Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[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.

[A noble Lord]

He’s gone. He’s done a runner.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I was sitting here confidently waiting for either the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, or the redoubtable noble Lord, Lord Rennard, the bravest of the Liberal Democrats, to get up and intervene, but since no one has, I shall say just a few words.

We are now down to the anoraks, the loyalists and the payroll vote. I am two out of three, by the way. I always hesitate to disagree with my noble friend Lord Rooker, because, just as he said that the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, fills him with awe, my noble friend fills many of us here with awe. He was one of the most effective Labour Ministers and he is an even more effective Back-Bencher and debater, so it is always with some hesitation that we get up to disagree. But I come from a fundamentally different point of view, in that I think that first past the post is, as I argued earlier, the best system, for a range of reasons.

I wonder, though, whether he is right in using the New Zealand example as a precedent for us, for two and maybe three reasons. First, New Zealand has a unicameral Parliament, so there is only one Chamber and only one election takes place. They do not have, as we do, two Chambers and—as I said in relation to the previous amendment—the possibility of having two different systems, one of which produces the Government and the other which produces the balancing force, or balancing Chamber. That is very important.

Also, as far as I remember—and I am sure that my noble friend Lord Rooker will get up and correct me if I am wrong—the example that he suggested was introduced by the Labour Government in New Zealand. They thought that it was right to change the electoral system. I visited New Zealand a few years later and spoke to a number of Labour Party members who were very strongly of the view that they had made a mistake in introducing it. I know that my noble friend Lady McDonagh was General Secretary of the Labour Party and has contacts with the New Zealand Labour Party. I was there on a CPA visit and met them and they were very regretful that they had moved in that direction. Despite his deep knowledge and the detail that my noble friend gave us from the Plant report and the system in New Zealand, he was not able to answer my noble friend’s question about the turnout, about how many people actually turned out to make these great changes in the two referenda that took place, and whether or not that could be justified.

That brings me to two final points. Someone suggested earlier that there was filibustering going on. There was actually a very good debate, which seems to me to be the purpose of these kinds of Chambers. I was pleased that quite a few Conservatives got involved in the debate.

The Liberal Democrats and some Labour people keep arguing that democracy is all about an arithmetical correlation between the number of votes and the number of seats, as exact a correlation as possible. That is democracy, they say—to get the nearest you can to the number of seats relating to the percentage of votes cast. I think there is another, perhaps even more important, aspect of democracy, which is accountability: that is the ability, first, of your party in the constituency and, secondly, of the electorate in the constituency to hold you to account. In my view, that can be done properly only by the first past the post system.

Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, made a very strong argument about wasted votes. One aspect of that was dealt with by one of my noble friends. The argument was that there are safe seats that never change. Come up to Scotland and go to Edinburgh South, which was held by the Tories for generations and is now a Labour seat, or go to East Renfrewshire, which was held by the Tories for generations and is now a Labour seat. We used to think our votes were wasted, but we worked hard, we convinced people, we got people on to our side, they voted for us and we got a majority. Surely that is what democracy is about. It is about convincing people and changing people’s minds. It is Gilbertian to think that because someone was born a Tory, they will always be a Tory or because they were born a Labour person, they will always be a Labour person. You can change people, you can convince people. If you will excuse me saying so, I was talking to my noble friend Lord Maclennan—I still call him my noble friend—earlier on. He won the seat through his campaigning, his personality and the Labour Party in Caithness. We had never held it before. We can win these seats and can convince people to change their minds. Surely that is what democracy is about.

Although my noble friend Lord Rooker has very powerfully argued the case for his amendments, I do not find it totally convincing. I say to the Tories that I wish that more of them in this place would have the courage of what I know to be their convictions and would stand up as the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, did earlier today and say what they really believe: that first past the post is the best way of electing people to the House of Commons.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I join my noble friend in calling upon the Conservative Benches to take a view because I do not know whether they really understand the danger that would arise in the event that an AV referendum was successful. It has huge implications for the Conservative Party. They sit there and say very little, apart from the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and it leaves me quite bewildered.

I can now answer the question that I asked my noble friend about what happened in New Zealand because it is in Review of Voting Systems: the experience of new voting systems in the United Kingdom since 1997. On page 136, it sets out precisely what happened and it is very interesting, so I shall put it on the record:

“New Zealand provides a particularly interesting example because it has changed its electoral system from FPTP to the MMP”—

mixed member proportional—

“system (similar to AMS in the UK) in recent times. The first election to be held under MMP was in 1996, following referendums”—

which my noble friend referred to—

“in 1992 and 1993 which first rejected FPTP and then selected MMP from four proportional options. The 1993 referendum, which was binding, took place at the same time as the 1993 election where 84.5 per cent of voters favoured replacing FPTP and 70.3 per cent chose MMP”.

