Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Glentoran and Baroness McDonagh

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glentoran]

My Lords—

[Baroness McDonagh]

Perhaps I may answer my noble friend’s point. I will then be happy to give way to the noble Lord.

[Lord Glentoran]

I just wanted to answer that point.

[Baroness McDonagh]

No, it is my point to answer, I believe. I shall be happy to give way to the noble Lord afterwards, if he will let me answer. I thank my noble friend Lady Armstrong for making that point, which she managed to put much more articulately than I could.

If the Government want to break with a community of interest, they should introduce a system like that which exists in Israel. It is a pure PR system, based on a list. I would have no problem with the Government putting that to the electorate. What I have a problem with is their coming in by the back door with a system of government on which nobody has been able to have a say and of which nobody has had any pre-legislative notice.

I turn finally to the question of how I came to the number 630. My starting point was not what would benefit the Labour Party but the assumption that county boundaries are sacrosanct. I used local government boundaries as building blocks, because most local government wards are communities. I also believe—I know that we will get into this later in the debate—that we will cause terrible harm if people have to seek different councillors and MPs within a small area such as a local government ward. By doing this, we will just turn people off our politics and our democratic system. I used those as building blocks. How then can you get constituencies that are roughly the same size? To do that you are forced up; you are forced to build up and you get to 630. It was not a top-down effort on my behalf. I did not approach the exercise in the same way.

[Lord Glentoran]

I thank the noble Baroness. I have two or three points to make. I did not talk to anybody to get my peerage—I happen to be a hereditary Peer. That is why I am here and why I have been here as long as I have. I am a Conservative through and through, although I of course support the coalition. I live in a country where we have single transferrable voting and a total nonsense at the moment of some form of Executive which seems unable to make decisions. I for one—I think there are many people in my party like me—am not looking to pave the way for a different form of voting, as the noble Baroness said.