Scotland Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Commons Chamber

I believe the Scottish Parliament has been a success, and it has been a success under the current electoral system. Clearly, I would rather there had not been an SNP minority Government for the past four years in Scotland, but the way for my hon. Friends and my party to change that position is not to change the voting system to suit what we believe is our short-term political gain, but to get a lot more votes, which is what I believe will happen on 5 May.

[John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

I rise briefly to reach out a cooling and, I hope, reassuring hand to the fevered brow of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) regarding his concerns about the comments made by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr Donohoe).

Before I do that, I make one observation. I had the privilege of doing a great deal of the Committee and Report work in the other place on the original Scotland Bill, and I acknowledge that we made one mistake. We agreed to allow the Scottish Parliament itself to decide and work out the relationship and work loads between all the different MSPs, and that there should be equality between the list and the constituency. It should be the Parliament’s job to work that out, but it would have been helpful had we given it a steer at the beginning as to a better balance, because I recognise some of the comments about squatting, although the majority of list MSPs do an exceedingly good job and the system overall brings fairness and proportionality. In the other place, we lost a vote that my noble Friends—at that stage—put for an open-list system, which I would have preferred, but we ended up with a broadly fair system that has worked well and come of age.

Now, let me reassure the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire regarding the comments of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire, who moved the new clause. The key is in his comments regarding history. First, he invoked the election of 1910, when 83% of Scots voted, as opposed to 2010, when only 64% did. Of course, he forgot to mention that we did not have universal suffrage at that point, and, indeed, that no women had the vote or could stand for Parliament. So, his first suggestion is, I think, that we should get rid of women from politics.

Secondly, the hon. Gentleman’s new clause sets out “Two members” with “two votes” and two posts. Of course, we had that system in British politics for many years during the century before last, with some very interesting results, so there is nothing new there. Indeed, many people had two votes in different constituencies if they happened to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

So, the clear direction of travel of the hon. Gentleman’s thinking is back to the future, and there are only two explanations for that. Either he is the last surviving relic of first-past-the-post-osaurus rex, or his contribution was a wonderful exercise in irony. I believe that he is a grandmaster in irony, and that explains the new clause.

[Mr Davidson]

It is true to say that the devolution settlement achieved at the time of the referendum represented the settled will of the Scottish people, but that does not mean that there can never be any further change of any kind. In our debates on the Bill, we have identified difficulties and we have tried to resolve them and to move things forward by making changes. On the question of the electoral system, we first have to ask whether there are any problems and, if there are, whether there is a solution.

I believe that there are some difficulties with the existing system. For example, the public have never entirely understood how losers become winners. They see people standing for election in a constituency and losing, only to pop up as an MSP anyway. The situation is made far worse when some of those who lost pretend to be the MSP for the constituency in which they stood and were defeated. That was certainly the case for a considerable number of years in Glasgow Pollok, where Johann Lamont was elected by first past the post. Kenny Gibson, from the SNP, who came second, then pretended to be the local MSP. Tommy Sheridan, from the horizontal road to socialism party, who is now detained elsewhere, also pretended to be the MSP for that constituency. That was undoubtedly unhelpful, because different people would turn up at local meetings, events, protests and campaigns pretending to be the MSP. This is a genuine issue that needs to be addressed.

We have already heard the outrageous story of Alex Neil printing posters saying that he was the MSP for Airdrie and Shotts when patently he was not. That was a deliberate attempt to deceive the electorate. The fact that there is an election coming up in the near future can only be coincidence, but that was none the less a deliberate attempt to deceive. We also had a situation in the Govan constituency, the one beside mine, where Nicola Sturgeon camped out. She has now won that seat, but she did so partly because she had pretended to be the list MSP for that constituency. These are all clear difficulties in the present system and they need to be looked at.

Related to that problem is the cherry-picking not just of issues but of individual items of casework, especially in relation to immigration cases but to others as well. As an MP, I have had a string of cases in which MSPs have taken up people’s complaints about immigration, told them that they could do something about it, led them down a path that led nowhere at all, then told them to come and see me. By that time, a considerable period had passed and some of the people had consulted lawyers based on what they had been mis-told. The same thing has happened with social security cases. We need a change in the rules that would stop list MSPs, in particular, cherry-picking.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Mundell]

The hon. Gentleman is seeking to give a different definition. I am specifying a not-for-dividend organisation. If he wants to go beyond that and into the realms of opening up the powers for the Scottish Government to renationalise the railways in Scotland, he should promote that point in a different debate, and not by tabling a new clause to this Bill. If he genuinely believes that the railways in Scotland should be renationalised, he should make that argument in the appropriate place.

The hon. Members for Dunfermline and West Fife and for Rutherglen and Hamilton West said that this was a minor matter that was being brought forward at this stage because it had simply been overlooked. However, I believe that it would have benefited from the thorough scrutiny of the Scotland Bill Committee in the Scottish Parliament and from discussion in the Scottish Affairs Committee.

[John Thurso]

I have no doubt that the Minister is right to resist the amendment, because I am sure that it is technically deficient in some way, but—[Laughter.] I took part in the entire Committee stage of the Railways Act 2005, and the intention was to devolve everything that could be devolved to the Scottish Government in relation to the railways. Is there no room for compromise to allow for what is a reasonably sensible suggestion without breaking the principle that the Minister is evoking?

[David Mundell]

The hon. Gentleman, as always, offers wise words. I thought that he was going to refer to the debate in this House on 31 March 1998, although he was not then a Member, in which rail powers were debated in the context of the original Scotland Bill. The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire was prominent in that debate, as he was in our earlier discussion on voting systems.