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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I agree, and the conclusion is just that: the Electoral Commission should not put out information because that might drag it into the debate. The whole purpose of testing a proposition in a referendum or testing candidates in an election is to allow a free exchange of ideas and views. The two campaigns will, of course, be heavily involved, but there will also be lots of other people, institutions, media representatives and newspapers claiming to be doing impartial analysis on the claims of the two sides. Some of them might even do something that gets close to being an impartial analysis of the claims of the two sides, but they will all discover, as we saw in the last general election, that having something that everybody regards as impartial is an impossibility. The issue behind this debate may be for the political classes only. I do not think that it is the subject of much discussion in the pubs, clubs or schools of Wokingham, for example, but it is of passionate interest to the political classes. A large number of people now earn their living out of politics one way or another, and they will be watching every word and every sign, in every part of the referendum campaign, to see how it is going and whether it is fair. I do not think that the Minister is about to give ground on the non-Government amendments in this group. I would therefore urge him to say to the Electoral Commission, ex cathedra, from his pulpit, ““We love you dearly. We wish you to be impartial. Hesitate, hesitate and hesitate again before you start to make statements about this highly charged territory.”” While there may be 40 million people out there who are not much moved by this subject, there are another 1 million or 2 million who are very moved by it—whose livelihoods depend on it or who are preoccupied by it—who will be watching every word. It will be extremely difficult to come up with that perfect, impartial prose that even describes the system, let alone avoids the obvious pitfall of wandering into opinion. There is nothing more annoying in the heat of an election campaign than for someone to claim impartiality, but then to say something critical of one's own position, which is what happened in the last general election.