Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Alan Reid

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

If my hon. Friend thinks that the Deputy Prime Minister—the great reformer—has read the report of the Welsh Affairs Committee, I am afraid that he is mistaken. The Deputy Prime Minister has not even read Ron Gould’s report or been present in the Chamber since 6 September, so the idea that the Government will take into account any of the evidence is nonsense.

[Mr Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman mentions the Gould report. The problems in the Scottish elections in 2007 were caused because the Labour Government decided to have a ballot paper on which people had to put two crosses in two separate columns. If he had read the Gould report, he would know that that was what caused the problem. In this case, there will be three ballot papers and people will have to put an X on each of them. That is far simpler. Clearly he has not read the Gould report.

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. Gentleman is making the same mistake that the Deputy Prime Minister made, which is not to have heard the comments made just an hour ago by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) on the same point. What the hon. Gentleman has described is not the reason why we object to the referendum and the elections being held on the same day. He really must do a service to his constituents, bearing in mind that they will suffer huge consequences, by listening to the evidence and listening to the debate. The other problem with having a referendum on the same day as national elections and council elections outside London is the differential turnout. Irrespective of the result on 5 May 2011, and whichever way the vote goes, there will be questions about the legitimacy of that vote because of differential turnouts. Who is to blame for this? The Deputy Prime Minister, the great reformer.

Labour supports a referendum on AV and agrees with the principle of creating more equal seats, but this Bill is a bad means of delivering both objectives. It is too inflexible and too hasty, and it will lead to great and ongoing political instability. This House has failed to improve the Bill because it has not been allowed to do so. To our shame, that task now falls to unelected peers in the other place, whom we must now rely on to inject some democratic principles into what, to date, has been an inglorious episode in recent parliamentary history.