HC Deb 23 October 1952 vol 505 cc1407-16

10.11 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sir Hugh Lucas-Tooth)

I beg to move, That the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations, 1952, dated 16th July, 1952, a copy of which was laid before this House on 17th July, be approved. These Regulations relate to the manner of publishing electors' lists which are required for the preparation of the register for elections to this House in Northern Ireland. Most hon. Members are no doubt familiar with the process of preparing the register. This process has been on the same general lines in Northern Ireland as in Great Britain.

In the first place, provisional lists are published. These show the names proposed to be included in the forthcoming register. There is then an opportunity for claims and objections. The registration officer revises the lists in the light of the claims and objections received and forms them into the new register for publication in due course.

The manner of publishing these provisional lists, with which we are familiar in Great Britain, and which was in use for many years before the war, is that they are published in the form of three lists, A, B, and C. List A is a copy of the register in force. List B is a list of names to be added to that old register to make the new register; and List C is a list of the names to be omitted from the current register.

This is the manner of publication of the provisional lists in force in Great Britain. It is also that prescribed by Regulations made in 1950 for the publication of similar lists in Northern Ireland. There is, however, a complication and difficulty in Northern Ireland arising from the fact that the register is also required for elections to the Parliament of Northern Ireland and for local government elections there.

This complication lies in two circumstances. In the first place, under Northern Ireland legislation a new list for the Ulster Parliament and local government elections is only prepared in every third year. This year, 1952, is such a year. In 1952, therefore, the register is a combined register. In 1953 and 1954 the register will be published for the purpose of elections to this House alone. There will be no new register for the purpose of elections to the Ulster Parliament and local government elections there. Meantime the 1952 register will remain in force for internal purposes in Northern Ireland until 1955 when a new combined register will appear.

The second complication lies in the circumstance that the qualifications for voting in elections to the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and particularly for local government elections in Northern Ireland, are not the same qualifications as those for voting in elections to this House. Consequently the combined register contains a good many names of persons who are qualified to vote in Northern Ireland elections, but not in elections to this House; and also conversely, people entitled to vote in elections to this House but not in some, or all, of the Northern Ireland elections. In other words, the combined register differs substantially from a register prepared for elections to this House alone.

I think the House will appreciate the kind of difficulties which have arisen. Perhaps the most obvious is the fact that a register prepared for elections to this House alone does not make a suitable list A for the preparation of a combined register. The other two lists, B and C—additions and omissions—would be too voluminous altogether. Moreover, the combined register must show for what purpose an individual is qualified to vote, whereas the single purpose register need not. I do not think I need enlarge on the complexities involved in that.

The difficulty I have just described is covered by existing Regulations which provide that for the combined register there shall be a single electors' list in the form of a draft register. Although the difficulty is less great than that which I have described, it is nevertheless considerable in going from a combined register to a single purpose register. It is therefore desirable to provide that in the year following the publication of the combined register the electors' list should again be a single list in the form of a draft register, instead of the list A, B, and C method. That is the first thing which these Regulations do.

If that were all however, we should have the situation that in two years out of three electors' lists in Northern Ireland would be a single list in the form of a draft register, but in the third year there would be the three lists A, B and C. We feel that this would be unsatisfactory and confusing to the electors. It would be far better to have the electors' lists published in the same manner every year instead of twice the same and once different. Accordingly, these Regulations provide that in every year there will only be one electors' list which will take the form of a draft register.

These are the technical reasons, which I have tried to explain to the House as shortly as I can, leading to the change to be made by these Regulations. The change will however be helpful to the electors, because an elector who wishes to see whether his name is to be included in the forthcoming register will have to examine only one document instead of two, or sometimes even three.

The other provisions of the Regulations are consequential. There is more printing work involved in printing a draft register than in printing lists A, B and C. Under the new arrangement more time will be required for printing, and the date of publication must be postponed. Accordingly, Regulation 2 of these Regulations provides that the latest date for publication of the electors' list shall be seven days later than under the 1950 Regulations.

The effect of Regulations 3 and 5 is that the latest dates for making claims and objections will be three days later than the new dates which are thus already prescribed for the combined register; that is to say, the time allowed for claims and objections will be the same for the register for this House as for the combined register in the third year. I understand that, in practice, that time has been found sufficient by all concerned.

I hope I have made this somewhat technical matter clear to the House.

10.21 p.m.

Mr. Geoffrey Bing (Hornchurch)

I am sure everyone, on all sides of the House, is very grateful to the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department for trying to explain what is very largely inexplicable—the election arrangements that take place in Northern Ireland.

I feel that, before the House deals with this particular Regulation—because, after all, it is our responsibility to decide whether we should pass this matter or not—we ought to look a little more closely at the provisions of the Elections and Franchise (Northern Ireland) Act, 1946, to which the Joint Under-Secretary has alluded, because whether or not we compile these lists in this way depends on which names go on which list.

Though I spent a little time in studying this matter, I speak subject to be corrected by hon. Gentlemen who represent Northern Ireland constituencies, and I am glad to welcome them in actual debate in the House. We know that they enter the Lobbies, but we seldom have an opportunity of seeing them here. It is a pleasure and a privilege to have them with us in the House, and I hope we shall have some contribution from them.

