Clause 5 - Referendums: frequency
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
This is my first opportunity to have dealings in Committee with the Minister in his ministerial capacity, although we had many exchanges when he was as active a Back Bencher as Government Back Benchers are allowed to be in Standing Committees. I am sorry to say that I found the argument that he expressed in his first ministerial outing to be contrived and unconvincing in the extreme.
We can only deal with what is written in the legislation. Clause 5(3) states:
''Any question as to the number of votes cast in a referendum . . . is determined by the certificate of the Chief Counting Officer''.
Clause 10 states:
''No court shall entertain any proceedings for questioning the number of ballot papers or votes cast in a referendum''.
That is fairly conclusive. I think that the Minister is suggesting—he may wish to confirm or deny this—that the clever and devious legal mind may find other ways to challenge the issue of the certificate than to challenge head on the ballot papers or votes cast. That is disingenuous. There is an important issue here, and my reading of Committee members' body language suggests that there is genuine feeling about it.
There may be a disagreement or dispute over the number of ballot papers cast. For example, if I stood outside a polling station all day and counted 350 people going in to vote, but when I attended the count later that evening the chief counting officer told me that there were only 250 ballot papers in the box, I would instinctively believe that a bundle of papers had gone missing, and I would expect to have a way to remedy my concern. It cannot be right to say that the courts should properly be excluded from that process.
The Minister has cited only precedent and expediency. He has further reinforced what I freely admit is already a well-enforced prejudice against the European Court by telling us that it determined that voting is not a civil right but a political right when it considered a French case. In the school in which I was brought up, voting is very much a civil right and it is to be protected and preserved at all costs. I have always understood that the purpose of our independent judiciary is to protect us against incursion on, and erosion of, our civil rights by an over-mighty Executive, which is represented in this case by a mere Minister who would have to make the decision in the absence of the right of access to the courts.
The matter is serious. I do not claim to be an expert on the precedent and I am prepared to accept that there is a precedent for excluding the courts. However, a precedent for doing something does not mean that it is right. My instinct as a non-lawyer is that it is absolutely wrong to exclude access to the courts on such an important matter. I know of no other example in civil life, especially when political appointees are the
ultimate determinants of a process, where the citizen is denied access to the courts to review a decision. Even a person who was charged with a serious crime—I shall not name the case, although we are all aware of it—on which a court made a decision to extradite and the Home Secretary made a decision to extradite had access to the highest courts to request a review of the Home Secretary's decision, and that is right. It is extraordinary that ordinary citizens of this country can be denied such a right of access on the ground that the right to vote is a political right, not a civil right.
I must press the amendment. I urge my hon. Friends and other Opposition Members to vote for the amendment and against the extraordinary clause 10. [Interruption.] As my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) reminds me, I hope that any right-thinking, free-thinking and liberal-minded Government Back Benchers who do not aspire to a ministerial career will join us.
Question put, That the amendment be made:—
The Committee divided: Ayes 6, Noes 9.