That shows that, when you ask the electorate what have been deemed in these debates to be complicated questions over the detail of various proportional systems, they actually understand what they are being asked and they are prepared to go out and vote and state a preference. The evidence is there in English-speaking New Zealand. It did it, and it shows the way forward. It is interesting to note, in the following pages in this section, that the turnout in New Zealand elections following the change in the electoral system in 1990 has consistently remained around the 80 per cent mark. That is almost as high as in my former constituency in one election, but it is vastly higher than the average within the United Kingdom. Again, we may have something to learn from New Zealand.

It is also worth noting what the review says is the impact of the system that New Zealand chose in this well-supported referendum.

“Since 1996, New Zealand has been governed by coalitions, usually with a minority of the seats in Parliament. Obviously this makes it more difficult for the leading party to achieve all of its policy aims but, arguably, policy decisions reflect the views of a wider coalition of voters. Tina Day, a Director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust interviewed 21 MPs in the 2002-05 Parliament for her research. She argues in her 2005 paper Increasing the representativeness of parliament … that there has been a shift of power from the Executive to Parliament, with select committees (whose composition reflects the multi-party Parliament) assuming a very powerful role”.

That reservation, expressed during the course of that consultation, might well be the one to which my noble friend refers.

The review continues:

“There is also a greater representation of women (around 30 per cent of members), Maori and the Asian population in Parliament. She argues that this has increased the legitimacy and standing of Parliament (notwithstanding the early unpopularity of coalition government). It also means that divisions in opinion within the country are played out in Parliament to a greater extent”.

The point I am making is that if you trust the people and give them the information in a form that they can understand, and put realistic options on the paper, they may well surprise us and actually choose a system that—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for moving the amendment. I understand exactly the point she is trying to make—aiming to ensure that the best possible referendum question is posed to the public. I hope to reassure her that an options form of the question was considered and tested by the Electoral Commission when it carried out its assessment of the original question on the Bill. The commission’s report concluded that there are potential drawbacks to using the options style in this particular case. It went on to discuss it and concluded that, in the circumstances, it could not recommend the use of an options question in place of the more traditional yes/no question that meets our criteria for assessing a referendum question.

The commission’s report also noted that an options form of the question could quite significantly affect the nature of referendum campaigning as campaigns will not be straightforward yes and no campaigns but in favour of either option. The question in the Bill as it stands therefore reflects the recommendations of the Electoral Commission which tested the question through focus groups and interviews with members of the public, as well as input from language experts.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Did the Electoral Commission test the question with the first past the post system first and the alternative vote system second or the other way round?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, it simply tested the options system as opposed to a yes/no. It concluded that yes/no was a better way than the options. It produced evidence to support that view. Therefore, to change the question in the way the noble Baroness has suggested risks going against the advice of the commission.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sewel]

It is not a matter of asking yes or no; it is a matter of asking what the substance is behind yes or no, which is either first past the post or the alternative vote system. That is the difficulty. If you are presenting content in the question that is being put, options are clearly the way of presenting that to the public. In other referendums, the question has been put more simply as do you want something or do you not want something. It is not a matter of wanting one or the other. That is what we are presenting to the people at this time.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I find the argument given by my noble friend Lady McDonagh much more convincing. With respect, she has been involved in a number of elections and referendums, as have a lot of us in this House. With no disrespect to the Electoral Commission, until recently it did not have anyone on it who had either been elected to anything or been involved actively in elections or referendums. It is only very recently, with a change in the law, that we have had people on the Electoral Commission who know what they are talking about in relation to elections and referendums. Surely the argument given by my noble friend is right. Yes is a positive argument and no is a negative argument. Therefore, yes is seen to be something far more attractive than no. If you are putting the option, you have to explain the option; you do not just go around sloganising. You have to explain in more detail what first past the post or the alternative vote is about. That is a much more sensible suggestion to put forward. I urge the Leader of the House to think carefully about that and not just to accept something because the Electoral Commission has said it. There is a tendency in both Houses for some people just accepting things because the commission says it. Now we have changed the commission’s composition and added to it some people who know what they are talking about with regard to elections and referendums. Its suggestions in future will be better informed. But will the Leader of the House listen to my noble friend on this?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, we have decided to support the findings of the Electoral Commission.