Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, I am pleased to follow my noble friend Lord McAvoy and to confirm what he said, namely that it is the custom for government Whips in the House of Commons not to speak. That has been the case with both Conservative and Labour Governments. I also add that what he did not say in the Chamber, he made up for outwith the Chamber, to keep his friends and colleagues on the straight and narrow very effectively.
I will raise a completely new matter. I make no apology for that, except to the Minister for not alerting him, because I did not know that there would be an opportunity today to raise this. I doubt if officials have cottoned on to this, unless they are really top-notch. The matter was raised yesterday in Scotland on Sunday. The Minister may have picked it up, because he lives in Scotland, as I do, and may have seen the paper. The matter was picked up today by the dailies and I alerted my Front Bench to it earlier. It is a new and genuine worry about having the election and the referendum on the same day. It was raised not by me but by the association of returning officers in Scotland, which said that it would be impossible to do the count for the Scottish Parliament elections on Thursday evening and make the announcement on Friday morning—as was the case in the past—because of the complications arising from having two elections together and the possibility of making mistakes in the middle of the night. We know the difficulties that arise when one has to work through the night.
It is a genuine worry of all parties in Scotland—certainly of the Labour Party and of the SNP Government, and I understand that at least some Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have expressed concern—that this will mean that on Friday morning there will be total confusion about the outcome of the election, because it will take some time to go through the count on Thursday night and Friday, and probably the result of the Scottish election will not be known until Saturday or Sunday. That will create tremendous problems—with the additional member system that we have, when constituencies are counted before additional members—for parties to know which of them will be in power, for there to be discussions between them about possible arrangements or for the largest party to decide to go ahead. It will create tremendous problems.
I will not blame the Minister if he has no immediate response to this, because the matter has just come up recently and I only became aware of it on Sunday. It would be helpful for all of us if he would look at that, take it away and ask officials—particularly officials in Scotland and in the Scotland Office, in discussion with the Scottish Executive—what the problems are and whether there is any way that they might be ameliorated.
Lord Rooker
I have not seen any of the reports that my noble friend quotes. However, it seems that this is a scam by the first past the posters to attack a PR fair voting system. It is inevitable with a PR system that one will not get an instant result. That has never been the case and no one has ever claimed that it was. So what if it takes 48 or 72 hours to count the votes because they have been cast in a fairer system than first past the post? Is my noble friend sure that he is not part of a conspiracy to undermine the successful operation of the PR fairer voting systems of the devolved Administrations of the UK?
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I would love to think that I am part of a conspiracy to undermine the so-called fair voting systems that some people want. It is a genuine slur on the returning officers—I know my noble friend Lord Rooker does not mean it—to suggest that they are part of any kind of scam. They are raising genuine concerns as non-political civil servants who work for local authorities. However, I draw the attention of my noble friend to Belgium, which has this PR system. It is seven months since the Belgian election and the country still does not have a Government. That is probably a better example. In Scotland, we can manage it rather more quickly than that.
Aside from that diversion, I ask the Minister—who has been very helpful, as has the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace—to look into this and, if there is a problem, to see whether there is any way to resolve it.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Succinctly, if my noble friend pushes this amendment I do not think that I am minded to support it. I would rather see some degree of flexibility but I am waiting to hear all the other arguments. As I have said, I have already sat through all three-and-a-half hours of the debate and am prepared to sit through the rest of it. I will make up my mind at the end as, no doubt, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, also will.
Lord Rooker
I am not keeping to the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, as I do not want it thought that I can be intimidated by the Front Bench opposite. What I have to say will sound a lot better in the dog hours of 2 am to 4 am so I shall save most of it for later on. First, I support very much what the Minister said. He cannot answer for a political party at the Dispatch Box. I fully accept that but there cannot be a party manager anywhere in the country that is not working out the consequences of this. On my visit to the Conservative Party conference, I could not avoid seeing the glass-walled room where, hour after hour, the training sessions were going on for the boundary changes. I assume that it was happening at the other conferences as well, but you cannot answer for that at the Dispatch Box and no one would expect the Minister to do that.
