Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am sorry to have missed the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, who was sitting in her usual place. I said as a harbinger yesterday that the promotion of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hodgson would bring us back to the circumstances in July 1989, that brief and honeyed month, when consensualists all around the country were hoping that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, and I, in whose hands lay all the decision-making about electoral reform, would reach agreement before the Summer Recess. It was the noble Baroness and I who reached agreement on the original figure of 20 years as the period within which people could live abroad in order to secure the vote. In advance of the 2000 Bill, the then Home Secretary Mr Straw made a statement on the Government’s intentions and indicated that they were proposing in legislation to change the 20-year figure. Mr Chris Mullin MP—at this point I paraphrase—said how glad he was to hear that the Home Secretary would change the ruthless way in which the Conservative Government had pushed through the period of 20 years in a gesture worthy of Tory Visigoths. I intervened to recount what had happened in 1989 between the noble Baroness and myself in securing the consensus, and either by telepathy or by that invisible thread by which the noble Baroness controls the Home Office, the Home Secretary confirmed at the Dispatch Box that every word I had uttered was entirely correct and that the 20-year period had been reached by consensus between the noble Baroness and myself. So far as I am concerned, anything that the noble Baroness and I can agree is the optimal figure with which to proceed, and the fact that someone intervened initially with a more destructive amendment and then, by the happy compromise that governs affairs in this nation, came up with a figure halfway between 20 years and the Government’s original intention, makes me happy to speak in support of my noble friend. As I say, anything decided by the noble Baroness and me is likely, in my view, to stand the test of time.