Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 31st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, towards the end of a long speakers list in a debate in this House, someone stands up and says, “Everything there is to be said on this topic has been said, but not everyone has yet said it”. That usually raises a laugh, as it has today; good jokes, like wine, improve with age. Here I have invented a variant on the old saw for Committee stage: “Everything possible has been said on this amendment but it has not been said everywhere. The matter can be raised on the Bill”. That is what a harsh critic would say.

I want to say why my amendment is different from earlier amendments which laid down that the referendum should not take place on 5 May. In our earlier debates, the arguments that we concentrated on for not having it on 5 May were that it clashed with the Welsh Assembly elections, the Scottish Parliament elections and the local authority elections, that this would lead to a lot of political noise—particularly as Liberal Democrat and Labour candidates fought each other—and that that would not be an atmosphere in which there could be sensible consideration of this issue. Those arguments are all valid. My amendment is compatible, I admit, with 5 May as a referendum date. It is three months after Royal Assent. We have only to give the Bill Royal Assent on Thursday night. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will be delighted if we achieve that timetable. Stranger things have happened in these Houses of Parliament, so it would be possible to have it on those days. All that the amendment lays down is that there must be three months between Royal Assent and the referendum to consider the matter. That is three months for information, persuasion and contemplation before decision.

Let us consider the present state of public opinion. I am taking a large poll done by YouGov in September last year. It asked first whether people had heard of AV and knew what it was. Roughly one-third said yes, they had heard of it and knew a bit about what it was. Of that one-third, I bet that half were lying—they did not know what it was, though they may have heard of it. One-third said that they had heard of it but they did not have a clue what it meant, and one-third had neither heard of it nor had a clue what it meant. That is the information backlog that we face as we run up to the referendum on this issue. There is a huge job of basic education to be done before we even get to the arguments for and against. Those arguments, which anyone studying the House’s proceedings on Part 1 of the Bill will have heard quite often, are difficult and balanced and need the most careful consideration. The electorate must think very hard about what they are doing.

The suggestion that this can be done in less than three months is not right. Yes, in that time a referendum can be held—the Electoral Commission can do its work, the ballot papers can be printed and so on—but we will not get a properly valid answer. I say that whether it is the answer that I want, a yes, or the one that many noble Lords want, a no. It will not be properly valid because the people will not have had long enough to contemplate the proposition put before them.

If the verdict seems invalid, that will have consequences for legitimacy. The side that loses will be able to stand up almost immediately and say, “It was fixed. It was cooked. This referendum is not the considered view of the British people. It’s a referendum held at a time to suit a political timetable”. Why on earth the Liberal Democrats want the referendum on 5 May continues to escape me, but they clearly do. That would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the verdict.

It is also true, of course, that had the House made faster progress on the Bill—I do not attribute blame on all this; I am delighted that we are now belatedly making progress—the Bill might by now have been law and the campaigning able to be started, so there would have been time to inform the public. However, the passage of time has meant that the time available for contemplating the actual issue in the referendum has been squeezed. My amendment says that it must be squeezed no further. There should be a three-month period between Royal Assent and the referendum. I hope that this is a common-sense proposition in a common-sense amendment and that therefore it will become a consensual amendment around the House. That just shows that I am a very hopeful sort of a chap. However, it should be understood that the argument is as I have set it out. If the Government reject it, it will be for reasons quite other, and arguably less reputable, than the House and the country have reason to deserve.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I intervene briefly and again address my remarks to the Liberal Democrats. They know from previous debates that I support the referendum and am in favour of electoral reform and a version of AV. Therefore, what happens in the polling booth is of great interest to me, as indeed it should be to them. The question is, in what circumstances is it more likely that the AV referendum will be won? I put to them two distinctly different scenarios: one where a person walks into a polling station, having heard a campaign, and votes for it deliberately, in circumstances where it is highly likely that those who are opposed to it will not bother going to the polls. The advantage of having a referendum day on its own is that it would concentrate the minds of those who were in favour of change to go and vote, whereas those who were against change would, more likely than not, simply stay away. The danger of holding a referendum on the same day as an election is that everybody will go to the polling booth and they will all vote. Those who are opposed, who otherwise would not turn up at the polling booth, will then go and vote against electoral reform. The Liberal Democrats will regret what they have done during the course of this Bill. The referendum will be lost for the reason I have given and they will bear the responsibility for that as they will have set the electoral reform agenda back decades.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