I want to share something very brief. I went into the other place in 1974, when it had 635 members. Paradoxically, in 1983, when the boundary change took the other place up to 650, my constituency changed from 52,000 to 76,000. Not many had a 50 per cent increase in one go. It changed my working pattern enormously but it was absolutely manageable. There was no problem, once you got settled in and learnt which sides of the streets were odd and even and where the postcode boundaries were—that is the way I work; I got my hands on the detail—so it is manageable. To be honest, as I have already said, I take the view that there should be fewer than the 650. I would not put a figure on it. I would go much further.
The point from my noble friend Lord Soley was valuable. I was, in a way, responsible for doing the very thing that he said but you actually undermine local government. With my constituency at 76,000, I was once in Gloucester—with its inner-city, dockland and urban renewal problems—talking to councillors as a spokesman for the Opposition. I asked them, “How many councillors have you got?”. They said, “We’ve got 46”. I said, “Well, the size of your patch is about the same size as my constituency”. “Oh, well”, they said, “we’ve got 12 county councillors”. I said, “I’ve got 12 councillors”—and that was all there was for 76,000, because of the size of the wards in Birmingham being 18,000 to 20,000. I was not in a position of shoving on to my few councillors the council work that came my way, but in the end you have that ratchet effect of undermining local government because of that structure. That is the issue to be addressed. Frankly, there is an opportunity to address that.
Your Lordships can have a look at the numbers—it is not scientific and it would be preposterous to say so—and at what was said in our Select Committee report on the role and functions of Members of Parliament and then their numbers. It is the very thing that we should do in this place; the role and function, then the form of getting in here. It is not to say that MPs should be constrained in what they do. They have to be freely elected to speak freely but if they could concentrate on being the cockpit of the nation—the inquest, if you like—and turn their attention to more scrutiny of central government in a very targeted, forensic way, we would have a better democracy for it. That would come as a consequence, but it would be much better if we could take that along with the flow, by a degree of consensus, so that it is not seen to be—this is the perception—for party advantage and party-driven. The outcome may be something that we could all say is a big success. Why spoil it all in the method of getting there if, at the end of the day, we will get something that will be good for all of us? I have stuck to my five minutes.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(14 years ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Is it not ironic that we joined the European Union without a referendum, but that the referendum was on whether we should stay in? The major change took place without a referendum, but the referendum actually backed the status quo.
Lord Rooker
Perhaps I may remind my noble friend that the then Government had the courage to hold a referendum on a separate day—on 5 June.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(14 years ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I am deeply grateful to the Government Chief Whip for providing this extra time for us to debate Clause 8. I am glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Deben—the artist previously known as John Selwyn Gummer—is here, even though he has moved conveniently to another part of the Chamber. He was concerned that some of us—although I have been here for five years now and have become sort of institutionalised in this place; the noble Lord joined us relatively recently—had imported habits from the other place. I shall try to explain to him and others why some of us here who were in the other place—in my case, it was for 26 years; a number of other Members were there even longer—are deeply concerned about what is happening. This clause is the fulcrum, as someone said earlier, of that.
Perhaps I can explain it better another way. I go around now to different countries as a member of the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. We talk to it about the Westminster system, our system of democracy and control, and the way in which we have checks and balances and parliamentary control of the Executive. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza—I call her my noble friend—was on the board with me for a number of years, and prior to that, and played an excellent role. She will remember all our discussions.
If the Bill gets bulldozed through, can we still go around to these countries and say that we are the greatest democracy in the world, the epitome of democracy, and that this Westminster system is the one to be held up for others to follow? We saw the Bill of 300 pages hugely amended in the House of Commons—I do not think that it was 300 pages when it started—with lots of amendments put down, lots of clauses never properly scrutinised, and great faith put in the drafters, the civil servants. After five years working with civil servants, I am always very cautious about putting total faith in their drafting, but no doubt Ministers think otherwise.
The noble Lord, Lord McNally, has put down dozens of amendments in this House which are going to have to go back; huge changes have taken place. The Bill was guillotined in the Commons. They did not consider it in every detail. They did not think: is this right, what are the implications, are there any unintended consequences to this, are there any implications for anything else that we are doing? They did not consider whether there were any implications for fixed-term Parliaments and reform of the House of Lords, as I said in an earlier debate. They did not consider that. Now there is the suggestion that we are not going to be able to consider it properly here. If that is the case, it will have gone through two Houses of Parliament without proper, detailed consideration.
