Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale
There were many clauses, but it was one Bill—one self-contained, sharply focused Bill on the Scottish Parliament, quite different from the hybrid Bill that we have in front of us.
I am not claiming that there was some kind of golden age in 1998 when we were in government and the Scotland Bill was being debated. Of course we got tired and we got angry with one another sometimes. However, we kept our cool and even accommodated in the timetabling of the Bill the late Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish’s love of salmon fishing by allowing dates when he could do that.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I suggest to the noble Baroness that one of the differences between the Opposition’s approach then and the approach of the Opposition today is that then their objectives were absolutely clear. It was also absolutely clear who was in charge of the Opposition.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
I will have a vote in the referendum.
I can let your Lordships into another secret: my noble friend Lord McNally will vote yes. Some might think, as our votes will cancel each other out, we should just stay at home and have a quiet dinner together, but we will not, because both of us are agreed that the British people should have this choice, and we will each campaign for the answer we seek.
How odd it would be if this unelected House, which lately voted overwhelmingly against the very idea that your Lordships should be elected, should have the temerity to tell the elected House how to proceed on its own election or to deny its wish to give the people their say.
The Lords Constitution Committee has now published its report on the Bill. It states that there has not been enough consultation on it. Respectfully, I disagree. The proposals in this Bill apply entirely to the other place. It has been rigorously examined there over eight days on the Floor of the House and through 35 Divisions. It reflects the settled will of the elected House.
On the referendum, the Government have worked closely with the Electoral Commission and administrators, and the commission has declared itself broadly satisfied that sufficient progress has been made to enable the local returning and counting officers to run the polls well and that voters will be able to participate in them.
The provisions in the Bill are sound, and Members of this House should consider carefully the clear signal from the elected House before making major changes in it.
There has been speculation about the last possible date for Royal Assent to allow the referendum to happen on 5 May. I believe there is more than adequate time. It is certainly important that, commensurate withfull scrutiny in this House, we give participants and campaigners in the referendum as much time as possible to prepare for a full and informed campaign. We owe that to the electorate, but it is possible to do that and allow enough time to examine the Bill, which I hope will complete its passage as soon as possible in January 2011.
I do not want to make unnecessary political points, but I remind noble Lords opposite of a forgotten document: A Future Fair for All, the manifesto of the party opposite only this spring, written by their current leader. On page 62, it talks of, “A New Politics”. It continues:
“To ensure that every MP is supported by a majority of their constituents voting at each election, we will hold a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for elections to the House of Commons”.
That was what Mr Miliband thought then, so I take it that we will have full support from the party opposite for the part of the Bill that provides for what it itself promised at the general election.
There is a small quibble: the party opposite promised a referendum by October 2011. The Bill proposes it in May 2011—one year into this Parliament, but that is a far slower timetable than the six-month one used by the party opposite for the referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Is not there a big distinction, in that what the Opposition, then in government, were proposing was a pre-legislative referendum, not a post-legislative referendum, which is an important constitutional distinction?
Lord Strathclyde
Yes, my Lords, but on the whole I think it is better for people to know what it is they are voting on, which is what is envisaged in the Bill.
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, whoever drew up the speakers list clearly had a good sense of humour since my very good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and I have debated the electoral system just about since the river Tamar came to mark the boundary between Cornwall and Devon, and I am sure that we will go on doing so in the run-up to the referendum, whenever that may come.
Before I turn to the other side of the case that he has put so well this evening—the case for AV—I want to refer to the other bits of the Bill in a couple of considered sentences. Governments of every complexion have generally proceeded cautiously on electoral matters, giving them due consideration, using, where possible, the independent judgment of the Boundary Commissions, and avoiding any charge of partisan manipulation. Most Governments have been extremely wary, and rightly so, of making electoral arrangements a kind of war booty to go into the hands of whatever party wins. We have only to look at France, which has enjoyed no such tradition, to see how wise we have been to adopt that. Therefore, it is our duty in this House to ignore the spurious arguments that have been put forward that somehow this is the prerogative of the House of Commons, which, incidentally, has not had a chance to consider very much of the Bill. We must do our duty and give this Bill the most careful, objective and, where possible, non-partisan consideration.
