Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

I do recall the chaos, and the noble Lord is right to refer to it. I hope that a number of lessons were learnt as a result of that, but the referendum question is different from the issues raised in May 2007. It is a very simple yes/no question. I am sure that our respective countrymen in Scotland will be able to decide between the two.

I hope that we can agree with the other place on the question of the date and the other provisions in the Bill: that the size of that House should be reduced, and the unfairness resulting from imbalances in the size of parliamentary constituencies rectified.

Surely, under any electoral system, people’s votes should have as equal weight as possible. That is not the case for the people of Warrington South, which last December had just under 80,000 electors; their vote is worth a quarter less than the people of Preston, which had 60,000. This is not an anomaly: these differences are repeated up and down the country. As of last December, a vote in Arfon in Wales had twice the weight of a vote in Falkirk. This inequality is compounded by the drawn-out process by which boundaries are drawn. It took more than six years to complete the last review in England. The constituencies in place for the 2010 general election were based on data that were a decade old. That is not fair for electors. Other countries draw their boundaries far more quickly.

Then, we are all pledged to reduce the cost of politics.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

We must be even-handed, my Lords. The noble Lord will know that, because of the Scotland Act, there was a reduction from 72 seats down to 60. It was Lady Cosgrove, the High Court judge, who looked after these matters. This matter was dealt with very efficiently and a report was put before Parliament in due course. So it is not always the case that it is a long drawn-out process.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, that of course is right, which is why I pointed out the case in England. In Scotland there was a reaction to the Scotland Act and the reduction in the number of seats. It does not mean that it always has to take a long time, but in England it demonstrated that it did. Maybe in Scotland these things are, on the whole, managed rather better.

The new rules put in place by this Bill will require that every constituency is within 5 per cent either side of a single size. To ensure that constituencies remain equal and up to date, boundary reviews will take place on a five-yearly basis. The Bill will also set the size of the other place at 600 MPs. This is a modest reduction of around 8 per cent and will save the public an estimated £12 million a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, it is not my wish to block legislation that has come out of the House which I served for more than 30 years. But I think that I am entitled to make some constructive criticism, perhaps in the form of amendments. I was interested when listening to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who brought back memories. It was very commendable of him when he had to sign the Boundary Commission report and get it put down on the Floor of the House for debate knowing that it would cause great difficulty for his local constituency. I remember a Conservative MP, Phil Gallie, who always fought his corner for the Conservative Party. The boys, like myself, and the girls who sat under the Gangway used to have some banter with him.

Doonfoot is a community I know well. I think it would be safe to say that it was a traditionally Conservative area. It was put into South Ayrshire, which was at that time the constituency held by George Foulkes, now my noble friend Lord Foulkes. That meant that Phil was fighting a seat that would go from Conservative to Labour. No words of bitterness or rancour came from Phil Gallie. He took it with dignity when he lost the seat, and everyone admired and respected him.

My noble friend Lord Dubs touched on the problems of boundary changes. We should forget about reviews every five years. I would like to see an amendment to make it eight years. We have done a great deal in this House to educate young people. I do not know a noble Lord who would refuse to go along to a school or college to talk to children and young people about the value of serving their country in politics. That goes for the other place.

I was asked whether I would go to Northern Ireland to speak and I said, “Of course I will. We are talking to young people”. I remember my noble friend Lord Healey saying, “You know Michael, our generation neglected our young people. We had to spend six years in the war and those of us who were lucky enough to get back wanted to get on with our own careers. We forgot about going into colleges and universities and schools because we wanted to get on with our lives”. It meant that people felt then that politicians were too far apart from them.

When I was asked to try for the nomination for my old seat of Glasgow Springburn, the first thing I did was sit down with my wife Mary and talk about it. I remember her saying, “Michael, your father was a merchant seaman and your mother told all her boys and her daughter never to take a job away from home”. I said, “Mary, I am not going to win the nomination”. I won by one vote, and to this day Mary says that I knew I was going to win, but I did not know, and that is the way it turned out. But Mary and I did not need to up sticks and get our children into another school or move to another part of the country. The culture I am so proud of and wanted my children to be brought up in would be different.

