Wales Bill

Debate between Lord Hain and Nia Griffith

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nia Griffith]

I am not casting aspersions on any individual list candidates. We have two excellent Labour list Assembly Members in west Wales—Rebecca Evans, who champions disability issues, and Joyce Watson, who champions human trafficking issues. They are doing an excellent job, because they are focusing on topics, not sitting like some great cuckoo on one constituency out of eight and making that their sole focus of attention, ignoring what is happening in important aspects of the other seven constituencies that they represent.

We have seen such abuse in Wales before. I am sure my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) will remind us again, as he has done many times, of the blatant abuse of the list system. He has quoted frequently from the leaked memorandum from Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, in which she gives explicit instructions to her party’s list Assembly Members to direct their time and resources, paid for by the taxpayer, to Plaid Cymru’s target seats.

Some people say that putting into the 2006 Act the clause that prevents an individual from standing for both the constituency and the list was a partisan move by the Labour Government, but we knew full well that it would also prevent our candidates from standing for both. We had at least four sitting constituency AMs who we knew were likely to be vulnerable to electoral change in the 2007 Assembly election and who could have hedged their bets by standing for both. That might have been very cosy for them, but as a matter of principle we knew how much the electorate hated it. On the doorsteps we heard people ask, “What difference will it make if we go out and vote?” It was extremely difficult to convince people after the Clwyd West scenario, because whoever the constituents voted for, all four parties were elected.

It was extremely important to us to stand by our principle, rather than making some sort of cosy situation for our AMs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in some circumstances, depending on the specific arithmetic for the region, a candidate who could stand for both the constituency and the list could be pretty much guaranteed to be elected on one or other of them. That could breed a certain complacency, which would not serve the electorate well at all. We take issue with the accusation that this is a partisan point, because it is a point of principle. We strongly oppose clause 2, which seeks to turn the clocks back and allow dual candidacy. Our amendment therefore seeks to remove that clause from the Bill.

Our view is that the Assembly’s electoral arrangements should be decided in Wales, so we have also tabled an amendment proposing that an order should be laid in the Assembly by the Welsh Government before any change on dual candidacy can be implemented. I hope that Members will vote for our amendments.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

I, too, wish to speak in favour of amendment 13 and against clause 2 remaining in the Bill. The Secretary of State and other Members who have taken part in our proceedings on the Bill might recognise some of my comments from my single transferable vote speech on dual candidature, because I remain firmly opposed to that abuse of democracy. However, I will be brief, because my favourite premiership player, Frank Lampard, is captaining England at 5 o’clock, and I know that even Members from Welsh constituencies, with the possible exception of our Plaid Cymru friends, will want to cheer them on in their final game.

I repeat my basic argument, which I have expressed throughout the Bill’s proceedings, and the rationale for my ban on dual candidature in the 2006 Act: it cannot be right for losers to become winners through the back door, despite having been rejected by the voters. That is an abuse of democracy. People who stand for a single-Member seat and then lose can end up being elected anyway, in defiance of the electorate’s wishes, because at the same time they are in a list category, and that is an abuse of democracy. There is no real argument against losers becoming winners in that way.

There was a widespread abuse practised by 15 of the 20 list AMs prior to the 2006 ban. They used taxpayers’ money to open constituency offices in the very single-Member seats in which they were defeated. They then targeted those seats at the following election by cherry-picking local issues against the constituency AMs who had beaten them. Why are they so afraid of taking their choice to the people, and why are the Government so afraid of democracy? Why are they so afraid of losing constituency elections that they need the lifebelt of standing for the lists as well? That is what the leader of Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood, for whom I have considerable admiration despite all that, is doing in Rhondda. In a leaked memorandum written in August 2003, she was refreshingly honest about promoting abuse of the dual candidature system by list Members using taxpayers’ money.