Subject, therefore, to any correction from the other side of the House, the difficulty in this matter is that there are three quite different systems of the right to vote in Northern Ireland. There is the first, which, without offence, I might call the democratic system, which is that enforced on Northern Ireland by this Parliament, and there is the other system which is enforced on Northern Ireland by the Conservative Administration which, unfortunately, they have had in that country for a considerable period of time.

When we come to the question of how to compile these lists, we must remember very carefully—and I say this without any party spirit—the typically Conservative system of elections. If I take, first, the local government register, one of the difficulties with which one is concerned in the matter of local government elections is to know how many times an individual name should be entered. For example, the Lord Mayor of Londonderry—I speak in the presence of the hon. Member for Londonderry (Mr. Wellwood), who will correct me if I am wrong——

Mr. Wellwood (Londonderry)

May I correct the hon. and learned Gentleman now? He is not the Lord Mayor yet; I hope some day he will be.

Mr. Bing

That seems to suggest that there is something very remiss with the capitalist system in Northern Ireland. Be that as it may, the gentleman who may become Lord Mayor has six or seven votes—I cannot recall the exact figure—but, almost next door to him is a building which is a convent housing 40 people, but there is only one vote for the local government register.

In these circumstances, the House should sympathise with the Joint Under-Secretary in the problem he had to face concerning an electoral list which includes the mayor's name six or seven times and has an asterisk against the names of 40 other people explaining why they have only one vote. This naturally suggests a technical problem with which we must all sympathise. We are only dealing with technicalities. We cannot be concerned with the rightness or wrongness of the fact that 40 people are given one vote, while one person has six or seven votes.

All we are concerned with is which is the cheaper list to print. That is all the House can consider at the moment, and I am only raising this method of making up the register so that the House may be in possession of all the facts and in a position to judge best how the record is made up. We are faced with merely a technical printing problem, and hon. Members will appreciate that all these repetitions are highly undesirable.

Therefore, I would respectfully urge my hon. Friends on this side, if they think my arguments on the matter are good, to accept the proposals put forward in this Regulation. This is going to be an immense saving and is going to avoid all this deplorable duplication. It really is not necessary to print the local government lists so often. I quite agree with the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. Why should these things be reproduced? There are very few names on them for local government elections. Only about half the people who are qualified to cast a vote here are entitled to cast a vote at all in Northern Ireland, and, so far as many people are concerned, they are entitled to cast a number of votes, not of course personally, but as representatives of limited companies.

In Northern Ireland there is a beneficial provision which commends itself, I take it, to the hon. Gentleman because, after all, it was the same party which produced it. But, again, we are discussing whether or not it is desirable to do this.

Mr. Speaker

The hon. and learned Gentleman is quite right, we are not discussing that, and I hope the hon. and learned Gentleman will follow his own maxim in the matter.

Mr. Bing

The point I was trying to make in regard——

Lieut.-Colonel H. M. Hyde (Belfast, North)

Perhaps the hon. and learned Gentleman will give way for a moment to allow me to make a correction. I think he is under a misapprehension. No representative of a limited company in Northern Ireland is entitled to have a vote by reason of the fact that he represents a limited company.

Mr. Bing

Not one vote, but six. Under the arrangement for local government elections in Northern Ireland a company can nominate six persons who can vote on behalf of the company. If we start putting these nominees into the ordinary list, the whole thing as the Joint Under-Secretary said, is going to get highly confused. The hon. Gentleman skated very lightly over the difficulties, and, perhaps, you think, Mr. Speaker, that he was not frank enough with the House and did not explain to them the difficulties which anyone faces who tries to compile a register in Northern Ireland.

Voting with a mass of names would not be allowed under the democratic system, under the Imperial system of election which we have here, certainly not six votes, and why should we have this cluttering up of the list? I think the Joint Under-Secretary is perfectly right and I hope that just because this is a Northern Ireland matter none of my colleagues will be prejudiced against it. This is a scheme to untie and rationalise a highly irrational process. We are faced with quite a different system of election in Northern Ireland——

Sir William Darling (Edinburgh, South)

Hear, hear.

Mr. Bing

—elections which are decided not upon the basis of one man, one vote, but on the basis of property. The hon. Member says "Hear, hear." Exactly, I am glad that I appear to carry him with me on this matter. He has made a great study of Northern Ireland affairs.

As the Joint Under-Secretary of State says, there are two quite different systems. One is a list composed on the basis of property, and the property value is represented by a series of names. The idea that one can combine with that a register dealing with people voting on a democratic basis is, of course, an absurdity. I am very glad that even hon. Gentlemen opposite realise this and have introduced this Regulation in order to deal with it.

The whole matter could be solved if one were at liberty to suggest that there should be the same system of voting in Northern Ireland as there is in this country. That, of course, would be quite outside the terms of the Regulations which we are considering. We are considering the question of combining a register on an entirely undemocratic basis with one on a democratic basis, and the hon. Gentleman has not thought that it is a workable system. I think the whole House will be with him on this, and when we have the approval of these Regulations, I hope that it will be on the understanding that by approving the Regulations this House does not in any way approve the system out of which these Regulations arise.

