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Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

As I indicated earlier, I must claim some responsibility for the fact that the clause has been removed. I will briefly set out the reasons for that. The clause was introduced at the very last minute in the passage of the Bill through this House and—picking up on the point made by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris)—it was my view and that of my hon. Friends that the proposal for a referendum was in the nature of an electoral stunt by the Government. The hon. Gentleman said that this matter goes back to 1997; for all I know, it goes back even earlier. I fear that his party has been the victim on numerous occasions of electoral stunts on the alternative vote by the Government and that it has been given tantalising promises which I hazard to suggest will never materialise. My party did not think very much of these proposals for a referendum, all the more so—I make this point strongly—because it was proposed that we enact a provision that would come into effect in a completely new Parliament without any opportunity for that new Parliament to consider whether it agreed. Even if the complexion of the Parliament changed completely but the Government remained in office, it would have been possible to hold the referendum, notwithstanding the fact that a majority of this House might well consider it unnecessary and undesirable. For those reasons, we think that it was an ill judged proposal. We have indicated, and will no doubt debate during the election campaign, ways of improving the electoral system in this country. My party has some very clear ideas about reducing the size of this House and evening out the size of constituencies so as to make the first-past-the-post system work more fairly and more effectively. We intend to proceed with that and we will have an opportunity to debate it with the electorate and, indeed, the other parties during the campaign. We objected to the proposals, and in the circumstances nobody should be surprised by the fact that, when we were asked during the wash-up negotiations whether we considered them acceptable, we said, as we had done throughout the passage of the Bill, that we considered them to be an electoral stunt and did not wish them to be in a constitutional Bill of this nature.