in those constitutional changes, we need to examine the process, for it is instructive in showing how the Government have gone about those changes.
First, let us look at what we were promised before we reached the devolution referendum, when we were still at the White Paper stage. We were promised that the proposals would preserve the Union and that they would bring an end to nationalism. The Secretary of State for Defence said that they would kill nationalism stone dead. Well, nationalism did not appear to be stone dead in north-east Scotland last Thursday, when the nationalists looked rather triumphant. That only goes to show that when we said that the proposals presented a tremendous danger to the Union, our warning was correct.
During the passage of the Scotland Bill through the House, we were told that the Government would always look at devolution in the worst-case scenario; they would legislate just in case the consensus broke down. Despite the lovely winceyette, cuddly and all-inclusive, new-age politics that we were supposed to have in Scotland--which fell apart last Thursday--the Government would always look at the worst-case scenario, just in case. We said in return that we would be constructive in our approach to the Bill.
Is that what we got? It is not. In the other place, we got 186 groups of amendments to the Government's flagship Bill: the Government had to amend a Bill on their main proposal for constitutional change that was desperately flawed, as we had warned--it was so flawed that a bus could be driven through the holes in it. The second Chamber here, which the Government say has no democratic legitimacy, had to deal with 186 groups of amendments to a Bill that sets up a unicameral body. That, in the Home Secretary's words, was detailed and thorough. The Bill was a dog's breakfast--it was even being amended at Third Reading, days before coming back to this House.
We have already had several verdicts on devolution and I believe that we are to get another in the next couple of days. We never believe the leaks that we read in newspapers, but if the leaks in The Herald are to be believed, the verdict of the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, which is dominated by Labour Members, will be damning indeed, saying that the Bill was poorly drafted and that Ministers did not understand their briefs. There are various criticisms of the process and of the fact that it will not fulfil the promises that the Government had outlined at first. Ministers had a unique combination of incompetence and naivety in their approach to the Bill, and--typically for the culture of the Government--Ministers of State get the blame, not Secretaries of State.
There was a by-election last week and, in the collapse of the Labour party's vote, we saw that the public had also lost confidence in the ability of the Secretary of State
for Scotland to deal with the nationalists, although, as a by-product, I noticed that the Liberal Democrats were today cosying up to the Scottish nationalists, just in case they might be the winners in future elections. The Liberal Democrats take the term "lowest common denominator" to new levels.
On Wales, which is the other part of the flagship, we heard interesting noises from the Home Secretary--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the terms of the motion are quite carefully defined, and he should refer to it.
Dr. Fox:
Indeed, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am simply pointing out, as your fellow Deputy Speaker pointed out earlier, that background issues lay behind the Government's broader constitutional programme.
The Home Secretary said in his opening speech that he believes in equal funding in respect of referendums. I presume, therefore, that he agrees with the Neill committee, which had grave reservations about the referendum in Wales--had the Government not spent money on one side, there might have been a different result. That has enormous constitutional implications for us, and is something that we should consider.
As several speakers--most notably, my right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd)--have said, the most important section of this part of the agenda is the fact that the West Lothian question remains unanswered: 20 years after that question was first asked by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), we still have no answer to an important constitutional conundrum.
How can it be that the West Lothian question was regarded as so unimportant that it was not addressed in the Government's well-thought-out, detailed and thorough constitutional programme? The reason is that it cannot be answered within the Government's devolution plans, because devolution cannot answer the West Lothian question. The West Lothian question defies the logic of devolution, which says that the constitutional arrangements in one part of the kingdom can be changed without changing them in the rest.
One of the issues that has come forward clearly today is the conduct of referendums. I thank those who have worked with us on that in recent times--Charter 88, the constitutional unit, the Electoral Reform Society; those who responded to our reasoned plea--the Law Lords, the peers, members of all parties in this House and the bishops; and all those of all parties and none who responded to what we had asked.
What we are interested in achieving in the conduct of referendums has to do with something that lies at the heart of the British people--a sense of fairness. I do not need to point out to the House that the groups with which we have worked are hardly the usual bedfellows for the Conservative party, but they all share a fear of the Government's approach to referendums.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) said so clearly--not only tonight, but on a previous occasion--if referendums are to be part of our constitutional architecture, and it seems that they shall be, we need better guidelines than we have at present. As she pointed out, we have adequate guidelines for the conduct of every other type of election in this country; why not for the conduct of referendums?
I was extremely interested in what the Home Secretary had to say, because--if I may use the term--his mood music was interesting and fair on this subject. As he will know, we have, with the co-operation of the groups that I have mentioned and a large input from Charter 88, developed a draft Bill which we believe could answer these points. I hope that he will enter into conversation with us, to discuss the content of the Bill and whether we could legislate in this Session in respect of this part of what the Neill committee has said. Any assurance that he could give the House--
Dr. Fox:
The Home Secretary is nodding, and I am pleased to see that.
