International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Lipsey

Friday 27th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much regret that I was not able to be here to move this amendment in Committee, but I am delighted to say that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—as I would have expected—did that job much better than I could have done. I certainly do not intend to detain the House for longer than I need, as it would be a better use of its time to read his magnificent speech.

The amendment is designed to increase the flexibility of the one-year programme so as to avert the danger that the money will be rushed out to hit the target in one year and that there will not be enough to hit the target so easily the year after. It is intended to avoid waste, to provide ministerial flexibility and to help in the management of our national budgets.

As I said, I do not intend to expand on that theme for long but I want to deal with one argument which was put very powerfully this morning by my noble friend Lord McConnell and which appeared very much in the debate at Second Reading. The argument is that the Bill will set the quantity of aid, enabling us then to focus on the quality. I will not address the second half of that—the quality, which comes up in other amendments. I just caution the House against thinking that the Bill will in practice set the quantity, and I do so by reference to Ireland. A report states that at the millennium summit in 2000, the Taoiseach announced a framework for reaching the UN target. It was to be attained by the end of 2007. In 2005, the target was adjusted to 2012. According to a subsequent OECD peer review, that deadline was extended again to 2015, but this has also been missed. Now, according to that authoritative source, the 2015 target is also going to be missed.

In other words, you can set these targets, and you can even enshrine them, as the Bill does, in legislation. You can insist that each year the Secretary of State gives an explanation to the House if the target has not been met; nevertheless, the targets do not easily hold, and if economic imperatives dictate otherwise then we will find that they do not hold. I would be pretty willing to have a fair bet with anyone in this House that within the next 10 years there will be one or more such occasions when they do not hold. The debate over quantity will inevitably persist while there is pressure on public expenditure and there are competing programmes.

I am realistic enough to know that this amendment is unlikely to be accepted today. However, it would be comforting and would help to bring the House together if the Minister could indicate that the Government are not without sympathy on the point about flexibility. It would help if they could indicate that, within the terms of the legislation, they will be prepared to look at this flexibly and will not allow something stupid such as a last-minute rushing out of the money through the door—as I am afraid happened last year, according to the independent National Audit Office reports—and that they will manage the Bill so as to minimise any possible ill side-effects from what is generally agreed to be a desirable thing; namely, effective overseas aid.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, which give effect to the target being achieved over a five-year rather than an annual period. I do so because I believe that that would give much needed flexibility in meeting the target. If there were flexibility, that would lessen what some of us perceive as the perverse incentive of the target—rushing projects towards the end of a year in order to meet the target within a year. It is much more likely that the money will be more effectively spent if that happens over a period of years.

The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, has already rather anticipated these arguments. He said that—this was his reason for voting as he did on the previous amendment —he felt that the target of 0.7% of GDP gave greater certainty. That was, to some extent, supported by the arguments of my noble friend the Minister. However, I am deeply puzzled by the argument that having a target of 0.7% creates certainty or will give greater confidence about how the money will be spent. Meeting the target of GNI or GDP will not be that easy. It would be easy if we were certain what GNI and GDP were going to be. However, as everybody knows, economic data are subject to constant revisions. There is uncertainty about the future during the year when you are trying to determine what your target is a percentage of and you have to rely on economic forecasts. However, there is not just uncertainty about the future; there is uncertainty about the present and—dare I say it?—about the past. These statistics are constantly being revised. Noble Lords will recall our famous double-dip recession—there was great excitement on that side of the House that it was occurring. A few months later it had been revised out of existence by the statisticians.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Lipsey

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I rise briefly to ask a further question to which I hope the Minister will address himself. The clause provides protection against something in a newspaper, other than an advertisement of course, or in a periodical or in the broadcasting media specified, being regarded as election expenses, but it does not say anything about expenses incurred via the internet. Does the protection extend to that medium?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

The question about the internet is very important. Following on from the noble Lord’s point, can the Minister comment on information about the referendum that may be made available by the Electoral Commission on the internet? The Electoral Commission is entitled to issue neutral educational material concerning the referendum question but, in practice, I think that it is extremely difficult to be absolutely sure of the neutrality of any such material in such a presentation. The materials put out by the authorities in the New Zealand referendum led to considerable controversy, as there was an argument that, in listing the pros and cons, they were not impartial. I do not want to go on about this but I should be grateful for the Minister’s comments because the point about the internet and the Electoral Commission is very important.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Lipsey

Monday 6th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

If I digressed, I apologise to the House and stand rebuked. Specifically on the amendment, its Achilles heel is the one the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, alighted on—namely, that it gives as an alternative this broad category of a proportional system. Proportional systems vary enormously. Some of them, like the German mixed system, are not so different from our system. They are different but they are not very different. And there is a world of difference between PR on a national list system, as it used to be at one time in Italy and as it is in Israel, and the German system. It is a huge variation, so much so that it would make the question, if it was put in this form in a referendum, completely nonsensical. I do not think one can follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and say, “We will have a referendum in which two or three of the outcomes may be definite but if a rather vague outcome is voted for, then we will have another inquiry”. This seems to be a slightly unbalanced and rather strange way of proceeding.

