Technical and Further Education Bill
Debate between Eleanor Laing and Tristram HuntMonday 14th November 2016
(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
No, indeed. The hon. Gentleman is technically absolutely correct that the debate can continue until 10 o’clock.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Mr Hunt is excited at the prospect of another three hours from the Minister, but it is incumbent on every Member of this House to judge the mood of the House, the pace of the debate and the necessity of taking up the time of the House. From my observation and experience, a speech of between 10 and 15 minutes from a Minister winding up is usually appropriate and welcomed by most Members of the House.
Technical and Vocational Education
Debate between Eleanor Laing and Tristram Hunt(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Tristram Hunt
The fact is that the number of starts for under-25s has gone down by 11,400. Ministers can rebadge their apprenticeships and reconfigure the figures as much as they like, but people in the country know that on apprenticeships, this lot are not to be believed. [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman may be making points that are not amenable to those on the Government Benches, but he must be heard, no matter what he wants to say.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Eleanor Laing and Tristram Hunt(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Mrs Laing
Yes, I entirely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point. He is totally correct. The fact is that some of us have tried, in all good faith, to improve the Bill, but we have failed to do so. On those matters of principle, we now have a Bill in more or less the state that it was in when it first came to the House. I must not presume what might happen in another place, but let us assume that we will now have to go ahead with a referendum on the same day as the elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and some local elections in England. The turnout for the referendum could be derisory, so it would not have much validity. However, I am now sure of one thing, and the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) has just reinforced my point. As this argument has gone on in the country and the media over the last few months, it has become clear—and it will become even clearer—that the British people will not be duped into voting for a voting system that is representative neither of a fair first-past-the-post system, nor of the sort of proportional representation seen in some countries, which I do not like, although I agree it has some validity. The system we will be voting on will be neither one nor the other—and I do not believe that the British people with their good sense will vote for it.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
Is the hon. Lady—[Interruption.] Wonderful? Yes, she is wonderful, but is she aware that there is no popular mandate for this referendum? It was not in the Liberal Democrat manifesto—the Liberal Democrats wanted to push this through without a popular referendum and to impose this on the British people—and it was not in the Conservative manifesto either. Does the hon. Lady think that the other place might well regard this commitment as having no validity in terms of a democratic mandate?
Mrs Laing
Yes, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct: there is no democratic mandate for this referendum—none whatever. If the proportion of votes cast for the Liberal Democrats in the UK as a whole during the general election in May this year were mirrored in the referendum, there would be no problem defeating the yes vote. The referendum would fail and we would be able to continue with our good, historic, solid, decent first-past-the-post system, which has served us so well for centuries.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Eleanor Laing and Tristram Hunt(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Tristram Hunt
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. It is extraordinary to have begun this process without thinking about the interrelationship between this place and the other place. One does not have to be a Newtonian to think that for every force there is an equal and opposite counter-force. [Interruption.] I am hearing more and more sedentary comments from the Deputy Leader of the House; I do not know if that is the usual form from him.
One would have thought that all these things would be pulled together in an overarching Bill that had some degree of intellectual credibility in terms of the British constitution and the role of this place and the other place. Instead, we have an arbitrary figure of 600, and meanwhile many more people are being placed in the House of Lords. The international comparisons steadily fall away when we think about the federal structure of many other European nations, local rates of representation in many other European nations, the interrelationship between the two parts of bicameral Parliaments, both nationally and internationally, and the role of Members of Parliament today in terms of the volume of work that they do.
The move from 650 to 600 will be an extraordinarily speedy process. I have had the great pleasure of sitting with some other Members present in the Chamber on the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, and we have heard time and again from independent witnesses, scholars and constitutionalists that the speed of this process is unacceptable and will lead to mistakes. Lewis Baston, from Democratic Audit, said to the Welsh Affairs Committee:
“I am concerned about the speed with which this is being brought through. It seems to be an absolute priority to get the new boundaries in place for 2015, rather than to get them right and to consider some of the principles involved. I would much rather we did this properly.”
Many Members share that view.
Above all, the problem with the arbitrary collapse from 650 seats to 600, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) so eloquently and brilliantly enunciated, is the total absence of sentiment or feel for the nature of either the United Kingdom or the British constitution. The UK is not something to be placed under a slide rule and arbitrarily cut up on the basis of a figure of 76,000. There are interrelationships of complex formations between Wales, Scotland, England, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly and the historic Duchy of Scotland—[Interruption.] Or Cornwall, even.
It surprises me all the more that the move from 650 to 600 is being driven by the Conservative party, which I had always thought was interested in tradition, identity, locality and community rather than in utilitarian butchery of the historic constitution of this country. We have been here before; one would have thought that the Conservative party might have learned the lessons of Edward Heath, but it seems to be intent on repeating them. The grotesque local authority rationalisations of the mid-1970s were done on exactly the same principle of utilitarian Benthamite thinking, with no feel for locality or historic identity. People did not like them and rebelled against them. The Bill has blown apart the “big society”, because there is no sense of locality, identity or tradition in it. Instead, it is rampant Cromwellian statism.
I believe that the reason for the arbitrary figure of 600 is simply that it is a big round number, and the Government thought it made sense. I suggest that this place deserves slightly more thought to be given to that matter. The arbitrary move to 600 was not in the manifesto of either of the governing parties, and it has no popular mandate. As a result, I am more and more convinced that the other place has no obligation to adhere to the Salisbury convention and pass the Bill. There is no popular mandate for the change, so we might lose temporarily in this House, but I hope the other place will help us win the war—even as the Government, shamefully and against the constitutional principles of this country, continue to pack it.
Mrs Laing
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who is my colleague on the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. I disagreed with almost everything he said, but he almost had me persuaded when he talked of Benthamites and Cromwellian statism. I am not a Benthamite, and I am not a statist, but—[Hon. Members: “Come over here!”] No, there is more coming. His argument was the most powerful and coherent that we have heard this evening. However, one point was missing, which was the integrity that equalising seat sizes and constituencies will give this place.
Only two issues really matter in relation to this group of amendments, although we have heard much special pleading, not from the hon. Gentleman but from other Members who are clearly concerned about their own constituencies and positions and how their political future might develop if these changes are made to the constitution. That is not what we should be discussing. We should be discussing principle, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central just did.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Eleanor Laing and Tristram Hunt(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Mrs Laing
Of course the hon. Gentleman is right. First, I do support his special pleading to IPSA. Secondly, I am glad to have given him the opportunity to put the record straight on the EEA; we are all better educated for that.
Our duty is not to try to amend the Bill to make life easier for Members of Parliament. What matters is not our certainty about where the boundaries of our constituencies will be drawn, but how the democratic process works. I have thought to myself, “Why have there been so many illogical arguments this evening?” I realise, of course, that it is because of special pleading.
Tristram Hunt
Does the hon. Lady recall, as I do, the evidence that we received on the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which suggested that where there were arbitrary and dramatic changes in boundaries, an absence of democracy often followed, as local party activists and local electors began to lose influence and interest in the local democratic process?