Electoral Administration Bill

As the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), who is in fact on the Northern Ireland Policing Board, says, we call in the police. Perhaps we should leave that one there. My plight before 5 May underlined a very real problem, and Members in all parts of the House were extremely kind in recognising that. I do not pretend that the Bill meets every eventuality, and nor would the Minister so claim, but it does meet most of them. One other problem that it does not address is one with which the Minister’s officials and I struggled. We wondered whether it would be possible to give the afflicted party, if I can put it that way, the opportunity of knowing whether it should continue. But, of course, that would depend on when the death occurred, and the party would have to have some time to make that decision. We did not feel, therefore, that we could include that provision. There is one provision in the new clause that was not in my original Bill, and I am grateful to the Minister for its inclusion. It states that a party is not allowed to substitute its candidates. In my case, for instance, the Liberal Democrat candidate died, and there had to be an opportunity for the Liberal Democrat party to field another candidate. However, the Labour party changed its candidate, too. I want to stress that I am not making any criticism of the two people in question, with whom I was on extremely good terms. I understood the reasons why that had happened. What they did was also entirely legal, as the law stands. However, the Minister feels, and I agree with her, that the death of one candidate should not provide an opportunity for other parties to substitute candidates. The new clause would also not allow new candidates to enter the field. In my election on 5 May, I had three opponents, but I subsequently finished up with seven. That would not be allowed. If the general election is being replicated—I was elected legally at the general election—there should not be the opportunity for new candidates to enter the field. New clause 3 deals with all those points. New clause 2 addresses a specific and remaining problem—not one that arose in my case, but one that I was able to highlight when I talked to the lady who stood in the four Cardiff seats. As Members on both sides of the House probably know, there is nothing to prevent any one of us, provided we can provide the requisite number of signatures and the requisite deposits, from standing in as many constituencies as we wish. The Minister and I believe that the days of that being permissible are long gone. It is up to an individual to decide which seat he or she wishes to contest, without being able to stand in a range of others. My case showed what might happen—this picks up on a point made by the hon. Member for Belfast, East in his intervention—so one can envisage an individual standing against every member of the Cabinet or shadow Cabinet, or against the Speaker and all the Deputy Speakers. If that person died, committed suicide or was assassinated, all those seats would be without Members for a period. At the last election, the complexion of the Government was not in doubt on 6 May, nor did it depend on the result in South Staffordshire, but I have been a Member of the House for a very long time and I remember that there was no overall majority after the first election in 1974. There was a weekend of bargaining between the late Sir Edward Heath, whose memorial service many of us attended today, and Mr. Jeremy Thorpe to see whether a coalition of some sort could be cobbled together. Later that year there was another election, after which the Labour party had an overall majority of four. You have only to imagine, Sir Alan, what might happen if a candidate standing in half a dozen seats died or killed himself in such a situation. There could be constitutional chaos. So, new clause 2 addresses that specific point and will make it impossible for any individual to stand in more than one seat. The two new clauses meet virtually all the points that I addressed in my Bill on 6 July. I am grateful to the Minister for her co-operation; I am extremely grateful, as I said at the outset, to her officials. I hope that the House gives the new clauses a fair wind so that they can be incorporated in the Bill and so that nobody, in any part of the House, has to face what I faced in those seven rather difficult weeks in May and June this year.