The second objection that I have, which is the reason I called it a rather strange amendment, is this device of using AV in order to determine which electoral system we have. It would be extraordinary on something as important as our choice of electoral system, which could have profound effects on the way we run politics in this country, to say that again the result should be determined by the second preferences of the system that people least wanted. The arguments that I put forward against AV seem to apply equally strongly to a referendum. To revert to the point I made earlier, I do not think one could leave PR as a choice just defined as PR. If one tried to answer that, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was suggesting, by putting the supplementary vote system, or STV, or any of the many different systems of PR, that would make the whole referendum meaningless. So I am afraid that, although the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made a very interesting speech, I think this is a completely unworkable amendment and should be rejected.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I am tempted by the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, not only because I always find him an exceptionally persuasive and erudite man but for two other reasons. One is that it uses AV to choose the winner of the contest. No electoral theoretician would think this was a good way of choosing between these preferences. You would need some sort of Condorcet system which ran off options to find the one that emerged as having the most support rather than a system that simply eliminates a better choice. It does not work terribly well for this kind of referendum. AV has the great advantage of simplicity, which is also the reason I, for one, favour it as our national electoral system.

The other reason I am quite tempted by this amendment is that I have no doubt that the result of the referendum, whether it was AV or first past the post, would certainly knock out PR for ever. The power of the arguments that would be placed against a PR system for Britain would be so enormous that nobody would be tempted. As a political observer I add this point. The only people who would be speaking up for PR in such a referendum would be the Liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrat advocacy of anything at the moment is a certainty for its unpopularity. This is the party that has lost more than half the votes that were cast for it at the General Election. The thought of these poor lambs bleating round the country for STV, or whichever system they choose, would make it a certain feature of the result of the referendum that it went down the plughole. So for those reasons, I am tempted by the noble Lord’s proposal, though not perhaps for the reasons that he put forward.

I go back to where I started on electoral reform, about which I did not know a huge amount at the time, which was with the Jenkins committee. That committee’s terms of reference were written, in many ways wisely, by the party of which I am a member. The terms of reference did not say, “Put forward a whole lot of possible options and discuss their merits as the electoral system for Britain”. Nor did they say, “Recommend an electoral system and we will have it”. They said, “Recommend the best possible alternative to first past the post to be put before the British people in a referendum”. I regret deeply that it was not put before the British people in a referendum at the time.

In the same way as the coalition is wise to put forward an alternative for the referendum, in writing the terms of reference widely in that way the Government were right about what a referendum can seriously manage to do. I think that I heard the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, correctly. He said that this was an abuse of a referendum. It is not. Let us face it: referendums have their strengths and limitations. They are quite good at resolving a simple question on which the political class is divided. The supreme example in my lifetime was Europe. The referendum of 1975 settled things, rightly or wrongly, for many years to come. There was no other way within our political system that it could have been settled because of the state of the Labour Party at the time and later the Conservative Party, which nearly blew itself apart over Europe. The voice of the British people came down clearly on a single alternative, which was to stay in, rightly or wrongly. That defused a bomb at the heart of the political system.

This is no disrespect to the British people, but I do not think it is reasonable to expect them to come to grips with the degree of complexity of choice such as is implied by this referendum, still less the choice that exists in real life. Imagine the kind of atmosphere that goes on during an election with claims and counter claims being made. Every time someone says, “This is more proportional”, the AV lot will say, “Ours isn’t more proportional”. You would have a cacophony, which even those who have been studying this subject for half their lives, such as me, would have difficulty disentangling. At least the option that we have before us would give the British people a clear choice to make and the arguments between AV and first past the post are not that complicated.

Moreover, as I said in an earlier debate on the Bill, in a number of years’ time people may think, “Well this has worked quite well. We would like to go further to a proportional system”. Or, they may say, “That was a big mistake. Let’s go back to first past the post”. They may say, like the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, “Never go back”, but that may show the inadequacy of the system that I thought he favoured. It is not a once-and-for-all choice. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, that there are other choices that could be made about our electoral system. They do not all have to be made in one jump at one time.

I now move on to the case made rather well by the noble Lord, Lord Lamont. The idea that there is something called a proportional system that has a unique set of features is completely without foundation. The differences between STV, the single transferable vote, between national list systems and between the additional member system as used in Germany and recommended in part by the Jenkins commission, are enormous. This calls for a proportional system but there is virtually no proportional system in the world. The only exception is Israel. I have talked to many people about electoral systems but I have yet to find a single person who thinks that the Israeli electoral system is ever other than a complete disaster. It allows for the representation of parties with only tiny members of votes who can then hold the polity to ransom in favour of their peculiar religious objectives. Israel is a disaster among democracies for that reason and, arguably, the current state of the Middle East is a result of that political system.

Other than the Israeli system, there is huge variety among more proportional systems as to how much proportionality. You can have a national list with thresholds, for example. It is a perfectly good system as long as you do not mind all MPs being chosen by their parties, the end of the constituency representative tradition in our country and the complete dominance of the party Whips over our politics forever more. You can have a national list system. STV is not designed to bring about proportionality at all, although it is a more proportional system. STV came out of the 19th century tradition where they wanted a greater emphasis on the character of individual Members of Parliament rather than on the party that they represented. If you look at the Irish STV system, what happens there is that the contest is not between parties but between individual members of those parties about who is the best representative of the people. You can make a case for that but it is not essentially the case for proportional representation, although it produces proportional outcomes. Additional member systems have a completely different set of characteristics again.

At this stage, one can hear the people crying, “Mercy, please. We pay you to sort some of these things out. Some of us think we pay you too much”.