Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I do not know whether I should be grateful for my noble friend’s intervention or not. I totally agree with him on the one hand, but on the other he has just taken away the point I was about to make myself. I was hoping I was going to be the first in the debate to raise those particular solutions. However, he is perfectly right and I think, before the House accepts the words that would actually go in the Bill, it needs to think very carefully about putting a responsibility on any human being or set of human beings to produce an opinion on something which is impartial and unbiased. The House could have an interesting philosophical discussion about this during the afternoon. It might be a slightly esoteric discussion for a legislative assembly, but it would be intellectually stimulating. I do not intend to go into it for very long. Perhaps it would be fair to summarise, in a way that nobody will want to disagree with, that there are two strands of post-Enlightenment philosophy, the positivist and the anti-positivist. The anti-positivist tradition of Hegel and Heidegger—the post-modernists—would say that there is no such thing as objective reality, that no one's opinion is ever better than anybody else's and that you cannot meaningfully suggest that it is. That would dispense altogether with the idea of producing this definitive, impartial and unbiased opinion. Those in the positivist tradition would say that there is such a thing as objective reality and that one can apprehend it through sense impressions, so that it would be perfectly possible to say, if one were making a statement of fact, that it is impartial and unbiased. This is also the case with analytic statements that are true by definition: they, too, could be made impartially and in an unbiased fashion. However, it would be quite unreasonable to suggest that a normative statement—for example, about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular voting system—could ever be stated in a way that could be described as impartial or unbiased. Leaving aside philosophy and turning to practical politics, I cannot imagine that anybody in the highly charged political debate over this referendum would ever credit the other side with a statement that they regarded as impartial and unbiased. If they disagreed with anything in a summary of the case for or against produced by the Electoral Commission or any other body, they would certainly denounce it as not being impartial or unbiased. That would tend to discredit the Electoral Commission if it was the originator of that summary or opinion. That is why I come back to my noble friend's suggestion, which I was intending to make myself, that it might be much more effective if the commission allowed itself to be simply the medium of distribution of two documents, one to be produced by the pros and the other by the antis. I am old enough to remember the first national political campaign in which I played a part, namely the 1975 referendum on our remaining in the European Community, as it was then called. We did exactly that. The pros and the antis were both invited to produce a summary of their views to a given length, which were distributed free to every household in the country. That is the system we have through the freepost opportunity that every political party has at a general election to distribute its manifesto to every household in every constituency.