Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Grocott explained perfectly how well my noble friend Lady Hayter introduced this set of amendments. She took us through the main issues and the main points within them. I wish to emphasise just a couple of issues that my noble friend Lord Foulkes touched on at the end of his speech.

British politics is cyclical. Removing proper parliamentary scrutiny is not just wrong but could prove to be a very short-sighted action by this Government. Empowering the Executive over Parliament raises issues and concerns. If this was the only change brought forward in the Bill, we would be questioning it and raising issues with it, but what makes it more concerning is that it is coupled with other changes that make it harder to have that democratic oversight: the timetabling of any future changes—we will be discussing later the 5% that has been mentioned—and the nominating process for the Boundary Commission.

Boundary Commission recommendations deserve a democratic parliamentary backstop. These are judgment issues: major constitutional issues and changes that could be implemented around the parliamentary landscape. Although MPs, political parties and communities can feed into the earlier stages of the Boundary Commission review, the full oversight of all the packages across the different nations really takes place only when they enter Parliament itself.

We have heard that the Commons would now have 600 MPs if we had the system proposed in the Bill. What happens if the Prime Minister of the day decides that 600 is not right, and that 200, 300 or 1,000 MPs are needed? Not having full parliamentary oversight and decision-making power on would just not be right. Like my noble friends who have spoken, therefore, I am more than happy to support these amendments and look forward to the Minister’s comments and response.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, the speeches by my colleagues before I was called have left me very little to say that is fresh, but I will try to make some new points, if that is possible.

My first point is that I am instinctively opposed to what the Government are trying to do here—to take this issue out of Parliament’s hands—mainly because I see it as part of the general trend of what the Johnson premiership is doing to Britain. It sees Brexit, and the constitutional changes resulting from Brexit, as an opportunity to strengthen the power of the Executive, and not to bring power back to Parliament, which was what the leave people argued for in the referendum. Across the board we see—for example in the Trade Bill and the Immigration Bill—a concentration of power in the Executive, with Parliament having less say than before. This is a deplorable trend, and it is not giving power back to the people.

My second point is that what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said about the need for impartial consideration of constituency boundaries, and what the Constitution Committee says about this proposal being appropriate, would be all very well if one felt that one could trust this Executive to behave impartially. The way in which the Government have behaved since the December general election gives one no confidence that they will behave in a decent and impartial way, so why should we give them this power that they currently do not have?

I also believe that there has been inadequate consideration of the Bill, in the Commons and in our own House as a result of the way we are now dealing with the Bill, of the very big issues that it raises. If you apply a strict population basis to representation in this country, you will gradually see a shift in political power to London and the south-east, where most voters are. The Government decided to opt for 650 Members rather than 600 because they were deeply aware of the fact that the redistribution is likely to see a shift of representation from the north of England to the south, and that with the new “red wall” MPs who have been elected, a further reduction in the number of MPs would lead to very considerable party problems for the Conservative Party in the north of England, where it has just won representation.

We ought to be taking a bigger look at these issues. Representation is not just a feature of the arithmetical equality of the size of constituencies; it is also about whether, within a union such as the United Kingdom, all parts are fairly represented. I deeply regret that the numbers of Scottish and Welsh MPs are being reduced—when the debate about the union’s future is becoming critical, this is a grave mistake.

Similarly, within England, we need to think about the balancing of power between the regions of the country. My noble friend Lord Foulkes and I would probably agree that we would like to see this done through reform of the upper House—but, while we cannot achieve this, it is a bad political and constitutional mistake for the Government to go down the road of strict arithmetic equality. The different parts of the United Kingdom have to be decently represented.

So I support these amendments, for the fundamental reason that you cannot trust this Executive to behave fairly.

[Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)]

My Lords, as someone who tried to be a constitutional lawyer when I was a law officer, I agree entirely with the remarks of my noble friend Lord Grocott and others that a constitutional Bill should not be handled by this Committee. I had a hand in proposing a number of devolution Bills rather a long time ago, and they were all taken on the Floor of the Commons and, in due course, on the Floor of this House.