What we propose is very simple. We believe that there is a need for minimum regulation to deal with finance and media access during a referendum campaign. There is nothing to prevent the Government from putting their case in any referendum to the people--that is right and proper. What is objectionable is the Government using taxpayers' money to support only one side--as happened in Wales--because taxpayers will inevitably support both sides.
Having established minimum regulations on finance and media access to both sides of a referendum campaign, we should go further and examine what other regulations may be necessary. It would be sensible to consider who should set the question in the referendum, who should decide on the timing, what constitutes validity and what thresholds need to be set. Those questions should be of equal importance to both sides, as they deal not with specific issues, but with the mechanism by which a referendum would be valid in the eyes of the electorate. That is the most important aspect. Will those who lose in a referendum believe that it was fair and accept the result? The low turnout was one of the factors that undermined the referendum in Wales.
We need look no further than the referendums that may come up in the near future. I have no idea whether the Liberal Democrats know when the referendum on proportional representation will take place--if they do, their information is probably not correct--but we know that it will happen at some point. There will also be a referendum on economic and monetary union. Without the referendum commission, the question would probably be, "I, the Prime Minister, the Almighty, being such a great guy, if, at some point in the future, I decide that it would be reasonably good for the United Kingdom to consider monetary union, do you think that I perhaps should be given the chance to take this country in at some point to be decided in the future?" That is the sort of crisp question that we are likely to get, and it is all the more reason to establish a mechanism to make the process more valid.
What is the difference in validity between a pre-legislative and a post-legislative referendum? Our recent experience in Wales and Scotland strengthens the case for a post-legislative referendum. A Bill has been amended and changed until it is almost unrecognisable, yet in both its forms, it is supposed to be the same measure that the voters voted for, and that cannot be so.
The case for a post-legislative referendum is also strengthened by the changes being made to the legislation for London, as my hon. Friend the Member for
Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Wilkinson) pointed out. My right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham referred to other cases in which people have voted for one thing and have got something quite different. It should be our practice to have post-legislative not pre-legislative referendums, if they are to have legitimacy.
I do not intend to say much about the European Parliamentary Elections Bill. We have had a rota, and have taken turns to speak on that Bill, so there can hardly be a Member who has not spoken on it. The attitude of Labour and Liberal Democrat Members is instructive. There is a clear principle, which is choice for voters. Choice for voters is good, maximal choice is best, and some choice is better than none. However, the Government have adopted the reverse principle--not voter first, but party first.
I was astonished to hear the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan) say that the Salisbury convention had been badly shaken by the decision to reject the closed list. There is nothing in the Labour manifesto about closed lists. The Liberal Democrats did not say that they would change from open to closed lists when it suited them. This was a properly constituted matter: the House of Lords decided that the House of Commons should think again.
The House of Commons can get its way through the Parliament Acts, and the Government have made it clear that they will do so. That is the correct process. For some reason, the idea has been put about that there has been undue process and an abuse of Parliament. This is how Parliament is supposed to work. We have a system of checks and balances to ensure that the House of Commons gets its way, but does not rush through legislation if the other Chamber believes that it should think again.
I hear people say that this is the settled will of the House of Commons. It is the settled will of the House of Commons through the Whips--there is no doubt about that--but it is hardly the settled will of the House of Commons as conveyed by Labour Members in speeches here. Labour Members went out of their way to be absent: to be in their constituencies, having dinner, seeing their best friends or doing anything to avoid having to defend a position that they found very unpalatable.
Most of today's debate has concerned reform of the Upper House. I feel that, generally speaking, the standard of debate on this issue should be raised from the caricature and tiresome class-war rhetoric that has featured too much today. I exempt the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle), who made an informative and intelligent speech. I wish that more of her colleagues had done the same.
The debate is not about the Government's right to have stage one without stage two, which is clearly in their manifesto; it is about whether the Government are wise, or correct, to have stage one without stage two. It is not about the Conservative party's blindly defending the rights of hereditary peers--although that is what the Labour party would love us to do, because it would make its job so much easier. It is very unlikely that, if we started with a blank piece of paper, we would end up with the constitutional position in which the United Kingdom currently finds itself.
I do, however, defend the public service of men and women in the other place, over many years. That has been cheaply denigrated today by too many Labour Members,
many of whom have been in Parliament for only a short time. Above all, Conservative Members defend the right of the people to know how they are to be governed. In saying that they want stage one without stage two, the Government are, in effect, saying, "We are going to change the way in which you, the people of Britain, are to be governed through Parliament, but we are not going to tell you what that change is to be".
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |