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John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD) rose—
David Cairns: I give way first to the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso); I will come back to my hon. Friend.
John Thurso: The hon. Gentleman made a point about the referendum being held on a public holiday, which is referred to in clause 3(10). It states:
"The day chosen for holding the referendum shall be a public holiday."
Does he interpret that to mean that there shall be a holiday on the day of the referendum or that thereafter, for ever, it shall be a holiday to celebrate it?
David Cairns: The hon. Gentleman has succeeded in getting a laugh from a joke that I was hoping to make later, so I may not give way again during my speech. That is precisely the point that I wanted to make and I will return to it.
Mr. Dismore: Assuming that the Bill did not come into force until autumn, the first public holiday on which the referendum could be held might be Christmas day. Bearing it in mind that we have previously debated Christmas day trading, does my hon. Friend believe that it would be appropriate to hold the referendum on Christmas day, which is the implication of the Bill?
David Cairns:
I have not studied the timetable in such depth, but clearly that would not be acceptable. My hon. Friend highlights the point that the Electoral
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Commission, which is supposed to decide such things, would be so fettered—so hemmed in—by this flawed Bill that its freedom for manoeuvre would be nugatory. He has pointed out yet another anomaly.
Mr. Lazarowicz: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way once more; he is being very generous with his time.
Surely another reason for it being wrong to exclude the Electoral Commission from the process in such a way is that, on the face of it, the Bill takes no account of any minor name changes to whatever treaty eventually emerges from the European negotiations. If the treaty were called the treaty establishing a constitutional framework for the EU, or if there were some other change to the wording that was not covered by the Bill, no referendum could be held. The Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), rather than enabling a referendum to be held, could prevent it.
David Cairns: I had not even considered that, but of course my hon. Friend is right. The flawed nature of the Bill involves not only how it would fetter the Electoral Commission, but how it would fetter us. We might have to wait to hold a referendum and perhaps this issue would become another important matter for the Government: our hands would be tied by such an Act of Parliament, so the name of the treaty that emerges would have to be a red-line issue. We will have to insist that it translates into English as a constitution for the European Union, and we cannot have it any other way because we have already been fettered by this legislation.
Mr. Maples: I want to deal with the public holiday point. I thought that the Liberal Democrats had understood the provision properly, whereas the hon. Gentleman had not. I take it to mean, and it is intended to mean, that whatever day is chosen for the referendum shall also be designated a public holiday, not that the referendum must be held on what is an existing public holiday, because that would constrain the timetable seriously and we would have had to have it on Christmas day. My intention, and what the Bill says, is that whatever day is chosen—let us say that it is 31 October or 15 November—will as a consequence also be a public holiday.
Mr. Dismore: It does not say that.
David Cairns: As my hon. Friend anticipates from a sedentary position, it does not say that. It says:
"The day chosen for holding the referendum shall be a public holiday."
There are three interpretations of that: one is that it must be held on a public holiday that was going to be a public holiday anyway; another is that whatever the day is, it will be made a public holiday; and the third is that it will become a public holiday for ever, heading off into the future. The Bill is ridden with flaws—not just the ones that I have noticed, but the ones that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith has drawn to my attention, and the nuance in the flaw that the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter
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Ross has drawn to our attention. It is almost embarrassing to point it out to the hon. Gentleman, but it must be done.
Mr. Dismore: If the promoter of the Bill is correct, although he is probably making it up on the hoof, there are two possible interpretations. One is a significant impact on the British economy from losing a working day, and the second, if it turns out to be a public holiday for ever more, is a significant bribe to the electorate, which he could claim as a result of his Bill to try to persuade people to vote the way that he wants.
David Cairns: My hon. Friend highlights another point. Where is the regulatory impact assessment? If it is going to be a public holiday, we need to know the cost to the British economy. However, there is no such assessment. I understand, because I have introduced my own private Member's Bill, that the promoter is not obligated to provide a regulatory impact assessment, economic impact assessment or environmental impact assessment, but every time that someone asks for a new public holiday—whether Trafalgar day or some other day—the CBI rushes forward with some figure of billions of pounds that it will cost the economy. I presume that there is a standard figure, whereby a day's public holiday costs X billion pounds—the hon. Gentleman does not have to do the calculation himself but just ring up one of his mates at the CBI who could tell him. I would have expected to know such a figure. I will not vote for any legislation today that makes a commitment to have a public holiday when I have no idea what the cost to the British economy might be. It would have helped the hon. Gentleman's case if he had been able to provide an explanatory note or impact assessment saying what the cost would be.
Of course, that only follows from the second of the three interpretations, which is that it should be a new public holiday. My first reading was that the referendum must take place on a day that is already a public holiday, which was my hon. Friend's understanding when he was looking to have it on Christmas day. Whether it is option one, two or three, it is simply not clear. The hon. Gentleman said that it was perfectly clear and then used a completely different formula and set of words, which, to his credit, were crystal clear, but they were not what is in the Bill.
The hon. Gentleman said that we should bring forward an amendment in Committee. I hope that somebody, somewhere, is making a tally of all the amendments that must be tabled in Committee—my hon. Friend on the Front Bench might be doing that. It is not treating the House with contempt, but it is stretching the patience of the House to introduce legislation that is so flawed that, before we have even reached Committee, it requires a string of amendments. Under these circumstances, all that we can say is that the Bill has become nothing more than a long string of amendments held together with a few standard clauses, which is simply not acceptable and simply should not be given a Second Reading.
Mr. Dismore:
Did not the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) give the game away when he made a passing reference to the Electoral Commission, saying that it could be involved further down the line? If
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he was serious about legislating, surely he should have consulted the commission before drafting the Bill to make sure that it did not contain so many flaws.
We have discussed the flaws relating to the issue of adoption and the insertion of words that fetter the Electoral Commission, which was probably not even consulted. The next major flaw lies in the wording of the referendum question. I suspect that the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon—or the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, if he drafted the Bill—tried hard to think of wording that was studiously neutral. Speaking as one who would be more inclined to vote yes than no, I do not consider this wording to be studiously neutral. My hackles are raised by the word "bound". Voters are to be asked:
"Should the United Kingdom be bound by the Treaty establishing a Constitution for the European Union?"
My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mr. Lazarowicz) also felt that the question was not entirely even-handed and free from bias.
Those of us who think that the British people should be given the final say cannot support the Bill. We did not observe the process that created that question. How did it come about? Who was consulted? What are the precedents? Is the question modelled on referendum questions that have been asked in Britain, or across Europe? There may be perfectly good answers to all those queries, but I do not know what they are, and in a speech lasting an hour and 10 minutes the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon left us none the wiser. Unless we gain some understanding of where the question has sprung from, I shall certainly not be minded to give the Bill a Second Reading.
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