I wish to support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lady Hayter. I hope that I am not given to extraordinary language. As a lawyer, one should be moderate in the use of words, if one is to have any effect on a tribunal. In my Second Reading speech, I referred to the proposals for Wales, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, a few minutes ago. I shall not go on about them; I will come back to them in due course. I hope that I am not too extravagant in my language but, as I see it, what is happening plainly in this Bill is gerrymandering on a huge scale. It is the second time that Governments have sought dramatically to reduce the number of Welsh MPs, all with the aim of reducing Labour representation, since we have been the majority party in Wales since 1905. There is no regard in the Bill for continuity, ties with local authorities or particular problems in south Wales, where communication is down the valleys and not across huge mountains.

I strongly believe that decisions so far as possible should be as distanced as one can from political Ministers. This reduces the temptation to gerrymander. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the former Lord Chief Justice, has a very helpful amendment in which he seeks to replace the Lord Chancellor with the Lord Chief Justice in the Bill. I will support him and will expand on my remarks in due course. The purpose is to reduce and remove political interest, because the Lord Chancellor is very much a political animal. As Secretary of State, I tried to be impartial; whether I succeeded is not for me to judge but for others. But one had a whole range of appointments to make, from chairmen of quangos to submissions of appointment to Lord Lieutenant and managing the honours list. One tried one’s best, and a diverse number of people, including ex-Conservative Ministers and ex-eminent Liberal MPs, were appointed to my quangos. I hope that I succeeded. I may not have done as much as I would have hoped to do, but I did my best.

It is of fundamental importance to the golden thread of fair representation in this House to ensure that there is independence and no political influence, and that the day-to-day management of electoral commissions is done by deputy boundary commissioners. I have appeared professionally before such bodies, and I applaud the experience and fairness of distinguished silks who know what they are about and do their best. I am not aware of any conflict of interest. But we should have all the time in the forefront of our minds when considering the Bill that there should be independence, there should be respect for the decisions, and they should be generally acceptable.

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We know that they are doing that because, had the previous boundary changes gone through on top of the boundary changes already made in Sheffield, you would have seen that people had drawn lines. I do not blame them; they sit in an office in London. I do not expect anybody to research this, but I would be surprised if anybody on or working for the Boundary Commission has ever lived in the north of Sheffield. If you do not know an area and you do not have a clue about its nuances, you are bound to get it wrong. The tighter the task you have been given, the more likely you are to mess it up. So having longer periods of stability, with people genuinely representing their areas and having the ability to adjust to changes and turnover as time goes on, makes sense, but being rigid about 5% and an eight-year timetable does not.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

We have had some excellent contributions. I want to make a simple point: the ties of community should be given equal weight to arithmetic. To strengthen those ties, there should be a longer period between each distribution.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I want to refute the calumny that I am participating in this debate only to go down in parliamentary history as one who was present at the first-ever hybrid Grand Committee of the House of Lords. It is not true. Indeed, it goes contrary to my strongest principles because, as a noble Lord said earlier, this Bill should be on the Floor of the House; it is constitutional, but it goes beyond its constitutionality.

We should consider the scale of the change in the Bill, the degree of disruption that it will cause if it is put into effect in full, the ruined lives down the other end of the Corridor—going from 600 to 650 helps, but it does not help as much as not having a 5% variant—the disruption it will cause and the loss of confidence among the population because they will not know who their Member will be next time round. This is really large-scale stuff—and that is without getting into the issue, which I do not intend to cover this afternoon, of whether this is in fact a gerrymander. No doubt we will have a chance to discuss that later in Committee and on Report. So I am not participating just to be in a hybrid Committee. I wish we were not in a hybrid Committee but on the Floor.

The second calumny is that I am intervening on this amendment only because the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I are such comrades, if I may use that word in the House of Lords. We are great veterans of the 2011 attempt to persuade the Government of the points, or most of the points, that I have just made. That attempt narrowly failed, due to a piece of stubbornness on David Cameron’s point of view. It is a great pity that those measures went through—they had to be ditched anyway—but it gives us a chance to have a second, more sensible, go. Unfortunately, I do not think that the Government have succeeded in doing that.

As I say, my noble friend Lord Foulkes is a comrade. He knows that we disagree on electoral reform. The idea that electoral reform would necessarily destroy the relationship between MPs and their constituents is nonsense. It was shown to be nonsense by something that nobody round this table other than me will remember: the Jenkins report on the electoral system. I remember it quite well because I was on the commission. Those noble Lords who remember that will remember that it had most constituencies represented by a single Member, as now. There were some additional Members to deal with discrepancies in the amount of support that each party needed to elect somebody, but they were on a county basis; they were not asked to represent the whole country at large or any of the things that go with other proportional systems, so there is no necessary link between electoral reform and whether you go ahead with this sort of system. It should be debated on its own complicated merits. I suppose I had better come to the amendment about now.

At the moment we have the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which implies that elections take place every five years. It makes sense to me that you should have a fixed gap between a boundary review and an election—they should come in that order. If you had 10 years under the present system, that is what would happen. It would come at the same distance before an election each time. Eight years tells you nothing. It means that sometimes you will have a boundary review immediately after a general election, so you will fight the next election on completely outdated boundaries. The time after that will be just before an election, so no would-be Member of Parliament will have time to get to know his electorate. It is a complete absurdity. It is so absurd that I can think of only one argument that the Minister could use to defend it, which would be to say, “We committed in our manifesto to get rid of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act”—and I recognise that that is the case.

However, do not be surprised if the Prime Minister and his party do not in the end show the enthusiasm that they have shown so far for the proposition that they go back to the old system where the Prime Minister calls the election every time. I should say, first of all, that the record of Prime Ministers calling elections when they have that discretion is bloody awful. I go back to Jim Callaghan, who I was then privileged to be an adviser to, funking autumn 1978 and going for 1979 and therefore making Mrs Thatcher possible. I understand why he made the decision, but I think he was wrong—and I think he thought he was wrong. More recently, Theresa May, befuddled by the opinion polls and having adopted a policy for social care that was bound to lead to at least a 10-point drop in the Tories’ reckoning, went for an election that was the end of her.

Even more recently, not the Prime Minister but the leader of the Labour Party, in the face of irrefutable evidence that his party would be massacred if it went to the country under his leadership, nevertheless decided that his party should vote for an early election, thus handing Boris Johnson the easiest victory in electoral history. My experience of politicians is that they do not much like choosing election dates anyway. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, for all its defects, seems to be basically right, so if we keep that, we will keep five-year Parliaments and one review for each 10-year stretch.

That would also avoid unnecessary disruption. Every time constituencies change, as ex-Members of the Commons have told us so eloquently this afternoon, there is considerable disruption. There is a tremendous problem that may do for these plans in the end. It is perfectly true, and if Ministers were honest they would admit it, that on the whole this change is probably slightly biased in favour of the Conservative Party. But that is one thing. It is another thing when the Back-Benchers are going to see the Chief Whip every week and saying, “We can’t have an election, look at what’s been done to my constituency. We only held it last time because I had so many supporters in Borrowstown and now they’ve been moved off to that fat, useless Tory Member for Bugglestown.” That is why they did not do this last time. It was not a matter of principle or because they saw that they were wrong, or even because of what the Lib Dems might have done about it. It was because it was rightly causing bedlam on the Conservative Back Benches.

This may seem to those who advise the Prime Minister like a bumper wheeze for getting a few extra Conservative seats. I promise that, before the next election, they will be eating their words and the Prime Minister will be saying, “Who the hell got me into this? Haven’t we got anything better to do than deal with Back-Benchers who feel that they’re going to lose their seats and it’s our fault?” There is no worse accusation to be made against a Government than that they are knifing their own party in the back.