Take other countries, such as the United States of America. It is not perfect in any way, but it has two democratically elected chambers—the House of Representatives and the Senate—the President taking part in terms of legislation, while the Supreme Court provides an opportunity to consider whether there is anything that infringes the constitution of the United States. We do not have those checks and balances here; we are rushing the Bill through.
Lord Rooker
Has my noble friend ever seen the preposterous way the Americans draw their boundaries?. We can lecture them on the way we draw our boundaries, both now and after we have passed the Bill. My noble friend should not pray in aid the American way of doing things as better, because the way they draw their boundaries is nothing short of a scandal.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My noble friend has had a lot more experience than I have. I accept his point in relation to drawing boundaries compared with the way we do it now, but if we pass the Bill and there are no hearings, I do not think I can be proud and pleased that we are doing it the best possible way. I am not saying that the US is perfect. There are other countries that can be prayed in aid.
We are pushing the Bill through. We have, in this clause, an Order in Council; some people outside believe that the Privy Council is some kind of democratic organisation, a bastion of democracy. My noble friend Lord Rooker will have been at many meetings of the Privy Council. I have only been at one, but it certainly did not seem to me to be any kind of bastion of democracy.
I am really concerned at the way the Bill is being pushed through without proper consideration. I say this honestly, and I know that a number of Conservative Members have heard me say it again and again: if the Bill goes through unamended in substance, I think that they are going to wake up, in a few months’ time and say, what on earth—I was going to say something else—have we let ourselves in for? I think that there will be some deep regret.
Finally, in relation to what we were discussing earlier—the electorate and whether we draw the boundaries based on those who are registered, or those who are eligible to vote—I can tell the noble Lords, Lord McNally and Lord Strathclyde, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, that this morning, to be helpful, I put down an amendment to page 11, on the interpretation of the “electorate” for the purpose of the Bill, which would take account of that. This was just to show that on this side of the House, we can be helpful. I hope that, eventually, we will get some more help from the Government.
Lord Rooker
I want to go home, to be honest. I did not realise how serious my noble friend was about his amendment. I know he supports AV, which I do not; I support PR. It is not our job to sow confusion in the ballot system, which is what this amendment would do. The Electoral Commission will spend a fortune distributing leaflets to every dwelling, informing the voters about the change in the system. They will not be talking about using Xs. I gave the example from my own experience. As every ex-Member of Parliament will know from being at a count, it is the indication of a candidate by the voter that counts. The officers have a whole list of charts, showing what you can put on a ballot paper, what counts and what does not. That is how you get your spoilt votes. Not every vote is like it is. The public do not understand this but the system works and I have every confidence in it.
What if the voters put an X against one and, because of all the publicity that has gone on, they put a 2 against someone else? How do you know the X is a 1 in that case? Only an X alone on the ballot paper would indicate a preference for a candidate. That, however, is the very antithesis of what we are trying to do with the alternative vote; it is not my preferred choice but it is a choice against first past the post. I ask the Government not to put this amendment in the Bill because custom and practice dictates, with returning officers, that the vote would count. This would actually sow confusion. Are we going to send back to the other place a Bill that we got from them and say, “By the way, we want you to use Xs.”.? Come on, that is absolutely preposterous.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My noble friend did not say that we want to use Xs, just that it might happen that way. My noble friend Lord Rooker says that it is very clear that a returning officer has all these charts, but that is not my experience. I will give him an illustration and ask whether he thinks that this should have been counted as a vote for me. Next to my name—and there is nothing else on the ballot paper—someone has written HMFC. Now, is that a vote for me?
Lord Rooker
No, because no words are allowed. That is part of the rules. A tick will do if it clearly indicates a preference, but words are not allowed so it would not count.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(14 years ago)
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Lord Rooker
Amendment 30 takes care of that. I know that I shall be criticised for Amendment 30 but, if you are going to have multi-choice answers, you have to be able to rank them so that there is a clear winner. What I have here are two questions that are intended to be on one ballot paper: “Do you want to change the system? Yes or no?”. If the yes vote wins, which will not be known until the papers are counted, then the second question comes in: “Which family would you choose?”. In New Zealand, there was a year’s gap between the two referendums. The first referendum was not binding but the second one was. It was do or die between one system or another. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said, the second referendum required a yes or no answer and so was absolutely clear.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Can my noble friend confirm that first past the post was not an option in the second referendum?