I want a referendum on AV but I do not want it on 5 May next year. Whenever it comes, I hope that the country returns a yes vote. I speak as a member of the Jenkins committee on electoral reform, on which my noble friend Lady Gould, who is not in her place this evening, also sat, and which recommended AV as part of its recommended solution. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who rightly quoted the report, that Lord Jenkins, who chaired that committee and was held in respect on all sides of this House and in British politics, had, by the end of his life, changed his mind. He wanted a move to AV, and he would be arguing for it if he were here tonight.
What is wrong with first past the post? In days of yore, maybe there was not much wrong. In 1951, 97 per cent of voters backed one of the two big parties—Labour or Tory. Nine MPs in 10 received half or more of the votes cast in their constituencies. The change has been dramatic. Today, the two big parties have just two-thirds of the national vote between them, and only one-third of MPs—one-third—are the choice of at least half the voters in their constituencies. That may not bother the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—as long as he was there, he felt all right about it—but it should worry anyone who believes in majority rule.
These facts create a disproportionate House of Commons, of course, but that does not particularly bother me. My objections to first past the post are quite different. It starves MPs of the legitimacy that comes from election. First past the post delivers Menshevik MPs. It encourages perverse political tactics by MPs. We should seek an inclusive politics where MPs try to get as many votes by reaching out to as many voters as possible. With first past the post, the temptation all the time is to concentrate on just enough of your core voters to get you back into Parliament. It gives too many MPs safe seats for life—a matter to which I shall return in a minute. It robs voters of choice. What do you do if you are a voter? Do you back the candidate you most want, or the candidate who has the best chance of beating the candidate you most do not want? First past the post, like rotten boroughs, the all-male franchise and university seats, is a system which people back out of nostalgia. Its day has gone, it is broke and it must be fixed.
Should we therefore go full circle?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The noble Lord alluded to the situation in the 1950s when he said that first past the post worked very well. We are often told that the Conservatives received a majority of the votes in Scotland in 1955. Was not part of the reason for that that really only two parties stood in most constituencies, because the Liberals had been destroyed as a result of their involvement in a previous coalition?
Lord Lipsey
The noble Lord is, of course, completely right historically, although he makes a wholly irrelevant point. In the political circumstances of those days, in a two-party system, first past the post was great. Once you do not have a two-party system and you have a multi-party system—with nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, a complicated situation in Northern Ireland, and a resurgent Liberal Democrat Party—first past the post does not work any more. It is as simple as that.
I do not want to go full circle by going for a fully proportional system—partly because I have never seen the advantage of it. I do not very much like the additional member system, which applies in Germany, because it too much erodes constituency loyalties. I do not like STV, loved by the much-mourned kind of Liberal who went around in sandals. STV again breaks the constituency link. In any case, in our constitution, we prefer to proceed by evolution rather than revolution. That is why we should have AV now and then in a few years, we could take stock again, or go further, stay where we are or, if you like and you can make your case, go back to first past the post.
I want here to confront a paradox. We AVers argue that AV is a relatively modest change and that it would be a change significantly for the better. How can we ride both these horses at once? As Jimmy Thomas said, if you cannot ride two horses at once, you should not be in the political circus. The resolution is like this: it will not make an enormous difference to the results of elections. At the general election in 2010, according to the academics David Sanders, Paul Whiteley, Marianne Stewart and Harold Clarke, it might have led to 22 fewer Tory seats, 10 fewer Labour seats—sorry about that—and 32 more Lib Dems. The effect, if there were to be a general election tomorrow, according to Professor Patrick Dunleavy, would be much less. Even changes of this magnitude would of course have mattered in a close election such as that in 2010, but they are scarcely seismic. However, there would have been far more seats in which the result was genuinely in doubt—so more MPs would have had to work harder to reach out to more people to win them.
I come finally to the main argument that I hear used against AV; namely, that it would help to create a situation where we had permanent coalition government and disproportionate power was given to the third party. I hear this complaint mostly from Conservative politicians. I am not sure how they square their enthusiastic support for the present coalition with the belief that coalition government is by definition a bad thing. It must be understood that in the new political geography of Britain, the strong probability is that coalition will be the norm. It is true that the eight general elections up to 2005 all produced majority Governments, but psephologists have compared this to tossing a coin that comes up heads eight times in a row—unlikely, but it happens. I often back eight even-money shots in a row at the races and they all lose.
