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VERBATIM
REPORT OF SPEECH
BY FREDERICK FORSYTH |
You will have listened already to quite a number of possible scenarios put to you today. It might come to the stage where Mr Blair feels in perpetuity that he dare not go to the country. It might. However, the present situation is, and has been since the last election, that both the then Prime Minister, John Major, and the then leader of the opposition, Mr Blair, gave firm guarantees that the decision to abolish or not to abolish the pound sterling would be made by referendum and that is still the situation that obtains to this day.
So we must presume that unless there is really some deus ex machina awaiting us which we cannot yet perceive, that will happen, though certainly not before the next election.
When the word referendum came up in the modern context it became very clear to quite a few of us that although our general elections are wrapped around by numerous rules and regulations and legislation - for example, the Representation of the People Act, referendum was in a sort of legal limbo.
It still is in this country today a rather rare bird. We have had regional referendums in the last few years, in Scotland in Wales and for the London mayoralty, but to my recall we have only really had one national referendum on a single issue. In a general election the public does not answer one single question: it votes on a range of issues, it may vote on whether it likes this particular constituency MP or not, or this potential Premier or not. It is accepted that there is only one democratic way of asking the entire public of this nation for its view on one single issue and that is the referendum, but it's still a rare bird.
Referendums divide basically into two categories. the consultancy exercise and the endorsement exercise. In 1975 Harold Wilson, trying to get off a rather well-baited hook, offered a referendum on whether we should stay in. That was therefore an endorsement exercise and we know what the result was.
We have therefore never really had in this country a national referendum on a consultation basis - do you or do you not wish to take this action in the future or do you wish us the government to take this action in the future or do you not? Although this particular body was created to concern itself with the abolition or not of the pound sterling nevertheless if that issue is to be decided by referendum we have to concern ourselves with the methodology of referendums.
Referendum stayed in limbo for quite some time and I think it was probably Sir James Goldsmith who managed to galvanise John Major into giving a flat guarantee that the decision if ever made would be made by referendum. Mr Blair - I'm sure he didn't mean it at the time - felt obliged to match that guarantee and therefore the guarantee remains in place. For either a Labour or Conservative Prime Minister to renege on that would cause a reaction which probably neither of them would relish. I think we can therefore presume that the guarantee is still in place and will one day be fulfilled.
Then came Lord Neill. Lord Neill was asked by the present government to compose a report, basically on the funding of political parties. But he went beyond his brief. He not only gave his advice on how parties should or should not be funded, he included 22 separate paragraphs in the Neill Report on the notion that if we are going to have other decisions made concerning the future of this country that are in their way as important as the outcome of a general election, they too should have certain rules and regulations surrounding them to guarantee absolute fairness.
What it has done since is propose the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill, and this is what your committee has been trying to address. The way the first draft came out it was clear that if the end intention was to create a methodology for calling a referendum which would be scrupulously fair to all parties, it failed and it failed dismally. It probably failed dismally by intent. There were so many flaws in the first draft of the Bill that even the present government has corrected some of them but, in our view, not enough.
In essence the Constitutional Sub-Committee has taken the view that there are at least five issues where there are grounds for considerable concern that a referendum could be in a way fixed or arranged - I think the word "rigged" might be slightly strong - but certainly something less than transparent fairness would probably be present in a referendum campaign conducted the way the present Bill would like it to be conducted.
We have identified at least five areas. At the top there must be funding. This must be scrupulously fair. There are obviously two sides to the argument, and there will therefore be two campaigns, and we all know that the campaigns will not be free in the sense that they will not exist on fresh air and good wishes. There will be money to be spent and how that money is raised, how it is contributed, whether there should be any capping, is crucially important to the fairness of the campaigns themselves and therefore to the possible outcome of a referendum. We have made certain recommendations which have been hoisted aboard by the Conservative Party. We even made them to the Labour Party, where I would say we were listened to with polite attention.
The second area is clearly the media. You cannot in a free society legislate as to what attitude the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun, Independent or Guardian should take. You cannot therefore tell Mr Rupert Murdoch what attitude his extremely powerful News International Group will have. However, there is public service broadcasting and it is felt that here there should be an oversight presence to ensure that at least the BBC - which don't forget is not just BBC1 and BBC2: there are very numerous BBC local radio stations - should have complete impartiality in the presentation of opinion, news and the number of interviews that they give.
