Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke

Thursday 26th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. It would change my position. I would snatch off their hand if they proposed a review of the voting system. I would be surprised if they wanted to do it now when the voting system has so decisively played in their favour and they have developed a sophisticated strategy of ensuring that regional list Members forensically target seats where there is a prospect of winning. My former seat of Airdrie and Shotts, which used to be one of the safest in Scotland, now has a SNP Member of Parliament because of that very forensic, very clever targeting of constituencies and issues.

It is with considerable regret that I say to my noble friend that I do not think that this is the time for this House or this Parliament to call for a review, because it would be misinterpreted. However, it is not often that I get a chance to say I told you so. There are one or two people, who will not be listening now, to whom I said that. It is a case of I told you so.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I hope I can persuade the noble Baroness to be a bit braver. We should not be too concerned about how people present it. The noble Lord’s amendment is not actually imposing anything, it is just saying that a committee should be set up to look at these issues.

I am told that I am supposed to be terribly grateful, as a Conservative, for the system of election that was put in place for the Scottish Parliament, and that I am the fellow who lost every seat when we had 8.5 per cent of the vote. I noted at the last Scottish elections that the Liberals’ share of the vote was down to 5 per cent; I think on the list system it was about 7.8 per cent. We never reached that particular nadir. The relationship with the number of seats that people win in Scotland because there is a four-party system is odd, to say the least. The nationalists have now got 45 per cent of the vote because of the way the system operates, like an avalanche, once a particular shift occurs.

There are a number of faults with the system. I will not repeat the arguments. Of course, one is this problem of having people in your patch trying to do you down, using constituency issues for that purpose. When I was the Member of Parliament for Stirling, one-third of my constituency had never had anything other than a Tory for as long as people could remember; one-third had never had anything other than Labour; the other third could go either way. This is going back to ancient times, but in 1983, even though I was a Thatcherite Tory and many of my constituents were not particularly committed to that view, you were respected as the Member of Parliament, and you made sure that you treated everyone equally, regardless of how they voted, and did your best. You were first and foremost the representative of your constituency.

I have watched what is happening in my constituency now, where you get different parties playing politics and constituents going to one after the other, and people trying to get stories in newspapers and using public funds to promote themselves, and undermining that relationship between the Member of Parliament and his constituents, which is an absolutely vital part of our system and which has been further undermined by the scandals over expenses and other matters. The whole system of being a Member of Parliament works—not because you have any real power but because when you send a letter on the headed notepaper, whether it is the Scottish Parliament or the Westminster Parliament, people sit up and take notice. I regret to say that is happening less effectively because of the damage that is being done and the fact that you have people playing politics.

Goodness knows—I will be tempted—if we are going to have elected Members of this House on a 15-year term, and the average lifespan of a Member of Parliament at the other end of this building is about eight years, that means we will have elected Lords who will last twice as long as Members of Parliament, and who will then be in a bigger patch, using their position to kill off all their opponents. I cannot think of anything worse. So there is an issue here that the noble Lord is right to identify.

There is something else I would like to say, which is probably going to get me into trouble with my party and upset a number of my colleagues. In this system, the way the list operates means that all you have to do to get into the Scottish Parliament is to make sure that you are in the right position on your list, as the noble Lord has pointed out. In my party, that means that all you have to do is get the membership to vote for you. If you are the incumbent and have been around for a long time, it is easier to achieve that because they know the name. Built into the system is something that gives the incumbent an advantage. That can be a good or a bad thing but the worst feature of this is that because you rely on the membership voting to give you your place on the list, you have a vested interest in having a declining membership. All political parties have suffered a lower membership. When I was Member of Parliament for Stirling, I used to recruit members. We had 2,500 members. Now we have 300. I thought, “What is going on in Stirling?”. Then I discovered that in the whole of Scotland we had 10,000 members. Yet we have got about 18 MSPs. We have a system that creates a self-perpetuating hierarchy who have an interest in having less and less contact with their constituents. If ever a system needs to be looked at and reformed, this is it.