Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Plant of Highfield Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Plant of Highfield]

My Lords, I want to concentrate my remarks on the proposals for voting reform. I agree with the criticisms of the rest of the Bill as set out by many noble Lords, particularly by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and put crisply by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. However, I shall leave that on one side and concentrate on the issue of the referendum and electoral reform.

If there is going to be a referendum there obviously needs to be a case for reconsidering the voting system, and that case has to be set out in terms of looking at wider social and political change. Usually, the considerations adduced by reformers cover some of the following issues. First, they claim that we live in a more diverse society but that that diversity is not properly reflected in Parliament. This argument is used mainly by those in favour of a form of proportional representation. There is also—the noble Lord, Lord Alton, spoke powerfully on this from his experience in Liverpool—a sense of alienation from politics. It is not entirely clear to me that the voting system is necessarily the best solvent of that alienation, but I am pretty sure that that sense exists and we need to be alert to it—perhaps the voting system can play some part in ameliorating it.

The third point that is often made is that people have lost a lot of confidence in the effectiveness of political processes and perhaps look to civil society organisations in particular as an alternative to political involvement and even voting. It is certainly true that many civil society organisations have much larger memberships than political parties. I think that I am right in saying, although I would not want to go to the stake over it, that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has more members than all the political parties in Great Britain and Northern Ireland put together.

There has also been a sharp decline over the years in party identification and party loyalty. People vote far more instrumentally now. First past the post in a largely two-party system was a good vehicle for mobilising party identification and party loyalty. However, if people vote more instrumentally and in a multiparty system, that feature of first past the post seems far less salient. In addition, it is argued that first past the post has worked well enough in a two-and-a-half-party system, but we no longer have such a system. The Lib Dems no longer fit in a telephone box or a taxi—the party is larger than that—and we have the growth of the nationalist parties as well. We no longer have that kind of two-and-a-half-party system in which first past the post worked effectively.

It is argued that first past the post has often been supported by the doctrine of the mandate: a single party would be elected under first past the post and would have the right to carry out its mandate. However, this idea of the mandate and the right to carry it out in full has been eroded by the declining percentage of people supporting the successful party at an election, which was a point made very effectively by my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. The doctrine of the mandate is less secure if a governing party gets a substantial majority of seats from a very low percentage of the vote.

Some people have said that first past the post was good at preserving a sense of political identity and differentiation. There would be a Conservative Party, a socialist or social democratic party and a Liberal Party and this sort of differentiation between parties, which fitted in with first-past-the-post politics rather well, mobilised party members and offered clear-cut alternatives to the voters. However, the criticism is—there is a lot of academic evidence on this—that the winner-takes-all system, which first past the post is, gives parties a strong incentive to move towards the position of the median voter or, to put it more colloquially, the centre ground. This has clearly happened. It has happened since 1982 with the Labour Party and the invention of new Labour as a vehicle for getting to the centre ground. It has also happened with the Conservative Party since 1997. The idea has been attributed to the Prime Minister, although I do not know whether he used the exact phrase, about detoxifying the Conservative brand. That is because of the pressure to move towards the centre ground for which the winner-takes-all system provides the incentive.

The struggle is now over the middle ground and not ideological purity, whereas first past the post was a kind of defence of ideological identity. The expenses scandal in the House of Commons has weakened the authority of that House, which is not helped by the fact that many MPs, as critics say, are elected on much less than 50 per cent of the vote. Perhaps the final point in favour of some kind of consideration of the electoral system is one not often put, but is quite a powerful one. In a position where we are likely to be devolving more power to the devolved Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales, it is very important to increase the authority of the House of Commons and of Members of Parliament within it, as the national Parliament. If people elected in the devolved bodies are seen to have greater legitimacy compared with MPs in the national Parliament, we are in for some problems.

Let us assume for a moment that these are good reasons to re-examine the electoral system and consult people, should the choice be between first past the post and AV. There is a case for saying that it should be a broader choice, because both first past the post and AV are majoritarian systems, whereas many criticisms of first past the post embody the idea that representation should be more proportional. Yet there is no guarantee at all, and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that AV would produce more proportional outcomes. There is a case for saying that the choice should be between a majoritarian principle and a proportional one or between two majoritarian systems like first past the post and AV, with the option of a proportional system. But of course that makes any referendum far more complex and the results of it much more difficult to determine.

AV is more pluralistic than first past the post, which allows the elector to choose more widely, should he or she wish to do so. While being pluralistic, it is also more consensual, which I suppose is an advantage to it, and it preserves the constituency link, which in the light of the expenses scandal is a very effective form of political accountability, to the electorate and not just to the party. Of course, it makes coalition government much more likely, but the pressures from the media in particular at an election run on those lines would be such as to require political parties to indicate before the election what their preferred coalition partners would be. That would make the whole process of forming coalitions, if they were indicated by the results, much more transparent and open.

It is sometimes said that one great advantage of first past the post is that it creates strong government, and no doubt it does. We can all think of examples over the years where governments have acted in a very strong and decisive way, but it is not necessarily the same thing as effective government, whereby a decision sticks and has wide consent behind it. There is nothing particularly partisan about this; the Suez invasion, the poll tax and the Iraq war were examples of strong government, but I am not sure that they were clear examples of effective government. It would be absurd to say that Germany, which has a coalition, has not had effective government over the whole time of its existence as a federal republic. So we need to be wary of assuming that single-party government is the same thing as effective government. If we have this referendum and it goes in favour of the alternative vote or if there is a proportional option on the agenda, we have to accept that coalition will become the norm and not the exception. We would therefore need to think much more clearly about the processes of coalition formation, rather than the protracted and not very edifying experience that we had earlier this year.