Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Rooker]

18: Clause 1, page 1, line 7, at end insert “in two parts”

[Lord Rooker]

My Lords, when I first tabled this little group of amendments, I included one that was along the lines of a side-title to it: “the people’s choice”. That is what this group is about. At the moment, nobody has asked the people. Nobody has asked anybody whether they want to change the voting system. This group of amendments splits the question into two parts. It is fairly self-explanatory, although it is not as easy to see when they are split up on the Marshalled List. The first question is in Amendment 21 and would ask people:

“Do you wish to change the voting system?”.

People are not being asked this. It was implied by Amendment 16. People were not asked whether they wanted change; it said that it had been agreed to change the voting system. I want to ask people whether they want to do so.

The second part, if there are yes and no answers to that first question, is in Amendment 27:

“If a majority vote for a change in the voting system, which of the alternatives”—

I call them families—

“would you prefer?”.

There are four there; it is a little package. I will not labour the point. I did not invent this. It is a replica, although not exactly, of what happened in New Zealand nearly 20 years ago. New Zealand had first past the post, a very modern democracy and votes for women 30 years before this country did, so we should not lecture anyone there about democracy and parliamentary systems. It had first past the post and there was pressure for change. I shall not deploy all the documentation and so on but a referendum was held in New Zealand in two parts. The people were asked, first, “Do you wish to change the system? Yes or no?”, and then below that on the paper was the second question, “If the yes vote wins, which one of the following do you want?”. The options given were in families—I use that term because of the debates that we have had—rather than in detail. Parliament took it away, worked on it to make it a practical reality and then a year later, in 1993, there was a second binding referendum between first past the post and the alternative, which won the vote and was turned into a practical system. It worked. I do not know how many times it has been used—probably at least four or five—but in New Zealand the people were asked before a change was made.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Perhaps I may ask my noble friend what the turnout was in the referendum. Is there anything that we can learn from that level of turnout?

[Lord Rooker]

I regret to say that I have not brought my New Zealand file with me. I could not get away from the Chamber and my file is across the road, so I do not know. It was a hot issue and I have copies of the information that at the time was distributed to people by the equivalent of the Electoral Commission to explain the systems and what was going on, together with copies of the ballot papers.

I am not going to spend this debate deploying the whys and wherefores of the system. The principle is clear: first, we should ask the people, “Do you want to change the system?”. I can make the case for that but the change, when it occurs, has to be cemented, and that is my anxiety about what is being proposed. This is not intended to be a cemented change, because it is clear that, assuming it is carried, the Liberal Democrats will come back later for a move to PR. Were I in favour of PR, I would go straight to PR, but that is not the point that I am making here.

[Lord Sewel]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. As I understand his argument, he wants to have an initial decision on whether to change from first past the post. If there is a majority in favour of change, that becomes a trigger for a list of alternatives, which, according to the first decision, excludes the retention of first past the post. Would it not be possible to have, say, 45 per cent of the people voting for first past the post and then, when you come to the alternatives, to have any one of the alternatives securing less than 45 per cent of the support of the electorate? What would happen then?

[Lord Rooker]

Amendment 30 takes care of that. I know that I shall be criticised for Amendment 30 but, if you are going to have multi-choice answers, you have to be able to rank them so that there is a clear winner. What I have here are two questions that are intended to be on one ballot paper: “Do you want to change the system? Yes or no?”. If the yes vote wins, which will not be known until the papers are counted, then the second question comes in: “Which family would you choose?”. In New Zealand, there was a year’s gap between the two referendums. The first referendum was not binding but the second one was. It was do or die between one system or another. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said, the second referendum required a yes or no answer and so was absolutely clear.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Can my noble friend confirm that first past the post was not an option in the second referendum?

[Lord Rooker]

Yes it was. First past the post was mentioned in both referendums even though when people were asked in the first referendum, “Do you want to change from first past the post? Yes or no?”, the yes vote won. They then chose what I call, in shorthand, the additional member system as the preferred option from the family. A year later, there was a run-off between a detailed additional member system and the status quo, the first past the post. You could not complain if you were a first past the poster that you did not get a fair crack of the whip in New Zealand, because there were two opportunities. That is what cemented the change, because on two occasions first past the post lost. It lost on the indicative referendum to start with, when the choice came; and then it lost on the binding referendum. So, on the second referendum, first past the post was back. It was incredibly sophisticated, modern and democratic, and this was 1992-93. The system worked, and it is one on which I wanted to model this kind of operation.

