Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

I wonder whether I might offer a word of advice to the noble Lord. At 1.30 this morning, in one minute flat, I proposed a very simple and very straightforward amendment to the Bill, which was passed by the Committee. Rather than hearing from everybody who has ever had any constituency experience in Scotland—a repetition of the argument that the noble Lord gave us in 12 minutes of fascinating discussion—I wonder whether very simply we could now proceed to some conclusion.

I support in general what he says. I have two points to make. I think that his amendment may be in the wrong place. It should probably have come in under rule 5(1), where it says:

“A Boundary Commission may take into account, if and to such extent as they think fit”.

That is a very important qualification, and all four of the Boundary Commissions are advised by that.

In addition, this amendment may be too broad in its present terms. The intention is right and it may well be that my noble friend is prepared to accept it, but if the noble Lord would keep quiet now it would be more likely to be accepted.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I accept the second two parts of the noble Lord’s three-part advice. As for the first part, I think he wants us to believe in fairy stories if he thinks that it was his eloquence that caused the Minister to accept his amendment.

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[Lord Myners]

I would have been more than happy to have given way to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, who was my local Member of Parliament for many years. I look forward with great interest to his later contribution to the discussion on this amendment.

I was bringing my remarks to a close. I am sure that Members of the House realise that I can talk about Cornwall for some considerable time, but I will not delay the House further than to say that an approach that is based upon arithmetic simply will not be acceptable to the people of Cornwall. In an earlier debate the question was asked: “Would the people of Cornwall prefer to have five constituencies, none of which went across the boundary into Devon, or six representatives in the other place, one or more of whom had seats that went into Devon?”. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, answered correctly, I believe, that the people of Cornwall would much prefer to have five committed Members of Parliament who stood for Cornish seats rather than someone who stretched across into a part of the world that the Cornish people regard as a different country. They look at Devon as part of a different country and they would not be able to understand why a constituency strayed across the Tamar into a country with totally different economic and social circumstances.

The obvious place where that would happen would be into Plymouth, yet the European Union, through the granting of Objective 1 and follow-on status, has recognised the acute poverty of Cornwall, which is very different from Plymouth. Indeed, one of the reasons why Cornwall was slow in getting support from Europe for its manifest poverty was that it was originally co-joined with Plymouth and Torbay, which had the effect of giving an illusion that Cornwall was more prosperous than is the reality. That is why my Amendment 88 proposes that Cornwall should retain six parliamentary constituencies and that they should remain within what is now the county of Cornwall.

[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.

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[Lord Berkeley]

I was illustrating the difficulty for a small community of 2,000 people of getting a new ferry link out of this Government and the previous Government. It is still not resolved; I gather that the final decision has been delayed, which will be extremely bad for those people next summer. I compare that with what happens in Scotland. There, with the support of the Scottish Government, these things seem to happen much more easily and quickly, because the Government there recognise the importance of the island life. I do not think that the English, or British, Government, recognise that in the same way.

My point is that it is important to have the strongest lobby in Cornwall to support such things. I have no particular view on whether it should be five or six Members of Parliament, but it must be a group of Cornish MPs.

[Lord Tyler]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, for whom I have a lot of affection and with whom I have worked together on Cornish issues, for giving way. Can he confirm that his amendment, which I am sorry he has been unable to move, leaves open the issue of whether the number of Members of Parliament should be five or six? My remarks and those of my noble friend were directed at the possibility that Cornwall might be prepared to accept underrepresentation with five Members if it retained the integrity of the county. By contrast, the problem with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Myners, is that it is prescriptive. It would have to be six. That is an important difference. Perhaps the noble Lord would develop a step further his point about the difference between five or six Members for the county.

[Lord Berkeley]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord. I am no great expert on sizes of constituencies. Under the number of 600, 650 or somewhere in between that is decided on in the end for the rest of the country, there could be increases or decreases in population in Cornwall—and, for that matter, on the Isle of Wight—which would affect that. I am happy to accept six and equally happy to accept five, but from my discussions with the people of Cornwall, the key thing is that they have a number, be it five or six, that is peculiar to Cornwall and does not go across the Tamar. Members of Parliament lobby for Cornwall in a very good way, and that would be lost.

I live in Polruan, which is in the South East Cornwall constituency. I know the Member of Parliament there, Sheryll Murray, who has written to me in support of the campaign for keeping Cornwall separate. She would be very unhappy to have a bit of Plymouth in her constituency. I agree with her, and all the people I have talked to would be equally unhappy. My main point is that Cornwall must be kept separate. I do not have a strong view on whether there should be five or six constituencies, and I am sure we can come back to that later if my noble friend does not press his amendment tonight.

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[Lord Myners]

I am most grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has—

[Lord Tyler]

Ditto to that. Would the noble Lord like to conclude by putting his amendment and testing the opinion of the House? Then he could stop talking.

[Lord Myners]

I find the discourtesy of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, which seems to be present at any time that I speak in this House, quite extraordinary and contrary to what I understood to be the custom and practice of this House. That is reprehensible. Fortunately—and I am closing my remarks now—it will not be long before the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, will be able to speak on matters relating to Cornwall. The noble Lord is a recent and most welcome addition to our House. He has previously contested seats in Cornwall and I know that he has a great affection for Cornwall. I also know him as a man of considerable courtesy and look forward to his interventions rather more than I can look forward to those from one or two others who sit with him.

In closing, and before inviting the House to take a position on the amendment, I take considerable encouragement from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that Cornwall is worthy of special consideration and from the endorsement given to that view from my own Front Bench by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton. I hope, notwithstanding the somewhat dismissive approach to the case for Cornwall from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, that careful consideration will be given to the issue of Cornwall and that the Government will bring forward their own amendments at a later stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.