First past the post has lost its potency to deliver majority Governments in most circumstances. There has been a very sharp decline in the number of seats that are marginal. According to Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, the number of marginal seats has fallen from 166 in 1955 to just 85 in 2010, so a given swing is much less likely to bring about the number of changes in seats that will deliver a majority to one party or another. There will be fewer majority Governments under first past the post in future.
Lord Rennard
My Lords, I am arguing that if people do not turn out to support an alternative, it is equally valid to say that their vote could be counted in favour, as it is to say, as other noble Lords have argued, that they should simply have their vote counted as a no. It is in the interests of democracy always to encourage high turnouts and that is why I believe that the first Thursday in May next year would be a good time to hold the referendum.
I also want to address briefly the issues of boundary reviews.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but perhaps he can help me. Is not one of the problems the fact that the question that is being put is between AV and first past the post, with no mention of STV, for example? Might there not be many Liberal supporters who support STV who might abstain because they were not getting any of the choices that they wanted?
Lord Rennard
My Lords, there are other noble Lords who favour a two-horse race between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. In an ideal world, I would not favour a two-horse race between AV and first past the post, as many noble Lords will know, but in the practical politics of not having won the general election and having to make compromises, the overarching principle is to allow the voters to have some say in how their representatives are chosen. People have been appalled in recent years that MPs were able to fix effectively the benefits of being in Parliament. A much more important issue is the means by which MPs are chosen and allowing people to have some say on that is of paramount importance. Risking giving them a further choice, which would be my first choice, may mean that they get no say whatever.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, at this late hour I shall avoid the temptation to repeat many of the arguments that we have already heard, but I should perhaps declare one interest. When I was in the other place it was as Member of Parliament for Stirling, having been elected in 1983. Leaving aside the birth of my children, my marriage and other personal events, arriving at the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament was my proudest day. I think that I did so with about 35 per cent of the vote when we had four parties fighting that election, so getting 50 per cent of the vote would have been quite an achievement.
At subsequent elections, without the split in the Labour Party and the SDP, it became harder for me to hang on and my majority dropped to around 700 and then to 500. By then, I was Secretary of State and I had to sign the order produced by the Boundary Commission to take Bridge of Allan out of my constituency and put it into another; that was probably about 4,000 Conservative votes. I did so without any concern at all, other than for me, because it was a fair process with a proper adjudication and inquiry. By the way, it was not just the political parties which put forward their views: views were expressed by the local community and, in the end, the right decision was taken. The result was that I got kicked out of Parliament —there were one or two other factors in that as well—and I found myself in this place.
This place has a very important role to play. It is the backstop; that is our whole purpose. A Question was asked in the House the other day of my noble friend Lord McNally as to the purpose of the House of Lords. If nothing else, it is to protect the constitution. I feel that the Bill is not Parliament’s finest hour. There has always been an understanding and a convention that on constitutional matters we should try to proceed with consensus and by agreement and, if we cannot do that, we should go through a process where matters are properly discussed and evaluated, whether by a Speaker’s Conference or something of that kind.
I understand, of course, the deal that was done after the election but I wonder at the reasons being given for this Bill and for some other Bills which are yet to come before us that are being put forward by the Deputy Prime Minister in his new role. One of the things being said is that it is about restoring trust in Parliament. In my opinion, a number of the best speeches tonight have been made by former Members of the other place. I say “best”, because they convey that sense of relationship which Members of Parliament have with their constituents, whether they voted for them or not, and which they have with the area that they represent. Even when you have been out of Parliament for a long time—I live in my old constituency —you still go around and remember that that was the place where there was this or that problem, and you have that feeling of identity. You come to Parliament as the champion of your constituents. Yes, you are there as Labour, Conservative or whatever, but you are also there as the man or woman for your area.