They did it and it works, so there is somewhere in the world that we can point to—somewhere that is English-speaking, first past the post, democratic. We are scratching around because no one can find a place where the type of alternative vote proposed in the Bill actually works in reality. I was going to use Canada as an example, but it was not a national election when they used it there, when it all went dramatically wrong for lots of people. It was always in the provinces. If you google Canada and the alternative vote you will come up with a textbook of how to smash the alternative vote. It was not a national election, however, so I am not going to use it.

It was a two-stage question and a two-stage referendum, but my amendments do not cover the second stage. I just wanted to deploy the case and give at least a positive push—or a nudge, in the language—to the effect that it can work, because it did work and there is a classic example for it.

There are a couple of points I did not speak on in the last debate—I showed enormous restraint, as I said to the Leader of the House—because I have got nothing new to add to what I am not going to say now. One of the reasons that I never joined the Electoral Reform Society after I became a convert just over 20 years ago was this issue about STV. That is why I never joined. I have worked very happily with lots of people on joint platforms and would be happy to do so again, but I will never join because it has this thing whereby if you join, people will say, “Oh, he is in favour of STV”. It is the one system I do not like because it forces party people to fight against each other. I do not think that is a clever system. It was also dissected by the Plant commission, which I will come to in a moment, which was chaired by my noble friend Lord Plant back in the 1990s.

On AV, you have to ask yourself what you are trying to do. Are you trying to elect the most popular person for a constituency and then as a by-product get a popular Government, because it is slightly more proportionate? The question that should be asked on this referendum is: do you want a majoritarian system or a proportional system? That is the question to ask. First past the post and AV are both majoritarian systems; there is no argument about that. They are not remotely proportional, so they are in the majoritarian family. But if you want to elect the most popular person, AV will not do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, raised an issue which I have covered later in Amendment 52, so I will not go into it in detail now, about what you do with those preferences for the bottom candidates. It is unfair; there is no question about that. The sixth candidate gets chucked out. That second preference is worth exactly the same as the first vote for the first candidate or the second preference for the second candidate. It is very unfair that someone’s vote should have that value. Amendment 52 gets us round that. But there is not a system that will deliver the most popular candidate.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, gave us a seminar on the last election. I want to read a bit from page 66 of the Plant report, which was a long time ago, about how to get the most popular person elected. You certainly cannot do it by ranking and kicking people out; that does not work. For example, as I tried to explain in a previous debate, the supporters of the first three candidates in a list might all hate each other equally, but each of the supporters of the first three would vote for the fourth. That is what is known as the Condorcet winner—which is defined as the option that beats every other in an exhaustive series of pair-wise contests.

I raised this with some academics upstairs and they gave me a good example of someone who would have been a Condorcet winner, although it did not happen because of the system that was used. Noble Lords will remember the French election when Chirac ran up against Le Pen and Jospin came third. Jospin was the Condorcet winner because, in a run-off with Chirac, he would have beaten Chirac and in a run off with Le Pen, he would have beaten Le Pen, but because he was third he got knocked out. He would have been the Condorcet winner in that case, but he was not because of the way the system worked with the two-round ballot, so the most popular person did not win. That is a good example from recent history and we all know what happened in the French election.

The alternative vote system will not give you the most popular candidate. I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, earlier—that would be far beyond my pay grade—but he repeated the canard about the winner securing 50 per cent plus of the votes. It is not true; it cannot happen under the system in this Bill. In order for it to happen every voter would have to use every single preference on the ballot paper and that will not happen because of what I said last week. I can guarantee that some Liberal Democrat candidates will go around the country saying to their supporters, “Don’t vote and use your second preference because they will work out what might happen if that second preference all goes wrong”. People will not be encouraged to use all their preferences.

There are some problems with the system. I digress because I wanted to point out that every system has its defects; nothing is perfect. You can make an electoral system do exactly what you want it to do. You can put constraints on turnout; you can put constraints on the additional Member system; and you could say to a party, “You cannot have a top-up candidate unless you have won at least one constituency”. I was accused of being antidemocratic when I said that. You do not need a percentage turnout. If you cannot win a constituency, you are not entitled to a top-up. They said, “All that is bad for the Greens”. I said, “Let them go and win a seat”, and they have done that now, so they would qualify. You can do all those things; it is all techie.

