Integrity of Electoral Processes

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Tyler]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to consult on measures to enhance the integrity of electoral processes.

[Lord Tyler (LD) (Valedictory Speech)]

My Lords, at the outset, I want to pay tribute from my own personal experience to Sir David Amess. He was a truly honourable Member, and I appreciate enormously his family’s call for more co-operation and working together. That is something I have tried to do throughout my 30 years in this Parliament.

It is perhaps sad but necessary to start by taking note of the deterioration in the public and political dialogue since David and I were first elected. During the whole of my service here, I have been privileged to work with colleagues from other parties and from none on a number of projects, not least in areas of direct relevance to the subject of this debate. It was a particular privilege to work with the late Robin Cook to reform the Commons—successfully—and try to reform this House, not quite so successfully. I have been able to co-operate closely with Conservative allies, too, in such notable reformers as Ken Clarke, Sir George Young, William Hague and Andrew Tyrie, as they then were. I have also had very constructive shadow relationships with Commons Agriculture Ministers such as John Gummer, Douglas Hogg and Nicholas Soames. At this stage in their careers, they will perhaps forgive me for blighting their preferment prospects with No. 10 by mentioning their names now.

What has changed, especially in the past two years, is that that constructive co-operation with Conservatives —now in the Johnson mould—has become impossible. That tradition of Conservative principle, combined with a pragmatic pursuit of shared values and objectives, has simply vanished. I am sorry to say that the once great Conservative and Unionist Party has become a narrow, dogmatic cult. I know that many great figures of the past and present on the Benches opposite know this to be true, though they cannot say it. Andrew Rawnsley admirably summed this up 10 days ago under the headline, “Like all cults, Borisology is detached from reality and destined to end badly”.

He wrote:

“The Conservative & Unionist party is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-party.”


The present leadership do not care about conserving the union. They do not feel obliged to conserve Britain’s reputation in the world—not even by maintaining the legal obligation for realistic international aid—so destroying the UK’s soft power role. They have no time for conserving business ethics, failing to apply due diligence to the award of huge contracts to their political friends and donors. They demean such core elements of our constitution as respect for the rule of law. They have even threatened the constitutional position of the monarch, with their underhand attempt at an illegal Prorogation of Parliament. Was that conservative? Likewise, tearing up international agreements signed with people the Prime Minister calls friends and partners is not conservative. It now appears that Ministers intend to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights, for which Churchill worked so hard. Is that conservative?

I owe my time in this Parliament to the people of my beloved ancestral county of Cornwall. They are feeling the distinctly unconservative, scorched-earth nature of this Government particularly keenly. It is easy to underestimate quite how badly people feel let down by the level of deceit, misrepresentation and deliberate distortion—downright leaver lies—that has become all too common since the 2016 Brexit referendum. Both the Prime Minister and Mr Gove promised that the level of EU investment funding for Cornwall, as a region of generally very low household incomes and below-average economic activity, would be fully replicated in the new post-Brexit national support programme. Tory MPs repeated that promise. EU structural fund support this year would have been some £100 million. As Cornwall Council now warns, the actual UK support now firmly promised is only £3 million. Even if the proportion of SPF is matched, the maximum would be £57 million. So much for levelling up.

Further, to add blatant insult to injury, we have just learned that Ministers have torn up their promise, made to me in this House during debates on the then Trade Bill, that all existing protections for Cornish speciality food products under the excellent EU scheme would be fully retained in future trade deals. My noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed pointed out on Thursday that the agreement with Norway and other countries has ditched that commitment. There is no protection there for Cornish pasties, clotted cream and so on. The Minister could only splutter in reply:

“You cannot get all that you ask for, of course, when you negotiate these agreements.”—[Official Report, 14/10/21; col. 2021.]


Did they even ask for this important protection? What is happening with all the other trade negotiations? It is this cavalier relationship with the truth that divorces today’s Conservative Party from its past and betrays the legacy of Macmillan, Heath, Major—and, yes, even Thatcher.

Eventually, I believe that the time of this clique will be over, both in the country and in the Conservative Party. But for now, the Johnson junta is making an insidious attempt to defy electoral gravity in perpetuity by weighting the entire system in its favour. Last week, the chair of the official Committee on Standards in Public Life said:

“It is essential … that parties obtain funding in ways that are free from suspicion that donors receive favours or improper influence in return … I doubt many would argue that our current system meets this test.”


That was a masterclass in understatement.

Yet, far from achieving cross-party and independent consensus on how to achieve transparency and safeguards, the Government’s Elections Bill actually increases the chance of elusive foreign financial inducements. It is demonstrably designed to inflate the influence of Tory millionaires while disfranchising millions of citizens who are less likely to vote Tory. It is deliberately partisan and a real threat to the basic integrity of our electoral system.

For about 150 years—since 1883, in fact—the law of the land has sought to prevent rich men buying the constituency elections that determine who will govern Britain. Candidates and their agents have been held responsible for all expenditure intended to advance their cause. This Government, in their own party interest, are attempting to reverse the 2018 Supreme Court judgment which reinforced that essential safeguard. In a feigned pursuit of “clarification”, the Bill would enable huge sums of money to be invested by the richest party in marginal seats while its candidate and his or her agent took no responsibility for it. There would be no effective control or limit.

To this, they add an attempt to change mayoral and PCC elections from the relatively fair supplementary vote system to the self-evidently less fair first past the post system, which cheats so many electors of any impact. Perhaps the most compelling line in the Government’s 2019 manifesto was the promise that they would be

“making sure that every vote counts the same—a cornerstone of democracy.”

In today’s multiparty democracy, that clearly requires the end of first past the post for the House of Commons. Parliament has legislated to make this happen in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. MPs should perhaps recall the admonition, “Physician, heal thyself.” That would be an initiative on which we could all work together, co-operate and seek consensus.

I could hardly leave the House without reflecting on a lifetime commitment to changing how Members get here. I recall being accused of being “an old man in a hurry” when I was an enthusiastic proponent of the coalition Government’s substantial and sincere attempt to reform this place in 2012. I pointed out then that progressing to elections a century after they had first been envisaged in the Parliament Act 1911 could only be considered “hurried” in this Chamber. At that time, there was real cross-party consensus for promising elections—just no consensus on delivering them.

Among the deluge of reports and submissions on electoral and political reform that I have been wading through in my office, clearing the decks for departure, I came upon a previous submission by the then Leader of the Opposition here, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, entitled “Delivering a Stronger Parliament”. I will read only a short extract:

“The Senate should have 300 members called Senators ... All political members should be directly elected in largely county-based, three-member constituencies. There should be an end to the abuse of patronage of the Blair years.”


But there was a footnote:

“It is truly alarming to think that the Prime Minister could believe the perpetuation of patronage on the recent scale was appropriate to any century, least of all the 21st”.


Yet today’s Prime Minister has again turned places in this Parliament into an instrument of patronage, to be purchased at party dinners. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will do me a parting favour by repeating his former words to Mr Johnson.

We cannot escape some criticism of the media for creating the destructive atmosphere that we see today. Some of the media has had a really divisive role in the past five years. Today is Trafalgar Day: “England expects that every man will do his duty”. However, marine historians remind us that at least 10% of the crews in Nelson’s fleet were not English; they were foreigners. In the Brexiteer media, they would be branded as unpatriotic immigrants.

I plead with true Conservatives—in both Houses and beyond—to reclaim their party. For many years, I have had staring at me on my desk the reminder from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” For all my reservations about the leadership of this Government, I sincerely believe that this House is a place full of good people. My Lords, I wish you well.