Lord Rooker
Yes it was. First past the post was mentioned in both referendums even though when people were asked in the first referendum, “Do you want to change from first past the post? Yes or no?”, the yes vote won. They then chose what I call, in shorthand, the additional member system as the preferred option from the family. A year later, there was a run-off between a detailed additional member system and the status quo, the first past the post. You could not complain if you were a first past the poster that you did not get a fair crack of the whip in New Zealand, because there were two opportunities. That is what cemented the change, because on two occasions first past the post lost. It lost on the indicative referendum to start with, when the choice came; and then it lost on the binding referendum. So, on the second referendum, first past the post was back. It was incredibly sophisticated, modern and democratic, and this was 1992-93. The system worked, and it is one on which I wanted to model this kind of operation.
They did it and it works, so there is somewhere in the world that we can point to—somewhere that is English-speaking, first past the post, democratic. We are scratching around because no one can find a place where the type of alternative vote proposed in the Bill actually works in reality. I was going to use Canada as an example, but it was not a national election when they used it there, when it all went dramatically wrong for lots of people. It was always in the provinces. If you google Canada and the alternative vote you will come up with a textbook of how to smash the alternative vote. It was not a national election, however, so I am not going to use it.
It was a two-stage question and a two-stage referendum, but my amendments do not cover the second stage. I just wanted to deploy the case and give at least a positive push—or a nudge, in the language—to the effect that it can work, because it did work and there is a classic example for it.
There are a couple of points I did not speak on in the last debate—I showed enormous restraint, as I said to the Leader of the House—because I have got nothing new to add to what I am not going to say now. One of the reasons that I never joined the Electoral Reform Society after I became a convert just over 20 years ago was this issue about STV. That is why I never joined. I have worked very happily with lots of people on joint platforms and would be happy to do so again, but I will never join because it has this thing whereby if you join, people will say, “Oh, he is in favour of STV”. It is the one system I do not like because it forces party people to fight against each other. I do not think that is a clever system. It was also dissected by the Plant commission, which I will come to in a moment, which was chaired by my noble friend Lord Plant back in the 1990s.
On AV, you have to ask yourself what you are trying to do. Are you trying to elect the most popular person for a constituency and then as a by-product get a popular Government, because it is slightly more proportionate? The question that should be asked on this referendum is: do you want a majoritarian system or a proportional system? That is the question to ask. First past the post and AV are both majoritarian systems; there is no argument about that. They are not remotely proportional, so they are in the majoritarian family. But if you want to elect the most popular person, AV will not do that.
The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, raised an issue which I have covered later in Amendment 52, so I will not go into it in detail now, about what you do with those preferences for the bottom candidates. It is unfair; there is no question about that. The sixth candidate gets chucked out. That second preference is worth exactly the same as the first vote for the first candidate or the second preference for the second candidate. It is very unfair that someone’s vote should have that value. Amendment 52 gets us round that. But there is not a system that will deliver the most popular candidate.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, gave us a seminar on the last election. I want to read a bit from page 66 of the Plant report, which was a long time ago, about how to get the most popular person elected. You certainly cannot do it by ranking and kicking people out; that does not work. For example, as I tried to explain in a previous debate, the supporters of the first three candidates in a list might all hate each other equally, but each of the supporters of the first three would vote for the fourth. That is what is known as the Condorcet winner—which is defined as the option that beats every other in an exhaustive series of pair-wise contests.
I raised this with some academics upstairs and they gave me a good example of someone who would have been a Condorcet winner, although it did not happen because of the system that was used. Noble Lords will remember the French election when Chirac ran up against Le Pen and Jospin came third. Jospin was the Condorcet winner because, in a run-off with Chirac, he would have beaten Chirac and in a run off with Le Pen, he would have beaten Le Pen, but because he was third he got knocked out. He would have been the Condorcet winner in that case, but he was not because of the way the system worked with the two-round ballot, so the most popular person did not win. That is a good example from recent history and we all know what happened in the French election.