I refuse to let my eyes glaze over, but when I am faced with the situation presented in this Bill, it makes me so angry because, at the end of the day, I will have to vote for first past the post, which really sticks in my throat. I am being forced to vote for first past the post because of what is in the Bill: the preference system, the turnout and all the issues which we discussed last week on which we can go into detail when we come to other amendments. Those matters make the situation more perverse and worse than the present system. That is a change I am not prepared to vote for. I am not prepared to vote for something on the basis of, “Vote for this and if we get it right at the next election, we will come back and get a bit of PR, AV+”. Give me AV+ and I will vote for it.

The noble Lord, Lord McNally, would vote for AV+ but he cannot get the person sitting next to him in the Cabinet to support him. That is a bit like the Labour Cabinet. We were presented with exactly the same in the Bill that came to the House in March. People were not asked if they wanted to change. It was put together by a Cabinet, most of whose members did not want change at any price; they just stuffed AV in and thought they could get away with it because it is so close to first past the post. There were the same problems and I made the same speech when sitting on the Bench opposite.

I am annoyed because, at the end of the day, unless there is a major change to the Bill, I will have to vote for first past the post, which I do not think is very good. Also I think people will be misled during the referendum. Perhaps I can give an example: somewhere in the world it worked in a mature democracy and I think it could work here if we asked the people. I wish we were brave enough to do that.

I realise this was all cobbled together in a rush in the six days after the election. I understand that the pressures to get a deal were enormous. I will support the fixed-term Parliament, although I think four years is better than five but I will settle for five years. I accept that the only deal in town was the deal I am looking at now, but that means we should be mature enough to say, “Look, if there is something intrinsically wrong with the system, let us put the case to the people and ask them if they want a change”.

Think of the mandate you would have from that Front Bench, if you could persuade people that, yes, there is demand for a change. The first-past-the-posters would be run out of town and we could get to work on getting a change that people would accept and it might last for the 132 years that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, keeps saying that first past the post has lasted for.

I freely admit that you can all go home because I do not intend to push any of this to a vote, but I wanted to put it on the record that there is an alternative way of doing this. I beg to move.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I was waiting for the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, to come in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

The question was this. Why did we propose a referendum on AV? It was not whether we supported AV or not, but whether we supported a referendum or not. The difference is that on this side of the House we can agree to disagree on whether we are in favour of AV, but what unites us is that we believe it should be the people's choice. The Labour Party denies that.

There are a number of ways in which the amendments proposed would get in the way of that clarity. Splitting the question in this way would risk making it unclear to people what they are really being asked to vote on. If someone was to vote no to the first question for example, why would they wish to answer the second question? Would their votes to the second question still count if they had said no to the first? As the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, pointed out, there is another disadvantage. The amendment allows for the possibility that people might vote yes to the first question but then not want any of the options presented in the second question, which would lead to uncertainty in interpreting the results as to what the voters really wanted.

Another drafting issue with the amendment is that it does not make it clear that it is a voting system for the UK parliamentary elections to the House of Commons. There is also no indication in these amendments about how any of the other voting systems would work. As I said earlier on, one attraction of the approach taken in our Bill is that, for all the arguments that might take place about how AV works, our Bill sets that out in Clause 9 and Schedule 10. Any questions about how AV works can be resolved by looking at the Bill.

In its report on the referendum question, the Electoral Commission noted that there was a great deal of uncertainty among the public about what the different voting systems were. The Electoral Commission will publish information on the different systems to address that. It is realistic to think that the commission will be able to address this sort of issue where there are two voting systems at stake. But in the context of the commission’s observations, it is not realistic to think the same where five proposed systems are referred to in the question.

A referendum on AV replacing the existing system will give a clear choice to the electorate with the ability for people to express a clear view. Offering more than one choice could lead to an indecisive result and confusion over the interpretation of the results. I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Rooker]

I am grateful to the Leader of the House for that reply. I freely admit that this amendment comes from the anorak side of me. This was the most difficult part when I went through the Bill. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, when I read the Bill looking for what I wanted to do, this was the one clause I had most difficulty with. I wanted to raise the issue, but I could not do that in a way that was clear and precise in terms of deploying the argument for a second referendum and how the people had a choice. I could not do that. For 11 years, all my amendments have been drafted for me and I admit to being slightly rusty, but I am learning fast. I then left it alone. All the rest of the stuff in my name is like the other two amendments—very precise and clear so that everybody knows exactly what the issue is. I hope that they were clear tonight. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 18 withdrawn.