It would not be proper for me to make any comment on them at all now; otherwise this debate would go on for a very long time, and I think there is a number of hon. Members who would like to express themselves on this question. If one confines oneself to the narrow point of two lots of registers or one, we must all be with the Joint Under-Secretary. In those circumstances, I hope that the House will, after some consideration of this Northern Ireland issue, be willing to accept the Regulations which the Joint Under-Secretary has put before us.

10.31 p.m.

Lieut.-Colonel Sir Walter Smiles (Down, North)

I am sure that the House has been glad to listen to the lecture from the hon. and learned Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Bing). It is always a great pleasure to us to hear the remarks that he makes from time to time about Northern Ireland.

The remarks he made tonight remind me of an occasion in our last Parliament when the present Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister sat in opposite places. Again and again the Leader of the Opposition complained that our Prime Minister attacked Socialist principles and Socialist policy. The policy in Northern Ireland, as the hon. and learned Gentleman has said, is Conservative. We are Conservatives there; we are Unionists there, and that is why we differ from these Regulations. I believe in Conservative principles.

The hon. and learned Gentleman complains about people who run businesses having any vote. Let me remind him of the time when Napoleon said that England was a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon was well beaten by that nation of shopkeepers. Over in Ireland we believe in hard work, thrift and running our businesses properly, and we see no reason at all why people who run those businesses should not have a vote to decide their affairs in the town in which they live.

All the attack tonight has come from the hon. and learned Member for Hornchurch upon Conservative principles, and I, as the Member for Down, North, stand up for those principles in which I believe.

10.33 p.m.

Mr. Ede (South Shields)

I am quite sure that on this side of the House we welcome such a revelation of what Conservative principles are. It was said of the Bourbons that they learnt nothing and they forgot nothing, and they would have been worthy representatives of Down, North.

We cannot alter the system in Northern Ireland. They have been given power to manage their own affairs, and it is fortunate for a large proportion of the population of Northern Ireland that this House has decided that as far as election to this House is concerned it shall be on democratic and not on Conservative principles.

The only point that we have to deal with here is a mere question of machinery. I think it is better, if there is to be a varying franchise, that there shall be one register whenever it is possible to have only one register, so that there shall not be a mistake made when there is an election to this Parliament and, by mistake, one of the other registers gets into the polling booth as the basis for election to this House.

We sincerely hope we can have an assurance that the marking on this single register shall be such as to make it quite clear who will have a vote for this House and that this will be the only register used for elections to this House, for very queer things happen in the course of elections in Northern Ireland. I recall what happened during the election for Belfast on the last occasion when there was an election for the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and the assaults that were committed on people other than Conservative candidates.

Sir William Darling (Edinburgh, South)

Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that the elections in Northern Ireland were in any way corrupt?

Mr. Ede

No, I was not dealing with corruption. Assault is not corruption, but it is an election offence.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Charles MacAndrew)

I do not think corruption or assault arises on these Regulations.

Mr. Ede

I should not have mentioned either subject but for the fact that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, South (Sir W. Darling) interrupted me with a question.

We also want an assurance that the cost of printing this register shall be fairly divided between the Imperial Exchequer and the Exchequer of Northern Ireland, for it is quite clear that we ought not to have to pay for the vagaries of the election law in Northern Ireland. In as much as additional printing is necessary it should be made quite clear that in addition to paying on the numbers of registers used we should also pay a proportionate cost of preparing the register for various purposes.

As I understand, there are not merely two franchises involved but three. There is, I understand, one franchise for the Imperial Parliament, another for the Northern Ireland Parliament, and a third for local government elections in Northern Ireland. It is quite clear that what appears as a single register is a very complicated document. The complications are not caused by this country but by what happens on the other side of the water.

I hope that the Under-Secretary will be able to give us an assurance that the cost will be equitably shared between the Imperial Exchequer and the Treasury of Northern Ireland on the basis of the comparative cost of the document when it is printed and published. I do not want to go beyond that in what I have to say tonight. To venture on any comment beyond what I have made on the subject of the franchise of Northern Ireland would probably be out of order and certainly would lead us to a very acrimonious debate. We can only welcome the fact that a descendant of the famous author of "Self-Help" lives up to the principle as far as the electoral opportunities in Northern Ireland are concerned.

10.40 p.m.

Sir H. Lucas-Tooth

With the leave of the House, I should like to answer the only point put to me which I think requires an answer. It was put by the right hon. Gentleman, who asked about the cost of the register. The position is not altogether simple, but I can give him some figures which I think will cover the point. The extra cost to Northern Ireland arising out of this order has been estimated to amount to not more than about £5,000 for each register. In the case of a combined register, one-third of the cost is borne by the Exchequer here, one-third by the Government of Northern Ireland and one-third by the local authorities. I think that that answers the point raised by the right hon. Gentleman.

Resolved, That the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations, 1952, dated 16th July, 1952, a copy of which was laid before this House on 17th July, be approved.