The alternative vote system will not give you the most popular candidate. I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, earlier—that would be far beyond my pay grade—but he repeated the canard about the winner securing 50 per cent plus of the votes. It is not true; it cannot happen under the system in this Bill. In order for it to happen every voter would have to use every single preference on the ballot paper and that will not happen because of what I said last week. I can guarantee that some Liberal Democrat candidates will go around the country saying to their supporters, “Don’t vote and use your second preference because they will work out what might happen if that second preference all goes wrong”. People will not be encouraged to use all their preferences.
There are some problems with the system. I digress because I wanted to point out that every system has its defects; nothing is perfect. You can make an electoral system do exactly what you want it to do. You can put constraints on turnout; you can put constraints on the additional Member system; and you could say to a party, “You cannot have a top-up candidate unless you have won at least one constituency”. I was accused of being antidemocratic when I said that. You do not need a percentage turnout. If you cannot win a constituency, you are not entitled to a top-up. They said, “All that is bad for the Greens”. I said, “Let them go and win a seat”, and they have done that now, so they would qualify. You can do all those things; it is all techie.
I refuse to let my eyes glaze over, but when I am faced with the situation presented in this Bill, it makes me so angry because, at the end of the day, I will have to vote for first past the post, which really sticks in my throat. I am being forced to vote for first past the post because of what is in the Bill: the preference system, the turnout and all the issues which we discussed last week on which we can go into detail when we come to other amendments. Those matters make the situation more perverse and worse than the present system. That is a change I am not prepared to vote for. I am not prepared to vote for something on the basis of, “Vote for this and if we get it right at the next election, we will come back and get a bit of PR, AV+”. Give me AV+ and I will vote for it.
The noble Lord, Lord McNally, would vote for AV+ but he cannot get the person sitting next to him in the Cabinet to support him. That is a bit like the Labour Cabinet. We were presented with exactly the same in the Bill that came to the House in March. People were not asked if they wanted to change. It was put together by a Cabinet, most of whose members did not want change at any price; they just stuffed AV in and thought they could get away with it because it is so close to first past the post. There were the same problems and I made the same speech when sitting on the Bench opposite.
I am annoyed because, at the end of the day, unless there is a major change to the Bill, I will have to vote for first past the post, which I do not think is very good. Also I think people will be misled during the referendum. Perhaps I can give an example: somewhere in the world it worked in a mature democracy and I think it could work here if we asked the people. I wish we were brave enough to do that.
I realise this was all cobbled together in a rush in the six days after the election. I understand that the pressures to get a deal were enormous. I will support the fixed-term Parliament, although I think four years is better than five but I will settle for five years. I accept that the only deal in town was the deal I am looking at now, but that means we should be mature enough to say, “Look, if there is something intrinsically wrong with the system, let us put the case to the people and ask them if they want a change”.
Think of the mandate you would have from that Front Bench, if you could persuade people that, yes, there is demand for a change. The first-past-the-posters would be run out of town and we could get to work on getting a change that people would accept and it might last for the 132 years that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, keeps saying that first past the post has lasted for.
I freely admit that you can all go home because I do not intend to push any of this to a vote, but I wanted to put it on the record that there is an alternative way of doing this. I beg to move.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I was waiting for the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, to come in.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(14 years ago)
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Lord Rooker
I want to make it clear that my noble friend is speaking for Scotland. I am an English person, who, by the way, would like the Scottish system. The only reason why he was elected for Lothian in the top-up system is because there were tens of thousands of Labour voters in that region without a constituency representative. That is the point. That is why he was elected. That this system did not leave hundreds of square miles with Labour voters without any direct representation is a bonus. It is a plus that my noble friend was elected to the Scottish Parliament, not a minus.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I am grateful for that endorsement and argument. My noble friend is a very powerful debater. He has made a good point. It is not all negative, but let me tell you some of the negative points. When we had a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, we were forced to concede STV for local government—I will come to that in a moment. Now we suffer from a minority SNP Government who have only one more seat than the Labour Party. They are so paralysed that they are unable to put any of their legislation through Parliament. That is why I said to my noble friend Lord Howarth that he should come up and see the stalemate that exists when we are not getting legislation properly dealt with.
