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Mr. Martin Linton (Battersea): I was interested to find out whether the right hon. Gentleman would repeat the comments that he made during last year's debate on referendums. He remarked on the Government's role in fighting in a referendum and he now repeats that it would
be artificial for them to have to contract the expression of their case to an outside body over which they would have no control. Does he agree that the Bill would force a Government into that position and that they would not be able to spend money to support their own case?
Mr. Maclennan: The Bill contains a risk of that happening, but it could possibly be amended in Committee to take account of the problem. The clear objective of the Neill committee, the Bill, myself and, no doubt, the hon. Gentleman is that there should be fairness as well as clarity on both sides. [Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. A number of private conversations are breaking out. Hon. Members ought to listen to the right hon. Gentleman, who is addressing the House.
Mr. Maclennan: As referendums are, of their nature, held on questions of Government policy, it is clearly right that the advocacy of the Government's case should not be subcontracted to any other body and the Government should be the spokesmen on the issue.
Mr. Gareth R. Thomas: The right hon. Gentleman said that, in a couple of instances, the Neill report had arrived at the wrong conclusion. I would suggest that it also arrived at the wrong conclusion about the spending limits for referendums. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that one of the criticisms of, and concerns about, the 1975 referendum was the wide disparity in the funding of the two campaigns, and that spending limits should be imposed in referendums?
Mr. Maclennan: It is unquestionably true that there was great disparity in the 1975 campaign and that it may have had an untoward effect on perceptions about its fairness. Again, we have to avoid artificiality. A Minister appearing on a broadcast, saying what the Government's view is, might cost almost nothing but have an immense impact. Somehow we have to maintain a balance.
I am not entirely happy about the Bill's mechanistic proposals on broadcasting. Broadcasters might give less attention than they should to both sides of the case if we constrain them too much by the proposed rules of balance. However, the reason behind the proposals is extremely important--there should be fairness, and broadcasters should seek to ensure that there is. This is precisely the type of matter on which the House would value not so much the regulations in the Bill, as the advice of a truly independent referendums election commission, which would no doubt carry great weight with broadcasters.
The Bill has great merit, especially in that it focuses on the urgency of the situation. It was quite right to introduce the Bill. I have no complaints about that, even in the knowledge that the Government intend to introduce an election commission Bill at some stage. It is right for the House to know that referendums are coming down the pipe. We want to make sure well in advance that we are not bounced into passing a referendum Bill to establish a poll on the euro, without having a well-established framework that is accepted by all parties and understood throughout the country. It would lend great weight to the outcome of such a referendum if such a framework were established soon.
I hope that, as a result of this debate, we might hear a little more from the Government about their intention to introduce a Bill and whether they would like it to be enacted in the next Session of Parliament. I heard the Minister saying that Governments do not divulge what will be in the Queen's Speech. That rule is becoming more honoured in the breach than in the observance, although I do not expect the Minister to give a definitive response today.
Mr. Andrew Dismore (Hendon):
I congratulate the hon. Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) on introducing the Bill. As has just been said, there is recognition of the need for reform. The question that we have to ask today is whether the Bill deals with that need in the way that it should. As the hon. Gentleman may have gathered from my interventions, my main concern is that many of the issues that need to be addressed have been left out of the Bill. They include, for example, the registration of campaigners, funding rules--including those in relation to donations--and the role of the Government in referendums, something that the hon. Gentleman touched on in response to me. I shall return to those issues later.
Mr. Letwin:
I do not want to detain the hon. Gentleman for long, but would it be of interest to him to know that the suggestion to remove the registration of campaigners derives from his Government?
Mr. Dismore:
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will be patient and wait for me to get to that point.
Any reform should be comprehensive. In response to a motion for the Adjournment of the House on 9 November 1998, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made it clear that the Government were going to consider the issue in the round. He said:
Judy Mallaber:
Does my hon. Friend agree that referendums and the broader matters raised by the Neill committee's recommendations are complex? I have not looked at them in great detail, but I am finding it hard to work out exactly how the proposals should be implemented. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government's Bill would benefit from pre-legislative scrutiny by a Committee of the House? Might not that assist us in making sure that the Bill is not only properly formulated but has support from all parts of the House? We have to get it right, otherwise we shall lose the legitimacy of the democratic and political process.
Mr. Dismore:
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. When I was researching my speech for tonight--[Hon. Members: "Tonight?"] I spent a happy hour or two in the Library the other night. The more I read up on this matter--I read the Neill report, the Jenkins commission's report, the Library brief, Hansard and all the other documentation available--the more that I became increasingly concerned that the detailed issues, some of which have already begun to be elucidated, were much more complex than might appear at first blush. I therefore welcome my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary's announcement about the draft Bill. The suggestion made by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) that there should be pre-legislative scrutiny of that Bill would be an excellent way to proceed. In longer discussions we could flush out the important issues that are already starting to emerge at this early stage.
Mr. Gareth R. Thomas:
My hon. Friend has obviously conducted wide research for his speech. Was he able to look at the Home Affairs Committee report on electoral law and administration? If he has seen it, would he comment on the evidence presented by Dr Butler and Professor Blackburn, who expressed concern at the large number of bodies with a role in the electoral process? One of their arguments in favour of an electoral commission with responsibility for the rules governing referendums, was that that would allow a much more coherent view of those matters to be taken.
"The next step is to turn the report"--
the report into the funding of political parties--
"into legislation. We are setting about that straight away. It will not be possible to introduce and carry through a measure of such scope with due attention to getting the framework and the detail right in the next Session of Parliament, but we intend to introduce a draft Bill before the next summer recess and to bring forward legislation so that new rules can be in place before the next general election."--[Official Report, 9 November 1998; Vol. 319, c. 53.]
There has been a great deal of argument about the Government's intention, but the Home Secretary's remarks were given particular force and emphasised by the Lord Chancellor when he spoke at the annual
constitution unit lecture on 8 December 1998. The Lord Chancellor stressed the importance that the Government attach to the issue and said:
"As the Home Secretary has made clear, we shall be giving careful consideration to all the Neill Committee's recommendations on the conduct of referendums and we will examine how best to take them forward in the context of the draft Bill which we will be publishing by next year's summer recess."
I understand the impatience of the hon. Member for Blaby that progress be made in respect of the Neill committee's recommendations, but he is jumping the gun because the Government have said that their Bill will be published by the summer and that we shall be able to consult more widely on much of the detail.
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