Referendums

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Soley for introducing this debate. It is a great pity we have so little time. One of the reasons for that is that we do not organise business democratically in this House. Maybe others will have the guts to try to turn it over, and maybe we will use a form of referendum to determine what we should be talking about, our priorities, on which days we should speak on them and for how long. If we can do that for ourselves, we should then be prepared to trust the people out there and do it for them. Much wisdom was spoken by my noble friend Lord Parekh about what we need to do.

The first big change we should make for any future referendum comes back to the accountability of individuals; they should be required to show publicly how they voted, as we do here. That would be a major move towards getting people to start acting responsibly and playing a part. We have to move on this because, make no mistake, this was not the last referendum. There will be many more demands for other ways to be involved in parliamentary activities, and we should not be afraid of this.

Representative democracy itself is at risk, because so many MPs now act like delegates rather than the representatives they used to be. If they are doing that, they are not playing their former roles. Instead, we should be looking for a participative democracy, because we now have the technology, which is being used in many different ways and will develop even further. The public out there will use it. Millions vote every Saturday evening in entertainment programmes. We may not be involved, but they are doing it; they want their say.

Some 6 million people signed a petition to revoke Article 50 and we have totally ignored it, yet they were moved to do it. A host of changes are being made to how people participate in society and through social media. Parliamentarians and the parties are way behind. People should look at what Tony Blair said on this recently, as he is on the cusp of the coming change. If we do not move with it, we will be swept away by it. The people will take it and then we will have real trouble.

Verify: Digital Identity System

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord knows much more about this than I do. It is the case that HMRC has its own service, the Government Gateway. Since it developed that service, Verify has come along. Obviously one would like to migrate from Government Gateway to Verify and encourage other departments so to do. I am not wholly convinced that we need legislation to do that—I will go back to my department in the light of what the noble Lord said—but we need to win the hearts and minds of government departments and persuade them to make more services available on Verify. That impetus is, I hope, gathering momentum.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, can the noble Lord explain what Verify will do to make our borders safe after Brexit? Will he now review his position on compulsory and voluntary ID and agree that the only way for us to have safe borders is by a compulsory form of recognition?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am not convinced that compulsory ID cards would stop the illegal entry into this country of a whole range of people. The noble Lord will know that in 2010, legislation was passed to scrap the ID legislation introduced by the previous Labour Government. We have no plans to reintroduce such legislation.

Meetings with Ministers

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

There will be due scrutiny of those who bid for the prizes. These are meetings that do not involve government property or government business but are undertaken by Ministers in their capacity as members of a political party, so my understanding is that they will not be official meetings with civil servants present.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, in 2013 the now noble Lord, Lord Lansley, introduced the lobbying Bill in the other place. It does not extend to activities such as those that the Minister just mentioned. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs? Should we not amend the lobbying Act to cover more of the activities now being revealed by the press?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The Government are genuinely open to discussions about how we improve accountability and transparency in our political process. I am very happy to look at those proposals. In the past it has not been possible to achieve the sort of consensus one would like on these sensitive matters of political issue.