I raised once before the system of Members retiring in the Scottish Parliament. If I were to retire tomorrow—and some people might like me to—the person who was second in the list would take over automatically without any election at all, with the people having no say whatever. Since my noble friend Lord McConnell represents a constituency—Motherwell and Wishaw—if he were to retire tomorrow, there would be a by-election and the people would have a say. However, if Margo MacDonald—who stood as an independent—were to retire tomorrow, there would be no filling of the vacancy whatever. I say to my noble friend Lord Rooker—a good friend—that this is just one of the many anomalies of the system that we have in the Scottish Parliament.
We ended up with STV. We had the European election system, the Scottish Parliament AMS system and the single transferrable vote in local government. Chaos has led to no overall control in so many authorities.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock(14 years ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Yes, I thank my noble friend very much; I did not know that he was a fan of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde.
It is a very difficult campaigning concept. I was speaking earlier about the Liberal Democrats going campaigning and using loudspeakers to say, “Vote for our miserable little compromise”. It will be even more difficult if you have a loudspeaker car saying, “Vote Conservative. Vote No”. Wait a minute—do you want us to vote for you, or do you not? It confuses the electorate. They are two different things.
I am trying not to use my usual humorous manner, because it is a serious matter that will confuse people. I worked with David McLetchie, who was the Conservative leader in the Scottish Parliament, for the “Yes” campaign for the European referendum; I think my noble friend Lord McAvoy was on the other side of the argument on that occasion. The essence of referendum campaigning is cross-party campaigning and building up as strong a campaign as you can. That is very different from the tribalism of the party campaign. It will really confuse people.
The second area of confusion is voting. When the voter goes into the voting booth, there will already be two ballot papers: one for the constituency and one for the regional list. That is enough to comprehend; I am not saying that Scottish or Welsh voters are any less intelligent than English voters or any others. Then you get a third ballot paper for the referendum. That is okay as far as it goes, but the problem with putting a referendum in with a Scottish election is that the two franchises are substantially different. For the referendum it is the parliamentary franchise, and for the Scottish Parliament election it is the local government franchise. The difference is that Peers are currently on the local election franchise but not the parliamentary election franchise. This Bill takes account of that, but does not deal with the other differences. Overseas voters are on the parliamentary franchise but not on the local government franchise. Citizens of European countries living in the United Kingdom are on the local government franchise but not on the parliamentary franchise. Taking Scotland as an example, we will have all the Polish, German and French people—people from all European countries—living and working in Scotland going to the polling booth and being able to vote in the election but not in the referendum. That is confusion.
The Bill is one of the most complicated that I have ever seen, with its formulae and everything else. One of the particular complications is how the presiding officer records who has voted and how. The option is there for the polling officer to have one register or two. If there is one register, he or she must make a note next to the name of every voter of whether they got two or three ballot papers. On the other hand, if they have two registers, they must move from one to the other. That will take twice, maybe three or four times, as long as at present.
Most Members of the Committee will remember that, even during the general election, with one election under the simple system of first past the post, there were queues to vote in Sheffield, no less. Some people lost their vote because of those queues because they could not get into the polling place before 10 o’clock. Imagine how much more difficult it will be when you have three ballots—two for the Scottish Parliament and one for the referendum—and it is then being marked on two registers or one register. All of that complication will ensure that there is confusion at the polling place. Perhaps people will be denied their vote because they cannot get in due to the time that it has taken to carry out this complicated procedure.
Because of a lack of respect, the Scottish Parliament was not consulted. This is what would have happened if it had been consulted: in that debate on 19 November, the Scottish Parliament voted by 90 votes to 30 to petition this Parliament not to have the referendum on the same day as the election. If the coalition presses it through that it should be on the same date, it will be going against the clearly expressed view of the democratically elected Scottish Parliament, passed by a majority of 60, or 3:1. I am sure that the coalition would love to have that kind of overwhelming majority in the Lobbies here tonight or on any other occasion.
I plead with the Government to listen to the Scottish Parliament and its democratically expressed view that these two elections should not be held on the same day. If the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is replying to this debate, I am sure that he will understand the problems involved, and that this will be the first amendment that the coalition understandably accepts.
Lord Rooker
At about 2 pm I was given notice about degrouping part of this group. Amendment 5 is mine. I was advised that Amendments 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, all of which contain specific dates, would be degrouped. They would come after Amendments 4, 6 and 13 which do not contain dates. I was advised to have the debate on that basis. I apologise for not being early enough in the day to give proper notice of that.