Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Viscount Ullswater and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Viscount Ullswater)]

I must advise your Lordships that if Amendment 1A is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 2 or 2A because of pre-emption.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, Amendment 2A is in my name and was grouped with Amendment 3 in the name of my noble friend Lord Rooker, who did not move his amendment. If I may say so, I think that he was right not to move his amendment, because I think that the amendment that has just been moved by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours is the best of the bunch of the amendments before us.

I think that it is helpful to voters to disentangle the two questions—first, do you want change; secondly, what you want to change to? That would enlarge the range of choices that could be considered. There is a difference. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours would have Parliament determine which of the other systems which was not first past the post should be the one to go for, whereas my noble friend Lord Rooker wants to offer an à la carte menu to the electors straight away on the day of the main referendum. I like the scheme that my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has put forward.

It seems absurd that if we are to go to all this trouble, to have this enormous national debate, and to give the people of this country a unique option to decide whether or not to change our electoral system, a proportional option should not be made available to them. I find it bizarre that STV, which I have always understood to be the preferred option of Liberal Democrats, will not be on the ballot paper at the referendum.

Noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches have told me that I need to be more realistic, that it was not possible for the Liberal Democrats to secure that outcome in the negotiations in those few days when the coalition was formed last May. I do not believe that. At that point, the Liberal Democrats could have secured the inclusion of a proportional—in particular, an STV—option on the ballot paper.

The reality was that David Cameron and the Conservative Party had lost the election. The Conservative Party—and, I assume, Mr Cameron—was frantic to get into government. We know what the Conservative Party does to leaders who it deems losers. We have seen the fate of Mr Hague, Mr Duncan Smith and the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne. I do not think that Mr Cameron would have wanted to go the same way. I think that he would have been prepared to concede something that was dear to the hearts of —canonical to—the Liberal Democrats but which they apparently did not have the nerve or the skill to insist on in those negotiations. In failing to press their advantage at that point, they did the country a major disservice. If we are to have this referendum, let us have all the sensible and serious choices—or at least a selection of them—put before the people. If it is to be only a selection of them, surely it must include STV.

We know the inadequacies of the alternative vote system—I will certainly not go into them in any detail—but the sheer unpredictability of the effect of using the second, third, fourth and fifth preferences on the part of voters casting their vote means that it would be more rational to have a lottery than to resort to this system. Moreover, there are varieties of AV. For some reason, the variety of the alternative vote system that those political parties and political leaders in this country who favour it have alighted upon is the system known as optional preference ordering. As my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours explained very tellingly in the first day of our Committee proceedings all that time ago, the evidence from Australia is that, once you cease to insist that everyone voting under the alternative vote system has to fill in all the boxes stating their preferences, the upshot is that you get a large proportion of electors only casting a vote for their preferred party. In practice, therefore, the optional preference-ordering version of AV is very little different from first past the post. It does not seem to be a sufficiently worthwhile alternative to offer the voters in the referendum. I do not mind it being there, but other serious choices ought to be on offer as well.