Thirdly, of course, there is the question of the civil service. We know that there has been a lot of politicisation of the civil service, and a lot of civil servants are less than happy with the process. In the run up to a referendum the government will be using civil servants but to what limit we would like to know and at what point will the civil servants desist from being the flag wavers of what is clearly going to be one side of the argument? The civil service in this country has a long tradition which it would like to safeguard of complete impartiality in matters political. They do not like this tradition being taken away from them and yet being taken away it systematically is.
Issue four is the timetable. The timetable for the campaign before the referendum is crucial. The government has suggested that it as government should cease to militate for this or the other outcome 28 days before polling day. This has longed seemed to your sub-committee far too short a period because we all know that governments have enormous access and enormous assets that they can use in putting a governmental point of view. The Bill says that from 28 days before polling day the views should be put as party political views but prior to 28 days they can be put as governmental views. We feel that 100 days should be the point at which the government stops militating as a government and lets the campaign proper begin.
The fifth, and last, point is very crucial indeed. Ours is an incredibly subtle language and the framing of the question will have much to do with the outcome of the poll. I can think of ten different phraseologies which on one extreme would cause any reasonable man to say yes and at the other extreme that same reasonable man would have no choice but to say no. The framing of the question will be extremely important and therefore who precisely carries it out will be of concern to us all.
The present proposals are that there will be a Speaker's Committee which will appoint nine persons who will then be the body which appoints the Electoral Commission, which will oversee the actual running of the campaigns. That is where in our view the present government has failed to resist the temptation to pack with supporters of itself and therefore of its own viewpoint the crucial committee that will itself select the Commission.
There are supposed to be nine members of the Speaker's Committee: the Home Secretary, another Minister, the Chairman of one of the Select Committees, plus two more backbench MPs from the government party, giving five out of nine. This we have objected to rather strenuously.
More to the point, the Electoral Commission lacks a lot of the powers that in our view it ought to have. We take the view that the Electoral Commission should be composed of people (not necessarily a large number: 50 has been mentioned but I think 20 would do adequately) who in our view ought to have powers plenipotentiary. This means that all the principal questions surrounding the run up to the referendum ought to be decided by that Commission, which itself should be composed of men and women of visible and transparent and unimpeachable integrity, impartiality and lack of bias. We take the view that if that Commission is selected by a Speaker's Committee already loaded in favour of the incumbent government, it would be difficult for them - perhaps impossible - to resist the temptation to choose an Electoral Commission of a certain political colour or persuasion. We believe, therefore, that the Speaker's Committee should be itself of absolute and transparent and visible political impartiality, which we do not see easily met if five out of nine are either government Ministers or government backbenchers, chosen no doubt for a certain level of proved obedience. We do not see either how it can be that the Electoral Commission has a constant supervisory presence in the form of the Home Secretary.
We have put these points very cogently to the Opposition spokesmen who were concerned with the Bill in the House of Commons, which it has now passed through. It is now entering its Third Reading. It has now passed to the Lords, and we have briefed them also. It may be that it will be the Lords once again, oft derided, a non-elected body though it may be, which will prove yet again to be the guardian of the interests of the common man.
We wait now in some limbo. The Bill has reached the Lords but it has not been debated by the Lords. The amendments therefore that their lordships will produce will be interesting to watch and it may be that their lordships will decided to enter amendments so numerous that the Bill will have to go back to the Commons. It is therefore what Confucius called "interesting times".
If a flawed, thoroughly partial, Bill enters the statute book then we must look to our wooden walls because it is going to be a very rough, tough campaign if we know in advance, for example, that the funds available to the Yes campaign are double or triple those that may legally be available to the No campaign. It will be a very tough fight indeed if the media are heavily slanted against the No campaign. It will be a tough fight indeed if the wishes of the Electoral Commission in any matters of impartiality are overruled by the Home Secretary.
I can say no more at this juncture about where we are: it is in the hands of their lordships, time must be found, amendments will no doubt be tabled, we shall watch and we shall wait with interest. But one thing I would like to say: we have heard many things today about whether we are or are not going to abolish the pound sterling. The key will be that referendum and the key to the referendum will be the issues as to how precisely the campaign prior to the referendum is won and that will depend upon the Bill, so the Bill is absolutely crucial.
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