That is a real and powerful identity, so if you depart from that principle and if Members of Parliament start to be seen as the representative of the party for this block of population in this part of the country, something disastrous will have gone wrong. Thinking back to 1983, one thing that was very sad was that I was a Tory; a third of my constituency had never had a Tory since the Twenties; a third had never had a Tory since before that; and a third had never had anything else. There were bits of my constituency where Tories, particularly with the miners’ strike and so on, were not very popular. Yet you were respected as the Member of Parliament; you had standing and status. The expenses scandal and other things have damaged that, and I find the extraordinary notion that we can repair that damage and restore the status of Members of Parliament with this kind of Bill and this kind of reform a little unnerving.
My experience, going around canvassing during the election, was that people said, “You’re all the same. You’re in it for yourselves. We only see you at the election. You say one thing at the election and then do another”. If we want to counter that kind of cynicism and distrust, one of the things that we might do is keep the promises that we put in our manifestos. The Bill fails miserably on that count. The manifestos made promises about the voting system and the size of Parliament. The Conservatives campaigned for first past the post and against AV. The Liberals campaigned against AV. The Labour Party campaigned in favour of AV. Now we have a Bill that puts forward AV, produced by the Conservatives and the Liberals in coalition, being opposed by the Labour Party, which campaigned on having AV.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Sorry, they campaigned on having a referendum on AV. To be fair, it was a post-legislative referendum.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
A pre-legislative referendum, rather than the post-legislative referendum that is proposed in the Bill. The ordinary voter being faced with the clips that will be shown during the referendum campaign of the Deputy Prime Minister describing AV as “a miserable little compromise”, while at the same time he is promoting the Bill, will do nothing to restore trust in Parliament.
If trust in Parliament is to mean anything, it must mean trusting the voters. The noble Earl spoke eloquently in favour of giving the voters a choice. I would prefer to have the status quo; first past the post seems to work perfectly well. If you are going to open up the issue of changing the voting system and consult the people, however, it seems strange to choose one system and not allow the voters to express a view on it. I look forward to amendments to the question in the referendum that will enable the inclusion of STV.
The Deputy Prime Minister, as part of this exercise in increasing trust and the accountability of the Executive, set up the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee. It was specifically set up to look at the work of the Deputy Prime Minister in respect of the constitutional reforms. Its first report repudiates the Bill and the process by which it is being carried out. How does that help to restore trust in Parliament?
The coalition Government have resolutely refused to reduce the size of the Executive in line with the proposed reductions in the size of the House of Commons. I have put down a Written Question, which I have not had an Answer to, asking how many people are now members of the Government or Parliamentary Private Secretaries, and what the size of the payroll is. I have the feeling that it has gone up substantially. That is not increasing the authority and standing of Parliament.
In a number of speeches today, people have made the point that it seems bizarre that we have Members of this House sitting in the Gallery that is meant for the public because there are not enough seats to accommodate us, but we are increasing the size of this House while at the same time justifying a reduction in the size of the House of Commons on the grounds of expenditure.
There is another thing: it was my party’s policy to reduce the size of the Scottish Parliament. That has 129 Members. It is hard to believe that you need 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament if you are proceeding on the basis of having 55 Members at Westminster. The public will find it difficult to understand why, having previously been in favour of reducing the size of the Scottish Parliament, we now want to keep the Scottish Parliament at its present size while reducing the size of Westminster.
I am conscious of the time. It has been suggested that this is all being done for political advantage. I have a cautionary tale. The Members opposite may not recognise this view of events. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who I am sorry is not in his place, telling me that devolution would kill nationalism stone dead. I remember people believing that, if they had a Scottish Parliament, Labour would dominate Scotland’s politics for ever. It did not quite work out that way. Constitutional change to secure party advantage seldom does. The unexpected has a habit of happening.
On AV itself, I thought that the 1997 defeat for us was an absolutely catastrophic rout. However, the information I have seen suggests that if we had had AV it would have been even worse. AV tends to reinforce the big shifts of the kind that have taken place. We should be very careful about making huge changes to a system that works perfectly well. It is true that there are anomalies in the system. However, the Bill has not been properly discussed in the country. It is the product of a political deal and that is no basis on which to amend the constitution of our country.