Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Roberts of Llandudno and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, the coalition kids are trashing Parliament. They are trashing everything else, after all—schools, humanities teaching in universities, the arts and the heritage, general practitioners, social housing, the Armed Forces, the police, the Civil Service, local government—so why should we expect Parliament to be spared? It is not that I think they mean to vandalise the national life; I acquit them of ill will. If it does not seem too patronising, I think the problem is lack of judgment. The Deputy Prime Minister said at Second Reading of the Bill in another place:

“We promised a new politics”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 44.]

A new politics, my Lords. I have to say that I detect a certain cockiness and callowness in that. At any rate, it is an excessively simple view that, because Members of Parliament were disgraced and the deficit needs to be cut, it is appropriate to cut the number of MPs by 50 and to save £12 million by doing so. No other justification has been offered for the reduction in the size of the House of Commons.

The coalition kids’ overconfidence and impetuosity has led Ministers into evident errors. A number of things that the Deputy Prime Minister said to the House of Commons were simply wrong. He was wrong to contend that the policy would save £12 million. If you take into account the cost of supporting Members of Parliament to serve larger constituencies and the enormous cost of a total upheaval in 2013 and of five-yearly boundary reviews thereafter, clearly the costs heavily outweigh any small savings that may be achieved by reducing the number of Members of Parliament by 50. He was wrong to say that the number of Members of Parliament had crept up over the years. He was wrong to say that local inquiries had had little impact, as noble Lords have already pointed out. He was wrong to assert that, with equal constituencies and the alternative vote, all votes would be of equal value. Under the alternative vote, general elections will still be decided in marginal seats. Tight contests will be determined by the third, fourth and fifth preferences of UKIP and BNP voters. Their votes will count more than the first preferences of supporters of the major parties.

Worse than errors of fact is confused thinking. The Deputy Prime Minister said at Second Reading that people must see us taking action to restore trust, including,

“ensuring that politics is transparent”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 34.]

The alternative vote is a uniquely opaque electoral system; it is impossible to foresee the consequences of the second, third, fourth and fifth preferences and so forth—the residual preferences of supporters of residual parties. It would be more rational and safer to hold elections by lottery, it seems to me, than by election under the alternative vote system.

Worse than confusion is poor judgment. To hand power to extreme parties in marginal seats is surely profoundly unwise. To subordinate every other important consideration to arithmetical equality in redrawing constituency boundaries, to discount the factors of geography, history, identity, continuity and to ignore the significance of local government boundaries is surely very unwise indeed. Is this a worthwhile new politics? How is anybody to make sense of this in relation to the Government’s ambitions for a big society and a new localism?

My noble friends Lord Touhig and Lord Elystan-Morgan spoke powerfully about the damaging impact on Wales of enlarging the size of constituencies. To reduce the parliamentary representation of Wales by 25 per cent at a time when there are also going to be Assembly elections and when a referendum is anticipated on the powers of the Assembly is surely in effect an invitation to the people of Wales to withdraw from engagement with the United Kingdom.

I had the honour to represent Newport in the House of Commons. Newport is a city with a long history, of which its people are very proud. It has been a settlement since Roman times, it was the home of Chartism, it was a significant port and it has been a major centre of steel manufacturing. Newportonians are intensely conscious of their local identity and the special character of their city. Before then, I had the privilege and happiness to represent Stratford-upon-Avon and South Warwickshire in the House of Commons: a rural constituency, equally forged by history and embraced by county boundaries that differentiate Warwickshire from Northamptonshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Wise politicians do not meddle with these realities and attachments; they do not transgress these boundaries for a theory; they understand that you cannot rally hearts and minds through an arithmetical formula.

Many of the mistakes that we make in public policy arise, it seems to me, from the fact that politicians, officials and, indeed, members of boundary commissions suffer from the characteristic handicap of our neophiliac age—they know no history. For them, it is always year zero; they lack understanding and respect for institutions and what others hold dear.

The Deputy Prime Minister asks us to measure the reforms that he proposes against the standard of 1832. As I understand it, it was the Great Reform Act that first constructed the concept of the constituency based on locality, to which its MP or MPs were accountable. The new manufacturing cities such as Manchester—I speak with diffidence on Lancashire in the presence of the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, but not in the presence of the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, who is no longer in her place—wanted to have their own Members of Parliament to speak to their concerns. Mancunians were not satisfied to be represented by the county Members of Parliament for Lancashire. Equally, rural Lancashire wanted Manchester and the new cotton towns to have their own Members of Parliament to stop urban votes swamping rural votes and confusing issues and representation. The 1832 Act redistributed seats from rotten boroughs to new towns and cities and enlarged the boundaries of small constituencies so that each seat represented a community and its interests. The view was held that when MPs spoke for defined constituencies with shared interests and a common sense of place, Parliament could better clarify the issues and come to decisions. The removal of the rotten boroughs, which had been tools of patronage, strengthened Parliament against the Executive.

The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 built on the foundations that the 1832 Act laid down. Under that legislation, communities could petition for incorporation as entities of local government. That process produced a map of local government that was erratic, anomalous and untidy but which accurately and authentically expressed people's sense of place and identity. That structure of local government lasted well over a century.

The Deputy Prime Minister's reforms move in the opposite direction to the reforms of 1832. They destroy the expression of community and identity in parliamentary representation, and they advantage the Executive against Parliament. Abraham Lincoln said:

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives”.

Any Government so insensitive as to offend people's pride in the place in which they live are acting to alienate people from the political process. This is being done in the name of restoring trust in politics.

It is also unwise for the Government to create constant instability. Just as Parliament is convalescing from the horrors of recent years, everything is to be uprooted and torn up again in 2013. New local parties will have to be formed in short order before the next election. There will be candidate selections, bitterly contested, no doubt, between those people who regard themselves as the heirs to the previous constituencies. Every five years thereafter there will be traumatic discontinuities both for constituencies and from Parliament to Parliament.

