BBC On The Record - Broadcast: 20.02.00

Film: MAYOR ELECTION FILM. Will the House of Lords vote to block the election for a London Mayor because the Government is refusing to allow the candidates to send a leaflet free to every voter?



ANNE PERKINS: It's been a nightmare from the start. For more than a year the political show has been haunted by Labour's search for a candidate who wasn't Ken. They only thing they hadn't reckoned on was trouble in the Lords. But that's what they've got now. LORD RENNARD: The stakes are very high indeed because if the government isn't willing to show some compromise with the other parties then they run the risk of these elections not taking place at all. PERKINS: Ministers thought Tuesday's vote was a formality, the light at the end of the long long tunnel of the devolutionary process. Instead they face another crisis, on the issue of whether the Treasury should pay for the candidates to send every voter a mailshot. PERKINS: In the political fairground, communication is everything. Finding ways of attracting the voters' attention takes a big slice of most parties' campaign budgets. In all national elections every candidate is allowed to send a leaflet free to every voter. KEN RITCHIE: While the media has got an important role in telling people about the election, about what the issues are, the candidates should have the opportunity of saying something directly to those who are going to vote. LORD MACKAY: If the government believe mayors are the way forward, then I think they've got to face up to getting the public involved. And one of the principal ways of getting the public involved is to ensure that each elector gets a piece of paper from each candidate. PERKINS: The democratic whirl leaves more and more people cold. The government's committed to finding ways of reviving interest in elections. The personal mailshot is reckoned to be a good way of getting a few more bodies into the polling booths. But there's never been a freepost for local elections. RITCHIE: I think it would be silly to regard London as a local election, London has got more electors than the whole of Scotland, there was never going to be any argument about Scotland being a local election, Wales was not a local election, when we had the European elections that again were London wide, there was a free post delivery for the candidates. Why we shouldn't have it here simply doesn't make sense. PERKINS: For smaller parties trying to clamber on to the political roller-coaster no free leafleting will be a body blow. The Greens are hoping for seats on the new greater London authority. LORD BEAUMONT: Trying to cover electorate for five million is very, very difficult, particularly when you don't have very large numbers of troops on the ground. Greens I think are going to come out in from all over the country to help with this particular election because they know we have a very good chance of getting very considerable representation, but nevertheless there are bits of London, Barking for instance is a green desert as far as we're concerned and unless we can get out there, get the information there, we won't get the votes that I think we deserve. PERKINS: But there's the cost, says the government. Depending on whether you deliver to households or individuals, and the number of candidates, it could be an open-ended commitment to anything up to twenty million pounds - enough to pay hundreds of extra policemen, argued one minister last week. RITCHIE: We believe you could reduce that down to something between perhaps two and four million if instead of saying that they all had their own delivery that we got the delivery co-ordinated that we simply had a single envelope. The different candidates if they wished to produce a leaflet it can be put into the envelope. LORD MACKAY: To be honest, I think if they're going to penny pinch on democracy, they shouldn't have started on this path at all, they should have left London with the kind of local government it had. They started this, they made a great big play of it, they've got to face up to the consequences. PERKINS: The government has another argument. Commercial interests - hamburger chains or a clothing store - might decide to pay the �10,000 deposit and stand, as a cheap way of buying a London-wide mail-shot. LORD RENNARD: This is absolute and complete and total nonsense. In fact the post office has a statutory duty to vet the material very carefully to make sure that no word appears on the election material that is not related directly to the election, so it's actually impossible for this to happen. PERKINS: The government blames political opportunism for this collision. Opposition peers, in another demonstration of their new, post-reform confidence, insist they're standing up for democracy. The crunch is at hand. The Lords vote is not on legislation which they could be made to reconsider, but on technical rules. That means that if the government is defeated, the May elections will crash. Would the unelected House of Lords really risk that? KEITH HILL: It would be an act of the grossest irresponsibility for an unelected chamber to seek to dictate electoral practice to the elected house and we will resist it. LORD MACKAY: The house is now the house the government wanted. they've got rid of most of the hereditaries, they've put a lot of their own people in, it's a new house and rightly I think the old rules, the old way we behaved is up for question. I think on this issue as a Labour MP said last week, when this was debated in the Commons, it's not so much the peers versus the people, it's the government versus the people and the House of Lords is on the people's side. PERKINS: The last time the Lords got the government on the hook like this was thirty years ago, over Rhodesian sanctions... This time, the opposition argues it's because the government itself is turning its back on constitutional convention. LORD RENNARD: As far as I'm aware it's unprecedented for one government to try and impose its view of the election regulations on every other political party. Normally the election regulations are agreed between the parties as far as possible or certainly between the government and the main opposition party, but it's unprecedented now that every single other opposition party disagrees fundamentally with the way the government is trying to change the way in which these elections have, are being conducted. PERKINS: So who will blink first? Both sides are gambling that with the elections so close, their opponents won't take the political equivalent of the nuclear option and risk delaying or even cancelling the whole show. The government could chance running the vote under existing local election rules. But that would probably be challenged in the courts, triggering more confusion and delay. The opposition alleges gerrymandering, claiming the government is trying to fix the rules in its own interests. LORD RENNARD: I think what the government was really worried about was that Ken Livingstone might have been standing as an independent against Frank Dobson as the official Labour candidate and what they wanted to do was to try and handicap his campaign by making sure there was no free post. But they've been rumbled and all the other opposition parties are united in saying that the government should not be able to impose its will on every other party in this way. It's fundamentally undemocratic. MACKAY: I know a little bit about how government works. I think they'll take us right up to the wire, but I would be surprised if they don't back down. But perhaps they think we're kidding and I just have a message, we're not kidding. PERKINS: The twist and turns of Labour's experiment in devolution is not over yet. However the party spins today's choice of candidate the House of Lords is determined to continue its trial of strength with ministers' nerves.
NB. This transcript was typed from a transcription unit recording and not copied from an original script. Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy.