Elections Bill

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moore, if he did not know it before, will now have the feeling that this is a slightly peculiar House. We have had a wonderful debate this afternoon with magnificent points made. I have to say I have found most of them critical of the Bill, but nobody has quite dared to call a spade a spade. This is a partisan measure; the great majority of it is partisan and designed to improve this Government’s electoral chances. This Bill out-trumps Trump.

I will give two or three examples—they have all been referred to but not everybody has said them yet. First, voter ID: there is no evidence of any problems arising with the current system. But we now have the evidence of the respectable Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which shows that 1.7 million, mostly low-income, voters will be disenfranchised as a result. Are those natural Labour voters, Lib Dems or Greens, who will be disqualified? Yes. Are they Tory voters? No. One big gain for the Conservative Party.

Take the 15-year limit for overseas voters being able to vote in the UK. This, in the words of the leading constitutional expert Professor Robert Blackburn of KCL, flouts two important principles of the British electoral system: that the basis of the parliamentary system is the representation of constituencies and that the basis of the right to vote is one of residency in a constituency. Let these fundamental principles go hang, for the Government have a more fundamental principle. All those Tory voters sipping their gins and tonics on the Costas should be allowed to go on voting as long as they can, even when they have lost all association with their home country. We know what will happen; anyone who has been in this House knows that we will again start getting letters from these people saying they are pensioners being unfairly kept down because they have not got votes. This is another partisan measure.

Dropped in at the last minute was the substitution of first past the post for the supplementary vote for mayors and police commissioners. Is that really a considered response to the relative weights of electoral systems—something which, as a member of the Jenkins committee, I have spent only too much time thinking about? Of course not. It goes like this: the latest Redfield and Wilton opinion poll gives the Tories 33% of the vote. It gives Labour 39%, with the Lib Dems on 11% and the Greens on 7%. Under first past the post the Tories are doing pretty well—they will soon catch up with Labour and take the lead. But if most of those Lib Dems and Greens have a second preference for Labour—I think that is highly probable—it would be Tories 33%, Labour 57%. They cannot have that, and SV must go. Then there is the end of the independence of the Electoral Commission. If you may be losing the match, there is nothing like shackling the referee.

We really need an election Bill at this time. Most powerfully, we have the unimplemented proposals of the Law Commission for major changes designed to clean up our electoral system. We are not going to get that Bill before the next election because we have got this instead. It demeans those who have brought it forward.

I conclude with one short constitutional point. We are all taught when we come to this place—I was taught it by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—that as a non-elected House we always give way to the elected House. In general, I would go along with that. But what if the lower House, put up to it by an unusually partisan Government, agrees reforms to elections designed not to make them more democratic but to create a partisan bias in favour of them? Should that rule still apply? In the next Parliament, after an election held under those deeply biased rules, does it apply then? Have I still got to allow everything a House elected under a bent system submits?

I do not answer that question yet because I deeply hope that, in Committee, the Bill will be greatly improved and the particularly offensive proposals it contains, such as those on the Electoral Commission, will be removed. However, if the Government go on pretending that they are doing this to improve our electoral system when they are actually doing it to improve their electoral chances, your Lordships have a right—indeed, a duty—to stand up and be counted.