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Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, courtesy of the Sunday papers, I have learned in the past 24 hours that the former chief executive of Birmingham, where fraud in electoral matters was widespread in the course of the past couple of years, has now become the director of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. I am conscious that I may be unduly subject to ad hominem or ad mulierem arguments. However, as an inner city MP, I had experience of that directorate for four awful years between 1997 and 2001, first with a Minister who left the Government, after which I had zero confidence in the Minister who succeeded him; and, secondly, in the new Parliament, with the Prime Minister running out of confidence in that Minister’s successor, who had to leave the Government in the same way. I was immensely relieved when Mr Desmond Browne MP was then given the responsibility to the House on behalf of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and I am delighted at his subsequent rapid promotion in this Parliament, first to Chief Secretary and now to Secretary of State for Defence. What we debated at Second Reading was such an awful a story, in the context of the Bill, that one could not help feeling that anything would be better. I have been delighted by the insistence from those on these Benches and the Liberal Democrat Benches on the proposed improvement in terms of the next set of elections. I have referred to my attitude to the right honourable Desmond Browne MP, as he now is. As demonstrated on a series of occasions, even in the conduct of this Bill, I have great respect for the Minister and I retain the confidence that she will see intelligent reason in at least some of the heterogeneous amendments in this group.