Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

If I had not already intended to intervene, the remarks of the noble Lord the Leader of the House certainly strengthened my conviction that I had something that I must say.

The more that I have listened to this debate, the more disturbed I have become. Why? Because I do not believe that there is anyone, in this House or the other House, who believes that the state of democracy in our country is at a peak in terms of quality and spirit. What undermines some of that quality and spirit is a widespread feeling among the public that politics as practised in Westminster is a closed community of politicians and that elections for the other House are about people gaining access to that closed system, from which they continue to run the country without overmuch sensitivity about the real convictions and anxieties of the people.

I do not believe that that is a very mature attitude in society as a whole and it is not altogether valid. To the credit of Parliament, much has been done over recent decades to try to meet that situation—by, for example, the introduction of the Green Paper system whereby, when serious legislation is being proposed, there is a genuine attempt to generate public consultation and debate about the proposal and to give the wider public an opportunity to shape the legislation that is finally put forward. That exists for all kinds of important legislation on social and economic issues.

Nothing is more central to our democracy than its constitution. We have to be incredibly sensitive about this because the constitution is not ours in Parliament—we are the practitioners within the constitution. The constitution belongs to the people. We operate within the context of something in which the people must have confidence.

I am by no means the person with the longest experience in our Parliament, but this year I will have been here for 33 years, in one House or the other, and for the majority of that time in the other place I was involved in government. When I look back, whether from the standpoint of being inside government or outside it, I often reflect that one of the things that have gone wrong is that, so often, politicians of good will and serious intent put forward legislative proposals as a solution to problems before there has been any sufficient attempt to build up a widespread understanding among the public of what the issue is that is being addressed. We get the solutions ahead of the understanding of why we are putting the solutions forward. If that is true about legislation as a whole, how much more central it is to the issue of how we handle constitutional matters.

What alarmed me about the noble Lord’s intervention was that he said, “We have demonstrated to ourselves in this debate”—of course, there was an element of sarcasm in what he was saying—“that we have the knowledge and the qualities that are necessary to make these decisions”. By saying that, he illustrated exactly the problem. The proposals that my noble friends put forward are not exclusively about the decisions; they are about having in place a system that would enable a debate and widespread discussion to take place, so that, when in the end the legislation was introduced, it would happen in the context of the widest possible public understanding of why it was necessary. Our case is that that simply has not happened on this Bill; it is being rushed through without that widespread public discussion.

For me, the discussion is infinitely more important than where the decision is made. I want those making the decision to have to make it in the context of an opportunity for the public really to have debated and discussed what they wanted. From that standpoint, I feel that my noble friends have done a great service by putting these amendments forward today. I beg noble Lords on all sides of the House to take seriously the issue of our being the practitioners of the constitution, not its masters.

In that context, I have been toying with whether I wanted to make the following observation, because it could so easily be misunderstood as playing at partisan politics, but it really grieves me to see Liberal noble Lords sitting there silently while this debate takes place. Almost to the suspicion of some of my colleagues on a number of issues about which I care desperately, I have found myself extremely close to the spirit and values of many Liberal Democrat Members opposite. I have found myself challenged by their conviction on some of the issues about which I feel very deeply. They have always argued that they are about the power and the influence of people in our society. However, here we are debating this issue tonight and where are they? They are locked into a coalition that inhibits them into silence. This is a tragedy in our political situation and I felt that I could not allow this debate to go by without making that absolutely clear.

Motion

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