[Lord Lipsey]

I shall follow directly on from what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, and I shall be extremely brief, so my noble friend will not be kept waiting long. In one way, I shall go further than the noble Lord did and say that many of the principles incorporated in the amendments are already present in the Bill in the rules under Clause 11. For example, it states, more explicitly than the present rules, that

“local government boundaries as they exist”,

on the most recent council elections, should be a special factor that the Boundary Commission can take into account. It states that a special factor that the Boundary Commission can take into account is local ties. County boundaries, as we know, most famously in the case of Cornwall, are exactly the sort of local tie that it can take explicit regard of. So those principles are in the Bill. The trouble is that they do not amount to a row of beans because of the 5 per cent limit. That is the problem. Otherwise we would not face this difficulty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Perhaps I may take my noble friend back to the very interesting and constructive contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. I am being very serious when I say that because what he suggested might, in some ways, influence any negotiations that take place. He placed greater emphasis on the numerical calculation than on the area of the amendment with which we are dealing. I ask my noble friend to press the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, perhaps to intervene more, not only on the Floor of the House but with his colleagues, because that is the way forward on the Bill.

[Lord Lipsey]

I have probably known the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, even longer than I have known my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, and no one has ever accused him of being as ineffective behind the scenes as he is effective on the public stage. I rose immediately after he spoke in order to agree with him and to show that here we are finding common ground, which is desirable for the conduct of the negotiations that are now to take place and will help the Committee out of the current impasse, so accurately described earlier in our proceedings by the Leader of the House.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. It says a lot for his assiduity, and for that of most Members of another place, that they are prepared to work very hard for people who will never have the chance to vote for them. Those who are cynical about Members of Parliament should bear in mind that remarkable and cheering thought.

I turn to another fact that I had not realised before I prepared for this debate. The system that I propose for discussion in this amendment, whereby constituencies are equalised by virtue of population rather than electorate, is more common in other countries than the use of electorates. Britain has a jolly good constitution; we love it very much and certainly I am not knocking it. However, we should consider this. It is not a silly idea for a system that no country uses. Lewis Baston of Democratic Audit states:

“Most countries use some measure of total population to serve as the basic measure of constituency size, either total population or a modified population such as voting age population … or citizen population. Britain is a member of a minority, albeit a significant minority, of countries that use registered electorate”.

He states that the ACE Project shows that half the countries of the world use total population and one-third use registered voters as the population base. No doubt there are all sorts of ingenious combinations of the two. Countries that use population include decent democracies such as Germany, perhaps slightly less decent democracies such as Italy, and Hungary and the Czech Republic. That is a pretty good list of countries that think the population measure is right. If we are internationalists, we should consider whether we could learn from them, as my other argument suggested that we could.

I see that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will reply to this debate. I should be astonished if he did not stand up and say that estimates of population are to a degree inaccurate, which of course is right, and are to a degree out of date. That is also true, although it does not mean that if we decided to go down the population route, it would be beyond the wit of the Office for National Statistics and others to produce more up-to-date estimates of population for this purpose than they do at the moment.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Is not one of the problems with the Bill the fact that the Lewis Baston material on countries that use population bases does not include how those population statistics were produced? One would have thought, when obviously the Bill was going to be surrounded by discussion about population, that research would have been done by officials in the department to establish the basis on which other countries use population figures. Have they a different way of drawing up census information? None of that information has been made available, which makes it very difficult for us to argue the question of population during the passage of this legislation.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend makes a very shrewd point. I look forward to discussing that with officials when we have our exciting meeting on notional electorates. It might mean that we go from three to 4.30 in the morning on Sunday, rather than from 3 to 4 am, but I shall be delighted to do that and to bring him the results of any information that they are able to provide.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, with this clause, we reach Part 2, which is a more technical part of the Bill—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

[Lord Lipsey]

I am sorry. I thought that the noble Lord had resumed his seat.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I thought that I was taking an intervention. I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me. The Government will not get off that lightly.

