Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Taylor of Goss Moor and Lord Tyler

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

I yield to no one in my pride at my Cornish ancestry. I am a direct descendant of Bishop Jonathan Trelawny, on whose behalf 20,000 Cornishmen threatened to march on London. Of course London gave way, so they did not have to march.

I have great affection for the noble Lord, Lord Myners. It is great to have him here fighting for Cornwall. I wish he had been more effective in doing so when he was a member of the previous Administration. However, I have to correct several of his misapprehensions. First, the reason why there were so many seats in Cornwall had nothing to do with good representation, unfortunately. It was simply that they were rotten seats, rotten boroughs, effectively owned by the Crown through the Duchy of Cornwall—it was a way of bolstering their majority in the other place. In my own north North Cornwall constituency, for instance, Bossiney had a notable Member representing it: Francis Drake. I am not aware that he ever went there, and there were only about three electors if he did.

Secondly, and much more seriously, if the noble Lord thinks that it was somehow through the advocacy of we who represented Cornwall that we managed to increase the number of seats from five to six, that is simply untrue. It was arithmetic—just as now, quite rightly, we are looking at the arithmetic. My noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor and I can guarantee that because of the increase in population in Cornwall, the Boundary Commission had to give us another seat.

I will also take the noble Lord up on his history. I know, for example, that when miners went over the border into Devon—it having been found that, as a result of the running down of the mining industry in Cornwall, there were more jobs in west Devon, as it now is—they allocated to themselves the description of working in greater Cornwall. That enabled them to say proudly that they were still Cornish miners. They could then emigrate to New South Wales, for example, knowing that they would not have to mix with Welsh, Scottish or Yorkshire miners. There would be only the real thing—Cornish miners.

I have a great deal of sympathy with this amendment—a great deal more, I am sorry to say, than with the selection we considered earlier. The big difference is that many of the other exceptions claim to be able to have overrepresentation. Their reasons are understandable; I do not deny the special claims that have been made. The Isle of Wight and Cornwall are, as far as I can see, the only areas of the country that may be prepared to accept underrepresentation. The case for six seats in Cornwall is not very strong. It makes a real difference if the people of Cornwall are prepared to accept underrepresentation with five seats, as was the case when my noble friend and I were Members in the other House and had very large electorates. The difficulty is of how to test that. Even if a referendum in Cornwall showed that people were prepared to accept a level of underrepresentation at the moment—which would be very persuasive to me, as a good democrat—what about the future? What about a year or two hence, when people say, “Why should we have less effective representation than other parts of the country?”? It is a real dilemma.

I do not know whether the noble Lord intends to press his amendment to a vote—perhaps he does—but we must give very careful consideration to that issue. In the mean time, it is much better that we treat Cornwall as a special case and examine it as such, as in the case of the Isle of Wight. It would have been wrong to put it into a longer list of exceptions, as I said at some unearthly hour last week.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor]

In following my noble friend and the noble Lord’s comments, I will briefly reflect on a couple of points. First, the noble Lord suggested that the Boundary Commission, in its wisdom, had decided at the last review that Cornwall should get six seats, rather than five. That was certainly not the case. It was a process of mathematics. Indeed, in the previous review we nearly crossed the threshold of five and a half seat entitlement to just above that to get six seats, but we fell just below it and got five. Any arguments in this place that representation has been based on a sense of entitlement or natural community are wrong. It has been a mathematical process, but one defined by one boundary—the county or borough boundary, which should not be crossed.

As somebody who represented two districts for a long time, I find some of the arguments about crossing local government boundaries rather untenable. It is perfectly possible to do that. What I profoundly believe—and always have—is that representation based on natural community is important. I have written about this and I do not like the Bill in its present form in that respect. I understand the belief that reviews should take place quickly and frequently to make sure that no party is disadvantaged by the slowness of the review process. The boundary review process has been too slow. There has been in place a genuine imbalance in the system for the past decade or two. It was clearly the case at the 2010 election that if the Labour Party had received a similar number of votes to those for the Conservative Party, the Labour Party would have been hugely advantaged by the distribution of seats. It is perfectly proper that Parliament is seeking to address that issue.

However, I agree with my noble friend that where communities are willing and able to be a little underrepresented to maintain a natural community of interest in their representation, there should be flexibility to allow for that. I should like this Bill to encompass that flexibility. If the noble Lord, Lord Myners, chose to press the amendment, I would vote in that way. I have written about this issue in that way. However, we should not in any sense present this issue as some special cause of Cornwall. It is about the representation of genuine community. We should not suggest in any way that what went before was right, because it was clearly not right. It was a different mathematical process which did not properly ensure a democratic outcome in elections, although I do not think that it ever affected the outcome of an election. I have consistently believed that the proposals before us, in that respect, should have a greater element of flexibility.