Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

My Lords, I am very pleased to participate in this debate, which is turning out to be a very thoughtful debate with a great many knowledgeable contributions. I, too, am indebted to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for enabling us to have this debate and for launching it in a very fearless manner. It is ironic that we, in this House, are able to raise some concerns—indeed, many concerns— from another place. My noble friend described the concerns absolutely accurately and has done democracy a great service today by permitting this debate and by launching it as he has done.

Although one’s first thought is that this debate is about parliamentary boundaries, my noble friend mentioned electoral administration matters because he has recognised that we cannot examine boundaries in isolation. They are affected by many other factors that were raised so well by my noble friends previously. One thing on which we all agree is that the democracy in this country and in this mother of parliaments, so long seen as a paradigm of democracy, is in severe difficulties at this moment in time.

Only this week the report on a study by the Democratic Audit concluded that democracy in this country is in “long-term terminal decline”, that the British constitutional arrangements are “increasingly unstable”, and that the UK is below average among the wealthy democracies of the OECD. I am sure that those conclusions concern us all; they need to and they do. We all continually bemoan the fact that fewer and fewer people participate in voting, and more and more people say, “It does not matter what we do”. There have been attempts by both the previous Government and the present Government to address the problem. The conclusion must be that very few of these initiatives have actually worked. There have been certain suggestions this morning that are obvious and which in times past we perhaps followed as a norm. We ought to look at those again.

Much more effort ought to go into cross-party, consensual agreement. This is not to the advantage of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrat party or whatever party. This is our democracy, and it is crucial that we work together to try to find a way out of the morass that we are in at the moment. I go along with colleagues who have made the point today that no party leader has been very helpful in the way in which they responded to the crisis in the other place a few years ago. Too many good, honest politicians were left to hang out to dry. We in Parliament are at a loss because of that. It is time to look again at the current state of our democracy.

I can understand that, in opposition, this Government decided that they had to have a new approach. I think that it was a bit simplistic in some ways. They talked about the big society and they wanted to progress localism, and no one can disagree with those ideas; they are very good ideas. In a democracy, no one can be against trying to be more inclusive and to bring more people into the running of the system. Informal arrangements on occasions can work better than a more formal structure, but I think that what we have seen is a substitution of one for the other. I rather deplore the way in which it has been quite commonplace to deplore and to demean the role of the state. The state has a critical role in the way in which society functions and the way in which the quality and the standards of life, and indeed our rights and liberties, are protected.

I cite an example from today. We see on the news the necessity of the state being brought in to ensure that there is security at the Olympics, because G4S, the private company, has failed. At the end of the day, we need the state. I use that as a very pragmatic example. It is not the best of examples, but it is a timely one.

I do not blame this Government, because I believe that generally their response to tackling some of the problems of democracy is well meaning. On occasions, too much stuff is done on the back of an envelope, and things are seen in isolation and not as a whole. I blame my own party in government for how it increased the amount of money spent in constituencies at election time. I used to boast that anyone could stand in Britain at a general election, because all you needed was a couple of thousand pounds. I used to boast in particular to my American colleagues, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to contest elections. Access to stand for elections is important.

Quite frankly, I was very shocked indeed when I looked at the constituency in which I live and from which I take my title “of Westmorland”. I was staggered to find that at the last general election the Liberal MP, Mr Tim Farron, who is a very good and active Member of Parliament, in the long election campaign period of six months spent not £2,000, £5,000 or £10,000 but £41,241 in getting elected. His Conservative opponent was not far behind, on £38,000, while the Labour candidate spent less than £3,000. That makes the point. I am not saying for one moment that people buy seats, but the competition and need for financial resources are clearly quite crippling—and I do not blame this Government for that. This is in addition to the normal parliamentary expenses, which rightly the sitting MP claims. That is an example of where we have rushed in to take decisions that have not been helpful.

I was going to say a few words about registration, but I shall refrain from doing so because my noble friend Lord Wills dealt with it very adequately. It cannot be right that we are sleepwalking into a system where millions of people will be removed from the electoral register. We need to be reassured on this balance of accuracy versus completeness, and I hope that the Minister will reassure us in his response today that we will get completeness as well as accuracy before the new system becomes completely incorporated at this point.

My noble friend Lady Taylor highlighted something that is absolutely critical. Our system of democracy in this country is representative. In the past we may have rejected or attacked alternative systems of democracy. We attacked the communist system of democracy, where the farm workers, trade unions and state industrialists had representatives. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had representatives. We said, “Well, that’s not democracy, because we believe democracy to be representative”. We are now seeing with this boundary review, as my noble friend Lady Taylor said, that numbers are the key. If you start from Cornwall or from Cumbria, you come up with a different conclusion. Because of their nature, if you reduce numbers and stick to a quota with very little movement, the ramifications of where you start are great.

I believe that we have lost a great deal in the notion of representative democracy and the sense of place that is so important. In every country in the world, the identification with a locality is very important. That has been a strength of our democracy. I hope that when the Government look again at the boundaries and come back to us next year, something can be done to work out a system where a sense of place in a representative democracy becomes the centre of the constituency and not just sheer numbers.