Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Lennie

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

[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.

[Lord Lennie (Lab)]

My Lords, I have enjoyed the speeches so far in this debate. I come here as a former chair of the political parties parliamentary panel of the Electoral Commission. We had something to do with elections and it is our fault that MPs had those reviews and the consequences of them. It seemed to me that the most important thing to the MPs whom I and other parties dealt with at the same time were the lines on the map: “Where will my majority be most or least affected?” So the co-operation between parties was immense in many respects in drawing up the constituencies, because it was a question of trading these voters for those voters and so on, to protect each other’s majorities and therefore the relationship.