My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, appears to accept that this proposal constitutes a threat to our electoral system, but he says that there are far more severe threats and therefore, among other reasons, he will not support the amendment. I congratulate my noble friend on raising this issue; he is right to do so.
As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has done, I would like to point out the danger that this proposal could lead to a vast amount of work for electoral registration officers, as we have seen already. It is certainly quite a weighty SI. I go back in history to the time in the late 1960s when Roy Hattersley first made a concession in this area. Since that time, this thin end of the wedge has been increased and expanded massively.
I would like to hear from the Government whether there has been evidence of fraud as this overseas franchise has developed over the years, and the extent of that fraud. As has been rightly pointed out, the further away you are from the UK geographically, the more likely it is that it is very difficult to verify statements that you make. You can get a friend, perhaps of long standing when you have been abroad for a long time, to do that.
6 pm
The slogan of the Boston Tea Party was, “No taxation without representation”. What we have in this case is clearly representation without taxation, as people can have very vestigial links. When I had a
place in France, I met many of those people; they were good people, but they had no serious links with the UK. We are talking about a context where there is great concern in the country about foreign interference in our electoral processes, so do these proposals give greater scope for such foreign interference?
I raise again the question of sanctions. For example, it is said that if people living overseas contravene the provisions of the SI by fraud or other means, they will be subject to fines. Surely that is absurd. How can any fines be enforced on someone who lives a good distance abroad? This is just window dressing; it is a spurious suggestion.
We are bound to ask some questions—but I will be brief. What are the pressures behind this proposal? What are the demands and how great are they? Is there evidence of fraud in the past? What is the real motive of the Government in pressing this? My noble friend Lord Khan put his finger on the motive: it is not the advance of democracy; instead, it gives the opportunity for many people to interfere in our elections.
This is surely a partisan proposal; it will benefit the Conservative Party, according to many estimates. What expectations do the Government have about the number of donors, some large, who may suddenly surface as a result of these proposals? In their dying days, this Government have brought forward these proposals. My hope is that an incoming Labour Government will speedily reverse them.