Some of the many Members of Parliament who came in with me in 1979 came from Edinburgh and had been fortunate enough to win English seats. The whole family would move and change jobs because they had to bed themselves into the new communities they were representing. With five-year Parliaments and five-year boundary reviews, if a young couple in the same position that Mary and I were in 35 years ago were asking whether to go for a nomination, they might say no, especially women being encouraged to come in to Parliament. They would see that they were doing well in their careers, but would have to leave to serve for one term. It is one thing to take a chance with the electorate, but you will have to take your chances with the boundary commissioners as well.

I know what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was talking about when he mentioned the difficult situation where two seats are merged and two Members of Parliament have to go to selection conferences. Frank Dobson is still down at the other end, but Jock Stallard came into this House and served it well. It was a great pity that those two parliamentarians had to fight it out for one seat. We are going to get that every five years. If you go for eight years, at least people will say, “The chances are that we will get 10 years out of this Parliament, so why not try for it?”. But let me say that when the Boundary Commission has finished, the fun starts because the new boundary has been taken up.

An MP might have two wards that he has his eye on, but his adjoining neighbour might think they belong to him. When I was Speaker in the other place, I had to hold the jackets over a dispute about sending out leaflets. Someone would say, “Those two wards are going to be mine under the new boundary review, so I want to put leaflets out”. I will have to check Hansard, but I recall making a Statement from the Chair to say, “Look, Members of Parliament in this House represent their old boundaries, not the new ones that the boundary commissioners have produced”. That kind of fighting is going to get worse because if a Member of Parliament takes on a ministerial job in those circumstances, they will have to be in their department on a Friday. But the adjoining neighbour has none of those responsibilities. I know who is going to turn up at the Women’s Institute, the Union of Catholic Mothers and the bowling club. They will ask, “Where’s Michael?”, and the answer will be, “Oh, he’s awful busy. He’s a Minister and he can’t make it”. There will not be a word said against the colleague, but a hint will be put out that if you get me under the new boundaries, I will be your man. I do not want to know about being a Minister.

I have many friends in the Liberal Party, but maybe the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, could pass the word along. Sound bites fall off the tongue, and the sound bite is this: no one should have a job for life. The implication is that no one should have a safe Labour seat. It has been said a few times tonight that nobody should have such a thing as a safe Labour, Conservative or Liberal seat.

When I represented Glasgow Springburn, I always cringed when someone said, “You’re all right, Michael, you’ve got a safe Labour seat”. I worked just as hard to ensure that my electorate were well looked after as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, in his marginal constituency. The worst thing that anyone can do is take their electorate for granted. The only branch of Marks & Spencer that could beat the store in Argyle Street was the one at Marble Arch. I can remember the manager, Aubrey Green, saying, “If a customer says to one of my assistants that he or she is displeased about the service or the product, I want that customer to come in for a coffee and a chat about why they are displeased”. This was a very successful company and yet he had it in mind that that one customer fitted the parable of the lost sheep. That was the view I took about my constituents regardless of the majority that I had.

I know that the night is getting on and that other noble Lords wish to speak. All I can say about public inquiries is that they are very fair. I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that I went to a public inquiry which was held in Glasgow in about 1981 in preparation for the 1983 election. The people who turned up there came from every walk of life, some of them with no political axe to grind. Scotland would have lost a seat had we not put our argument—which was accepted—to the Boundary Commission. It was not a case of QCs arguing in front of another QC, the inquiry chairman, but of men and women coming from their communities and saying, “This should not happen and this is why we wish to give evidence”. So inquiries are worthwhile. Sometimes when inquiries were lost and the person or the party did not win their case, they always went away feeling that they had had a good hearing. That is very important.

The noble Baroness, Lady Adams, mentioned Argyll and the islands of Jura and Islay. I advise noble Lords to visit the area, particularly Islay. I am a teetotaller but it has some lovely distilleries there if anyone likes a whisky. It is a widely spread out area. However, on the mainland, if the Member of Parliament representing Galloway arrives at Glasgow airport, he will have to travel further south than Carlisle in order to get to the Mull of Galloway; and to get from the Mull of Galloway to Carlisle is a job and a half because in some of these isolated places there are only one-track roads. Consideration should be given to these communities.