The Government should be reminded of the relevant sections in the very well written report of the House of Lords Constitution Committee on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I understand that the report’s recommendations were carried unanimously by the membership of that committee. All parties subscribed to the principles set out in paragraph 11, which states:

“We regret the fact that this Bill has not been subject to either pre-legislative scrutiny, or to prior public consultation”.

That is to say, Liberal Democrat and Conservative Peers all support that statement.

The report continues:

“We conclude that the Government have not calculated the proposed reduction in the size of the House of Commons on the basis of any considered assessment of the role and functions of MPs”.

My noble friend’s proposed inquiry would do precisely that. It is fair to ask the question: why 600? Why not 590? Why not 500, as my noble friend Lord Rooker has suggested? Why not 550? Why not 700 or 800? All the coalition Government have done is pick figures out of the air and say, “Yes, the Liberal Democrats want 500; the Conservatives want 600. Let’s settle on that figure”. That is not the basis on which the size of what is perhaps the most important Parliament in the world should be decided.

We then have to consider the whole issue of Lords reform. Until we know what the arrangements for an elected House will be, how can we even begin to comprehend the nature of the relationship that will develop between individual constituents—because there may well be individual constituents—and Members of an elected House of Lords, and the extent to which that will impact on how many MPs there should be in the House of Commons? That matter has not even entered into the discussions that have taken place prior to the introduction of this legislation.

There is also the whole question of population, on which I intervened during my noble friend’s speech. I have pondered over the Christmas Recess on why population should not be taken into account when, particularly in the inner cities, many of the people who come to MPs’ surgeries would be excluded from the electoral register. I cannot see why those groups who are excluded should not be taken into account when one is deciding the workload of a Member of Parliament and the size of any constituency.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I accept that there will be great difficulty explaining to the country what the implications of the AV vote will be, but that is why the referendum should be held on a separate day. I am convinced that it will be extremely difficult to explain to the country what the AV vote is about. If it is held on the same day as the local elections and all the other elections, it will be virtually impossible. People will not understand the implications of any different voting system if we stick it in on the same day as the local elections. However, that is what the House has decided to do, in its wisdom, and we are therefore in a very difficult situation, making the whole business of what the vote is even more complicated than it was already.

I am just amazed at how calm everybody seems to be in this House, collectively, about allowing the Bill to go through and allowing the referendum to be held on the same day as the local elections, which will fundamentally change the whole way that this country votes, when I think that we mostly agree that people will not really understand the implications of what they are doing when they vote in that referendum.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, this is by no means the first time that I have been not asleep at this hour due to the joys of debating the merits of AV and so on, but there is something still more exciting to come, because before the Bill is finished I confidently predict that at one or two in the morning we shall get on to the relative merits of d’Hondt and Sainte-Lague and the three Imperiali largest-remainder formulae, a matter on which my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours will no doubt illuminate the House as he has on this. I cannot support, however, the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Rooker any more than he could support the one put forward by me earlier.

It takes me back to the days, the happy days indeed, when I was sitting on the Jenkins committee. We got many, many proposals on the Jenkins committee for various systems of weighted voting. D’Hondt as the noble Lord, Lord Henley, with his great knowledge of these matters surely knows, is not a weighted voting system. All the many proposals on weighted voting systems had one factor in common; they were invariably written in green ink and therefore we on the commission did not have to spend as long considering them as we might otherwise.

There are two reasons of substance why this amendment should be rejected. The first is that Churchill’s neat phrase does not reflect the reality in many voters’ minds. It is not true that the most important choice for voters is who they put first and who they put second and they do not care who they put sixth and who they put seventh. If you take my case, in a constituency where there were some serious candidates and towards the bottom of the ones with a chance there was the Democratic Socialist Crosland Labour-affiliated candidate and, on the other hand, the British National Party candidate. I would feel extremely strongly that I preferred the first of those options, whatever I was doing further up the list between those candidates who really had a chance. In reality, there is no way of measuring the strength of people’s preferences, or the amount of thought they have put into them, and it is therefore better to treat all preferences, as AV does, as of equal weight.

