Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 4 July 1963.
Mr Nigel Fisher
, Surbiton
12:00,
4 July 1963
That was certainly not my intention. What action I propose to take, or my lack of action, will become apparent as I come to my hon. Friend's arguments. No, this was quite innocent. I just thought that the House should be informed of this important development in the Gambia.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkdale for raising this, as he said, very complicated matter, because it is of some importance to the Gambia and deserves, I think, to be ventilated and clarified. Of course, the opportunity my right hon. Friend had to do this on 28th May was inevitably circumscribed by the limitations of time and form which a statement after Question Time imposes.
As my right hon. Friend then explained, the 1959 register of electors was, by common consent—and I do not think that this is disputed—unsatisfactory. It was therefore decided, in 1961, to prepare an entirely new register—the one which was, in fact, used for the 1962 elections. I will try to explain this as best I can, but it is really very complicated.
My hon. Friend has told the House that the intention was to hold the elections on the 1959 register. With respect, I do not agree. In law, this may be the legal interpretation of the apparent legal intention, but the actual intention in the minds of the people who did it was to hold the elections on the new 1961 register, which had already been prepared by that time, and the trouble arose because of a drafting error in the 1961 Ordinance.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right in saying, in effect, that the law as it was in 1961 provided for amendments to the existing 1959 register, but did not provide for a new register. In fact, the registering officers had legislative authority to compile a new register every tenth year, but for the intervening nine years they only had authority to bring the existing register up to date. So the 1961 register was not legally authorised.
If the Gambia Amendment Ordinance, 1961, had specifically validated the new 1961 register as such—which it could have done and should have done—all would have been well and we would not have been in this difficulty. But it did not do that. All it did was to provide for registering officers to certify the accuracy of their lists and upon such certification, such registers
..shall be deemed to have been lawfully compiled and shall not be open to challenge.
What the Ordinance did not do was to legalise the 1961 voters lists as legal
registers. That was the sole respect in which the error in the Ordinance occurred.
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