Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I speak in the debate on whether Schedule 2 should stand part of the Bill not from a passionate objection to anything in the schedule but as a means of impressing on the Leader of the House the importance of these paragraphs. This is the bit where we should be able to transcend party politics. This has been a closely fought part of our legislative process, but at the end of the day the reality is that, for the referendum to have real value and merit in the development of our constitution, people need to feel confident that it has been conducted in such a manner, and the rules of the legislation have been applied in such a way, that they can relax not only from a partisan point of view but from a citizen’s point of view. I urge the Leader of the House, who is a reasonable man, to look at these issues as someone who just wants a proper result for the referendum. There is a strong case for all the parties represented in this House to get together to discuss these nuts-and-bolts issues. I remember with some pain Scotland’s 1979 referendum, which is an experience that I would not wish to repeat. Earlier I spoke to the noble Lord, Lord McCluskey—who, sadly, is not in his place at the moment—who was talking about some of the pressures that he experienced as a Minister in the Government at that time when looking at how the referendum should be run. There are no two ways about it: there will be huge divisions in every party. That means that the parties must be confident in the structures that exist. One of the big problems we will face is that the people who are best equipped to run the organisational part of the referendum—the part that is not run by the returning officers—are party apparatchiks. Thank God, it is 30 years since I was a party apparatchik, but the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is a party apparatchik par excellence, as is my noble friend Lady McDonagh. We all know that there are mechanisms that get people to vote, that inspire them and that ensure that the true process of democracy takes place. To allow that to happen, we need the structures in place. In opposing the question that Schedule 2 stand part of the Bill, I am asking the Leader of the House to convene a gathering of the major parties that will form part of the process. The worse thing that could happen is for us all to get up on 6 May or whenever it may be—we are beginning to learn that it may be somewhere around 10 May before we find out the result in Scotland—and feel unhappy and uncomfortable about the nature of the processes. At an early stage of the Bill my noble friend Lord Boateng made a powerful speech about how this Parliament, the mother of Parliaments, is looked to by Parliaments around the world for its procedures and its respect for the processes of democracy that transcend all that is party political. I urge the Leader of the House to reflect on what my noble friend said on that occasion. At the other end of the world, in Egypt, there are people crying out for the kind of democracy that we take for granted. Here we have an opportunity, at the fag end of a Bill that has been difficult for both sides of the House, to say that our democracy is bigger than the partisan divides. I ask the Leader of the House to consider these issues and to convene a non-partisan gathering of all the parties to see if there is a way forward.