The second argument has been touched on and it concerns complexity.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

When my noble friend goes into the polling booth and casts his first preference for Labour and he might be tempted to cast his third preference for the Liberal Democrats, is he, in his own mind, giving that third preference the same weight, when he votes for the Liberal Democrat as he would to Labour, his first preference?

[Lord Lipsey]

It depends on the circumstances in the particular constituency. In my own constituency of Brecon and Radnor, there are very real choices to be made, due to the fact that the Labour candidate, alas, is not a front-running candidate in that seat. That is a choice that I hope to avoid having to make when AV has come into being and I can put my first preference first and then my other preferences in their order without any danger of defeating my preferred second choice by voting for my preferred first choice.

I was going on to say that I think the complexity of the Rooker system and the sheer difficulty of explaining it counts very heavily against it. I do not take the view that voters need to understand absolutely everything about voting systems in order to cast their vote, any more than, when I get into my car and turn the key, I require to know all about how the engine works before I drive off. I need to know certain things, such as how to steer, but I do not need to know how the engine works. There are degrees of complexity and, frankly, the Rooker system would be simply impossible to explain. I do not think many people would buy the explanation that was being given. I am sure my noble friend did not have this even in the back of his mind, but one is tempted to think that a complication of this kind is a well-designed sabotage bomb to make sure that the referendum on AV is lost. Therefore, I cannot support the amendment and hope that the House will not support it tonight.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend would say that, but I cannot possibly comment because I believe of course that AV will win a referendum whenever it is held.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

They would have something to say if the amendment that I tabled was accepted. I have tabled an amendment that would be extremely helpful to the Liberal Democrats on that very issue.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, perhaps I might intervene as a supporter of AV. I agree with nearly every word that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said. There is a slight Alice in Wonderland feel about today. I have popped in and out of the Chamber and on many occasions when I came in, I heard the noble Lord, Lord McNally, saying that this was a simple Bill. Every time I hear him say it, I look again at Clause 4—Clause 4 stand part is part of this grouping—and find so much legalistic rigmarole that, despite having many years of experience of parliamentary draftsmen, I find it extremely hard to comprehend. Given the compelling case that has just been made both by my noble friend and by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, it is very hard to understand why on earth the Government continue to want to hold the referendum on 5 May. I find that particularly hard to understand of my noble friend Lord McNally—I call him my noble friend because we have been friends for many years. Like me, he is in favour of a yes vote in the AV referendum. The Liberal Democrats, who seem to want this vote to be held on 5 May, are in favour of a yes vote in the referendum, but the one thing that will make it very difficult for proponents of AV to win that vote is to hold it on 5 May.

I have heard only one argument with any force that it could be to the advantage of AV campaigners to hold the referendum on 5 May and it is that turnout in Scotland and Wales will be higher on that date because there will be regional elections on the same day and that will help. However, that is conceptually ridiculous. Let us suppose that the Scots would be 10 per cent more likely to vote AV than people in the rest of the country, and let us suppose that, as a result of having the two elections on the same day, the turnout would be 10 per cent higher. If those two extraordinary assumptions were true, it would make a difference to the national vote of something like 0.1 per cent. Any advantage that might be gained from a higher turnover would be absolutely negligible in terms of the outcome of the referendum. However, why look into the crystal ball when you can read the book? We have YouGov polls, so we know what the level of support is in each part of the United Kingdom. Support in Scotland is precisely the same as that in England and more or less the same as that in Wales. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason for a differential turnout to favour those in support of the alternative vote system.

However, there is a major reason to suppose that it would be bad news for AV if we had the referendum on 5 May, and it is this. When it comes to the battle over the referendum, supporters of AV have one enormous advantage. Unlike in this House, where most active Members—I freely concede this—are opposed to AV, there is a network of supporters, most of them in the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrat party, who are prepared to work their socks off for a victory for AV on whichever day the referendum is held. They are networking and phone banking and so on. I doubt whether there is a similar organisation of people opposed to AV, although I am sure that a very sophisticated campaign will be run by the nice Mr Elliott who runs the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and I am sure that they have done very well to get him on their side. However, we will cast this huge potential advantage to the wind if we hold the referendum on 5 May. If you think that Liberal Democrats campaigning in a local election are going to be able to turn their attention from supporting their candidates, who are whipping them on, to manning the phone banks for AV, you are mistaken.