The Government are further weakening Parliament in the name of restoring trust. There will be no reduction in the number of Ministers commensurate with the reduction in the number of Members of Parliament. This Administration are larger than any that we have ever had before. There are 95 Ministers. That is five more than there were in the previous Government, and 12 more than there were in the Administration of Margaret Thatcher in 1983 when I first came into the House of Commons. Since then, of course, there has been devolution, so there should be a need for fewer departmental Ministers. The category of Ministers that has most increased in number is, of course, the Whips.

Government patronage is growing. The reduction in the number of Back-Bench Members of Parliament will enfeeble what is already an all too feeble capacity of the House of Commons to hold the Government to account. What is being done is in plain contradiction of the commitment in the Tory manifesto to a,

“sweeping … redistribution of power … from the government to parliament”.

The way in which the Government have handled the Bill so far in Parliament demonstrates an unreconstructed attitude on the part of the Executive to Parliament. Major constitutional legislation was programmed in the House of Commons. Twenty years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Remember the debates that we had, for example, on the Maastricht treaty. Clauses 3 to 6 on very important matters—the conduct of the referendum, combining polls, and the rules about media coverage—and Clause 11, on the number and distribution of seats, were entirely undiscussed in the other place in Committee or on Report. If the House of Commons is so effete and supine as to tolerate that, it is clearly the responsibility of this House to scrutinise the Bill with great rigour and to amend it in the many respects in which it is deficient.

All Governments should be humble in the face of their responsibilities, exercise a decent restraint in the use of the huge powers that our system of parliamentary government confers on them, and respect the views of others. This applies particularly in the case of a coalition Government, neither of whose parties won the election and who have no mandate for their policies.

Too many of the reflexes of Ministers and too many of the measures that they have brought in show disrespect for Parliament. We saw it in the Local Government Bill, where Ministers were content to exploit for their political convenience a decision by a judge to override a previous decision by Parliament. We saw it in the resistance to refer to the Examiners both that Bill and this Bill yesterday. We saw it shortly after the formation of the new Government in the attempt to rig future votes of confidence. When we come to scrutinise the fixed-term Parliaments Bill, we shall be on the lookout for further such chicanery. We have seen it in the Public Bodies Bill, which confers massive Henry VIII powers on the Government. Your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution has excoriated that measure. We see it in the packing of this House to stack up a majority, destroying the character and value of this House and undermining our capacity as a revising Chamber.

Reform of the electoral system is massively important. I happen to believe that it is right and timely that people should be given the opportunity to choose a new electoral system. There is a crisis of alienation from our politics. Far too many voters across the country feel that their votes at elections make no difference. The choices offered to them should include the single transferable vote—a proportional electoral system. The Deputy Prime Minister said on Second Reading that,

“it is vital to our political system as a whole that they are considered to be legitimate and fair”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 34.].

Why are people to be offered AV but not STV? After all, the commission chaired by Lord Jenkins found that AV was even more disproportionate than first past the post. The reason the Deputy Prime Minister gave when challenged on that was feeble. He said:

“For the sake of simplicity, however, it is better to present people with a simple yes or no alternative”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 41.].

However, he could have got STV on the ballot paper. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said yesterday that that was not practical politics, but the Liberal Democrats were extremely powerful at that moment. It was only with Liberal Democratic help that the Conservatives could form a Government, just as now only the Liberal Democrats—and not, for example, the National Union of Students or the PCS—can bring down this Government. The Liberal Democrats are happy to condone and tolerate the economic recklessness of this Government, their casual cruelties, for what? For a referendum on AV. What scale of values is that?

Constitutional reform should be embarked on not hastily, not casually but with the greatest care and sensitivity. Ministers should recognise that the constitution is intricate and its parts interdependent. The future of both Houses needs to be considered together. The future of central and local government needs to be considered together. There should be no taint of exploitation for party advantage and no suspicion of gerrymander, as there is with the Bill. There should be no rush towards deadlines contrived for political convenience. The case should be made on the basis of a full laying out of the facts and of honest, sustained debate. Genuine consultation should lead to compromise and the building of consensus.

There must be consensus. That is why it is essential that there is a threshold for the vote on AV in the referendum. It is quite unacceptable that major change should be introduced on the basis of low turnout by an electorate who are ill informed, through no fault of their own because they have not had time to inform themselves on the matter, and no doubt disgruntled and unhappy with the policies of the Government. It is a reform that is not supported by a substantial consensus.

Nor should the vote in the referendum be confused with other votes in elections held on 5 May. The Electoral Commission was robust when it responded to Tony Blair as Prime Minister when he was minded to hold a referendum on the introduction of the euro at the same time as Scottish and Welsh elections in 2003. It said that combining an election and a referendum could,

“have a distorting effect on the conduct and outcome of both polls”.

Whatever its views now, it was right then.

The Bill provides for change to the electoral system, change to the nature of our constituencies, change to the number of MPs, change to the relationship between MPs and constituents, and change to the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. Those of us who honour and cherish the Parliament of the United Kingdom—while always, I hope, being ready to accept duly considered, timely, gradual reform—will relentlessly oppose careless, improper, damaging constitutional change, as threatened in the Bill.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

Is the noble Lord really rejecting the Labour Party manifesto and its commitment to a referendum on AV? He would be far happier if there was STV in the UK.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

For the reasons I have given, I do not think it is a good idea to hold a referendum on AV; nor did I think so then. I would be deeply hesitant about moving from first past the post, but given what has happened to public attitudes to politics and Parliament in this country, I believe it is appropriate that people should now be given the choice, the opportunity, to switch to a different electoral system.