Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Lipsey

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, whoever drew up the speakers list clearly had a good sense of humour since my very good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and I have debated the electoral system just about since the river Tamar came to mark the boundary between Cornwall and Devon, and I am sure that we will go on doing so in the run-up to the referendum, whenever that may come.

Before I turn to the other side of the case that he has put so well this evening—the case for AV—I want to refer to the other bits of the Bill in a couple of considered sentences. Governments of every complexion have generally proceeded cautiously on electoral matters, giving them due consideration, using, where possible, the independent judgment of the Boundary Commissions, and avoiding any charge of partisan manipulation. Most Governments have been extremely wary, and rightly so, of making electoral arrangements a kind of war booty to go into the hands of whatever party wins. We have only to look at France, which has enjoyed no such tradition, to see how wise we have been to adopt that. Therefore, it is our duty in this House to ignore the spurious arguments that have been put forward that somehow this is the prerogative of the House of Commons, which, incidentally, has not had a chance to consider very much of the Bill. We must do our duty and give this Bill the most careful, objective and, where possible, non-partisan consideration.

I want a referendum on AV but I do not want it on 5 May next year. Whenever it comes, I hope that the country returns a yes vote. I speak as a member of the Jenkins committee on electoral reform, on which my noble friend Lady Gould, who is not in her place this evening, also sat, and which recommended AV as part of its recommended solution. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who rightly quoted the report, that Lord Jenkins, who chaired that committee and was held in respect on all sides of this House and in British politics, had, by the end of his life, changed his mind. He wanted a move to AV, and he would be arguing for it if he were here tonight.

What is wrong with first past the post? In days of yore, maybe there was not much wrong. In 1951, 97 per cent of voters backed one of the two big parties—Labour or Tory. Nine MPs in 10 received half or more of the votes cast in their constituencies. The change has been dramatic. Today, the two big parties have just two-thirds of the national vote between them, and only one-third of MPs—one-third—are the choice of at least half the voters in their constituencies. That may not bother the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—as long as he was there, he felt all right about it—but it should worry anyone who believes in majority rule.

These facts create a disproportionate House of Commons, of course, but that does not particularly bother me. My objections to first past the post are quite different. It starves MPs of the legitimacy that comes from election. First past the post delivers Menshevik MPs. It encourages perverse political tactics by MPs. We should seek an inclusive politics where MPs try to get as many votes by reaching out to as many voters as possible. With first past the post, the temptation all the time is to concentrate on just enough of your core voters to get you back into Parliament. It gives too many MPs safe seats for life—a matter to which I shall return in a minute. It robs voters of choice. What do you do if you are a voter? Do you back the candidate you most want, or the candidate who has the best chance of beating the candidate you most do not want? First past the post, like rotten boroughs, the all-male franchise and university seats, is a system which people back out of nostalgia. Its day has gone, it is broke and it must be fixed.

Should we therefore go full circle?

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Lord alluded to the situation in the 1950s when he said that first past the post worked very well. We are often told that the Conservatives received a majority of the votes in Scotland in 1955. Was not part of the reason for that that really only two parties stood in most constituencies, because the Liberals had been destroyed as a result of their involvement in a previous coalition?

[Lord Lipsey]

The noble Lord is, of course, completely right historically, although he makes a wholly irrelevant point. In the political circumstances of those days, in a two-party system, first past the post was great. Once you do not have a two-party system and you have a multi-party system—with nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, a complicated situation in Northern Ireland, and a resurgent Liberal Democrat Party—first past the post does not work any more. It is as simple as that.

I do not want to go full circle by going for a fully proportional system—partly because I have never seen the advantage of it. I do not very much like the additional member system, which applies in Germany, because it too much erodes constituency loyalties. I do not like STV, loved by the much-mourned kind of Liberal who went around in sandals. STV again breaks the constituency link. In any case, in our constitution, we prefer to proceed by evolution rather than revolution. That is why we should have AV now and then in a few years, we could take stock again, or go further, stay where we are or, if you like and you can make your case, go back to first past the post.

I want here to confront a paradox. We AVers argue that AV is a relatively modest change and that it would be a change significantly for the better. How can we ride both these horses at once? As Jimmy Thomas said, if you cannot ride two horses at once, you should not be in the political circus. The resolution is like this: it will not make an enormous difference to the results of elections. At the general election in 2010, according to the academics David Sanders, Paul Whiteley, Marianne Stewart and Harold Clarke, it might have led to 22 fewer Tory seats, 10 fewer Labour seats—sorry about that—and 32 more Lib Dems. The effect, if there were to be a general election tomorrow, according to Professor Patrick Dunleavy, would be much less. Even changes of this magnitude would of course have mattered in a close election such as that in 2010, but they are scarcely seismic. However, there would have been far more seats in which the result was genuinely in doubt—so more MPs would have had to work harder to reach out to more people to win them.

I come finally to the main argument that I hear used against AV; namely, that it would help to create a situation where we had permanent coalition government and disproportionate power was given to the third party. I hear this complaint mostly from Conservative politicians. I am not sure how they square their enthusiastic support for the present coalition with the belief that coalition government is by definition a bad thing. It must be understood that in the new political geography of Britain, the strong probability is that coalition will be the norm. It is true that the eight general elections up to 2005 all produced majority Governments, but psephologists have compared this to tossing a coin that comes up heads eight times in a row—unlikely, but it happens. I often back eight even-money shots in a row at the races and they all lose.

First past the post has lost its potency to deliver majority Governments in most circumstances. There has been a very sharp decline in the number of seats that are marginal. According to Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, the number of marginal seats has fallen from 166 in 1955 to just 85 in 2010, so a given swing is much less likely to bring about the number of changes in seats that will deliver a majority to one party or another. There will be fewer majority Governments under first past the post in future.