More powerfully—and I can say this with a great deal more authority—the idea that Labour supporters fighting Liberal Democrats up and down the country, condemning Nick Clegg for the disgraceful abandonment of his election pledge on tuition fees, and trying to eliminate the Liberal Democrats as a party in this country will at the same time on the side go out and hit the phones, saying “Would you mind voting for AV? It might help our little Lib Dem friends”, is a complete absurdity. The result is that, if the referendum is held on 5 May, we who are in favour of AV—and I do not claim, and never have claimed, that our task is an easy one—will have cast aside our greatest advantage and will have handed a greater chance of victory to those who would block what we are trying to do.

I can understand the Conservatives supporting that way forward and I can understand those on my own side who do not share my view about AV supporting that point of view. However, I was greatly cheered to hear the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes—whom I hugely admire and whose performance throughout our debates on this Bill has been so remarkable—cheering and nodding at some of the analytic remarks that I made, even if he would not necessarily support the conclusion to which they were directed. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, too, could share the preference for 5 May. But I have to ask: what is the noble Lord, Lord McNally, up to? Does he not want to see the result for which he—like me—has worked for so many years? I am mystified by the coalition’s stance, purely because of the realpolitik involved; that leaves aside the whole argument that I have developed on other occasions about what I almost call the “immorality” of combining different sets of issues, including sub-national Parliaments, Assemblies, local government, a change in the voting system for national elections all on the one day, which is a cruelty to inflict on the willing but sometimes confused electorate, who although willing may be confused by such shenanigans.

I beg the noble Lord, Lord McNally to think again and to look at the analytic case both in terms of the result he wants and its merits. I know that as he is a good and clear thinking man, he will conclude, whatever he may say tonight, that the right thing is to abandon 5 May and to have an early but separate referendum so that the British people can concentrate on resolving this issue for the good of the nation.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I do not want to detain the Committee but, until I read the Marshalled List, I was unaware of the issue that my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock was going to raise.

The more I think about it, the proposition in the Bill is utterly ludicrous. The Liberal Democrats must understand that the idea that we will have joint platforms either for or against the question being answered positively does not arise. The Liberal Democrats more than any other party should know of the bitterness that often exists at local level during campaigning. How is it possible to have a full, honest, open and participatory debate if the people at the heart of it are factionalised and arguing among themselves about the greater issue of who will be in Parliament and who will be on the local authority? I cannot understand the logic.

Who is driving this on? Where is all the pressure coming from? After four days of listening to these debates, have not Liberal Democrats and the coalition realised that there might be something wrong with the way in which we are proceeding, particularly when some of us are passionately in favour of electoral reform? We are worried that it will all go wrong. The only way forward, it seems to me, is for the parties in the coalition to sit down privately, without telling anyone, and to think through again whether there is a need to further amend the proposed legislation, perhaps even against the new timetable.

What is the pressure for the timetable? Why in the first year are we faced with a Bill for a five-year fixed-term Parliament? Why are we so preoccupied in this year one in getting through the legislation in this form? Can we not afford another 12 or 18 months? What will be lost by delaying and getting the question and the process right? We would then have a chance of a successful resolution. We are being stampeded into a decision. It is like a panic-based decision, which will result in it all coming apart. If it does not come apart, we will end up with the wrong system. The Conservative element of the coalition will be faced with an electoral system for which it will be held responsible historically. Why cannot the coalition just sit down for perhaps a matter of months to reconsider this part of the legislation with a view to coming back following the inquiry that a number of us have asked for, having decided on a proper system and process?

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lipsey

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

That is not something that I condone, but it is insignificant compared to what happened and to what we picked up on the doorstep during the course of the three campaigns to which I referred. I remember the Bermondsey campaign, which was utterly appalling. The Liberal Democrats believe that they can break through on the back of AV, and they will ruthlessly use this system. I warn the Conservative element in this coalition that this will backfire.

