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Sir Patrick Cormack: Ah! The Minister says he hopes that I will feel able to withdraw "them". Well, I am perfectly content to withdraw amendment No. 45. The Minister has given a sympathetic and understanding answer; I believe him to be a man of his word, and I expect an amendment along the lines of amendment No. 45, giving the commission the role that he and I both want it to have, to be tabled on Report. If my inference is correct, we shall not press the amendment to a Division at this point, but, if the Minister does not table a similar amendment on Report, we shall do so then.
Mr. O'Brien: I want to reflect and consider. Obviously, consultations will be necessary. We spoke earlier of the need to consult devolved Executives, for instance. I am not giving the hon. Gentleman an undertaking; I am saying that I am very sympathetic, but wish to consider the matter
further and undertake the proper consultations that I am sure he would want me to undertake before proposing such a measure.
Sir Patrick Cormack: It is early in the afternoon, and I am a man of infinite charity. I am therefore prepared to accept what the Minister has said in regard to amendment No. 45, but I must make plain our belief that my point--echoed, briefly but eloquently, by the hon. Members for Tatton (Mr. Bell), for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) and for Greenock and Inverclyde (Dr. Godman), and by my hon. and silver-tongued Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) in his interventions--is important, and that the amendment is important. We want to return to the issue on Report if the Minister does not, and it is only right to give the Committee notice of that.
The Minister gave an elegantly forensic response to amendment No. 46, but a response that was wholly unsatisfactory to us. There are worries about the timing of referendums, and the Minister was honest enough to admit that timing can influence outcome. Let us look back to the two constitutional referendums that took place in the autumn of 1997. I cannot prove and do not know, but strongly suspect, that, had Wales voted on the same day as Scotland, the result might well have been different. A week later, the result was too close to call: it was so marginal as to be equivalent to a result demanding a recount in a marginal seat. We had the tiniest possible majority for the Welsh Assembly.
Nothing that I say should be taken to mean that I want to rerun that referendum. Constitutionally speaking, we of course accept that a majority is a majority, and we are doing all in our power to make the Welsh Assembly work; but the concept was not embraced with universal enthusiasm in the Principality. Half the people voted, and of those, nearly half said that they did not want it. I think that, if people had not been to some degree influenced by what I accept was a much more decisive result in Scotland in the previous week, we might well have seen a different result in Wales. That experience underlies our amendment.
Therefore, although I am prepared, for the reasons that I have advanced, to withdraw amendment No. 45 and will not press amendment No. 48 to a vote because the argument is finely balanced. We do not agree with the Minister, but we do not seek to divide the Committee on every amendment. We believe that there is a point of real substance in amendment No. 46. The Committee should be given the opportunity to vote on it. At the appropriate time, therefore, I would wish to call a Division on amendment No. 46.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 95 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield):
I do not want to take up the Committee's time, but we should widen the discussion a little to look at what clauses 96 and 97 contain, in the absence of amendment No. 46 which we discussed earlier. Clause 97 is of particular concern.
As the Committee will be aware, the whole purpose of the legislation is to establish a set of ground rules. It provides for fairness between the respective parties participating in a referendum campaign. As some of the clauses concern the provision of funding to one side or another, fairness is essential--above all, fairness for a campaign to get off the ground to put its case.
Clause 97 is linked to clause 96. There are two provisions. Clause 96 provides for a period not exceeding six months from when the draft of an order comes in to the date of a poll, but, crucially, clause 97 provides that
After designation, I would find it hard to imagine getting a national campaign off the ground with funds in only 28 days. I think that the Minister would agree that that is the absolute minimum period in which a referendum campaign could properly take place and be described as fair, yet clause 97 will not apply to a referendum where the date of the poll is specified in the Act.
The explanatory notes put it in a way that the Minister might say is a little disingenuous:
I should therefore be grateful if the Minister could comment on that issue as we debate the two clauses, but particularly clause 97. It might also give him pause for thought in relation to amendment No. 46, to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) spoke earlier and which was dismissed
rather out of hand by the Minister as being "unnecessary". The Minister said that those are political decisions--of course they are political decisions--but the whole purpose of the legislation is to remove party politics from, and introduce a note of fairness into, proceedings.
Sir Michael Spicer (West Worcestershire):
I am listening very carefully to my hon. Friend's comments. I wonder whether his interpretation of the Bill is such that he believes that the 28-day period specified in clause 97 is relevant also to the powers that the Government would have to intervene and to make their case? Is it part of the quarantine period that the Government would have applied in communicating their own point of view? If so, such a period is not only very short, but highly relevant.
Mr. Grieve:
My hon. Friend has a good point. The clauses are complex, but the Minister may care to enlighten us. Certainly there is a whole series of mechanisms of interlinked timings. Part of that is the quarantine for the Government, which would run up to the time of the referendum. I would assume, therefore, that that is the time in which the umbrella organisations are up and running and the Government have no part in the proceedings. If I am wrong about that, the Minister will enlighten me.
The point I was making--my hon. Friend has rightly just added another element to it--is that, if in fact we are leaving open the opportunity for the House or a Government using their majority to specify in an Act a shorter period, one might well ask why on earth we are being bothered with passing this complicated legislation with all these rules. Without so much as altering this Bill or having a debate on whether its provisions should be changed, it would be possible for a Government who wished to do so completely to circumvent the purpose that the legislation is designed to achieve. That is a matter of concern.
Why bother to have the Electoral Commission's input into referendums if the Government could, with a short wave of the hand, simply introduce a referendum Bill stating that these clauses will not in reality have effect?
Mr. Mike O'Brien:
We are considering clauses 96 and 97. In clause 96, we are ensuring that we establish a basis for subsequent clauses, in part VII, such as those providing for the designation of umbrella groups and for expenditure restrictions. Those later clauses lean heavily on the concept of there being a defined referendum period in which the provisions will apply.
The purpose of clause 96 is to establish how the referendum period is to be calculated. The main provision is in subsection (4) and applies to the great majority of cases in which the date of a referendum poll is specified in a Bill. It is an important point. Parliament will decide the date of the great majority of referendums. Therefore, the length of time for a campaign will be a matter for political discussion in this place.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
"the date so fixed shall not be earlier than 28 days after the end of the period"
in which the various parties participating in the campaign have been identified. If it were taken to its absolute conclusion, the 28-day period would be very short.
"Nonetheless, the expectation in such cases will similarly be that there will be at least 28 days for campaigning following the designation of campaign organisations."
That fills me with some concern. We are enacting complex legislation, some issues in which have taken up much time upstairs in Committee and which we have tried as best we can to speed through, yet we are left with a clause--clause 97--that the Minister would have to agree could be circumvented at will by a Government who wished to do so. All they would have to do would be to designate in the Act that the period concerned was reduced to 10 days, five days or four days. What is the purpose of the Bill if it is not to set a fair framework? Yet, as things stand, what I have outlined could easily happen: it will not matter how much funding is provided to the campaign that the Government do not like because, in reality, the campaign will never have an opportunity to get off the ground.
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