[Lord Lipsey]

It is very tempting for me to think that, having heard the formidable argument put forward by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, it is necessary to reply to each of the points he made because as a supporter of AV, I could, and would, readily do so. I think I have some sense that the House would prefer to proceed a little more rapidly than that would imply, and therefore I will resist that temptation and keep my remarks as brief as they can be in view of the substance that I need to impart.

I noticed that during my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours’s speech, the Lord Speaker deserted our proceedings. I can only think that she was so convinced by my noble friend’s arguments that she realised that she was not a legitimate Speaker of this House. She was elected by AV, a system which my noble friend was destroying, and perhaps because she had not heard me put the counter-case, she felt it necessary to desert her seat. However, I can assure her that she was legitimately chosen by a proper AV system, as are the leaders of the political party of which I am a member, and it is a very good system too.

When debating between SV and AV, as opposed to between first past the post and AV, I sometimes feel that I am back watching television some years ago and watching the Tooting Popular Liberation Front fighting it out with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tooting. As I am Lord Lipsey of Tooting Bec, I particularly enjoy that contest. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours and I agree on one thing. It is more important than the things on which we disagree—SV against AV. We are both electoral reformers and therefore hope to see electoral reform emerge eventually from this Bill.

There is at least as formidable a case to be made against SV as my noble friend made against AV. Let us take a point on which the House has spent much too long this afternoon; that is, whether AV requires someone to get 50 per cent or more of the vote. Without going into detail, quite apparently, SV leads to people being elected with a much lower share of the eventual vote than does AV. This can be very serious in four-party marginals, particularly in Scotland. SV simply does not allow the same breadth of choice and the same degree of voter choice as AV. That is just one example of the many points that could be levied against SV.

I shall go through some of the arguments put by my noble friend. He said that this was a panic creation by the coalition. Clearly, it was stitched together in order to create the coalition, but there is nothing panicky about AV. My party has stood for it for quite a while. The Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, favours it. If noble Lords care to look, there is a long list of signatures of very distinguished members of my party who favour AV. Whatever the circumstances that have brought it on to the stage now—I would much rather that it had come on to the stage as the result of a Labour victory in the general election and a Bill containing this clause was being put forward by a Labour Government—I do not think that they are sufficient reason to be against it today. It is not a newly forged system, as noble Lords opposite have pointed out. It has been about for about 100 years and quite often nearly came about.

Moreover, it has been closely examined in recent times by the Jenkins commission, of which I was a member. AV formed part of what was recommended by Jenkins. SV did not. AV maximises voter choice whereas SV gives a relatively limited voter choice. I regard the issue of lower preferences being of lesser importance as being completely without foundation. I would greatly prefer, for example, a Green candidate to a candidate from the British National Party. That is quite low on my list of preferences. If I am wholly honest, once upon a time I did not terribly care whether I voted Lib Dem or Labour, but I always voted Labour, of course. That seemed to me to be a much less important choice. However, at the next general election, as a result of this coalition, I daresay I will approach that question in a different frame of mind.

I would not claim that AV eliminates tactical voting altogether. Of course, it does not. But it eliminates the most difficult choice for a voter; namely, what will a person do with his single vote if it is a first-past-the- post-system? Will he put first the party that he really prefers or will he put first the party that he would prefer to the third party for which he might vote? That becomes vastly more important between SV and AV in four-member seats.

We will have a long referendum campaign. Whatever system comes out of this Bill and is the system debated in the referendum, I very much hope that all electoral reformers will choose eventually to rally behind it, although having heard my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, it may be that that is an overoptimistic prediction. It is certainly true that the great majority of electoral reformers, including the electoral reformers in the Electoral Reform Society, which historically is almost keener on STV than the Liberal Democrats, have chosen to back this system.

Let us have the debate. This clause will enable it to be put before the people in the referendum, particularly if, in the course of further amendment of the Bill, we make sure that that referendum does not take place, as the coalition proposes, on 5 May 2011.