Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Austin Mitchell Excerpts

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but perhaps I am more optimistic than he is. I hope that the power of argument might just wake up our fellow Members.

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what we are doing is repairing the damage done by the gutlessness of the Liberal Democrats? They did not have the guts or the integrity to include in the referendum a question on a system of proportional representation, which they always purported to believe in. We are allowing the people to speak out.

[Caroline Lucas]

Many millions of people in this country will be looking at what some Members do in the Committee this evening, and they will be looking with a degree of perplexity, given that what we hear many Members might do runs counter to what was in their manifestos.

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[Mrs Laing]

I did not say that my constituents would not be able to understand. My constituents are very intelligent, and I am sure that they would be able to understand. I will not go into a long explanation at this point in the evening. I am merely saying, and I stick to it, that if amendment 7 were to become part of the Bill, the referendum would bring about a system—any of the systems in amendment 7—that would lack clarity and certainty. Any voting system ought to have clarity and certainty.

Clarity is what amendment 230 is all about. I am pleased to say that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, of which I am a member, looked at the report of the Electoral Commission. The commission consulted extensively on the wording of the question, as the Minister has told us this evening. The Select Committee supported the suggestions of the Electoral Commission. The wording in amendment 230 is much clearer. It brings about clarity and certainty when a question is put to the electorate, as it should be. Therefore, members of the Select Committee tabled this amendment. We were delighted to discover that the Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister also supported the amendment, and I hope that the Committee will support it this evening.

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

What the hon. Lady thinks about the system is largely irrelevant. Amendment 7 is designed to allow the people to speak out—to put before them the choice of a preferential system. I have to point out to my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) that this was exactly the wording of the New Zealand referendum. In 1993 it was decided that people did not want the first-past-the-post system, and they were given a choice about what system they wanted to replace it. In that referendum, almost 60% of people said that they wanted the additional member system. Only 6.6% said that they wanted the alternative vote.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is right, but New Zealand is a unicameral system, and I have argued and campaigned in the House for many years in favour of a second Chamber that is elected, not appointed, on a proportional system. We should have a Bill about the whole of constitutional reform, rather than picking off bits and pieces one by one.

[Austin Mitchell]

Why does my hon. Friend not see that it is daft to give the second Chamber a better representative system than the first Chamber? It is important that the first Chamber has a system that gives us representation according to the way people vote. That is the essence of proportional representation; that is all we are trying to include in the referendum.

[Mr MacNeil]

Having just heard the words uttered by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), it is a fact that for the electors here, we effectively have a unicameral system, because they do not vote for those who enter the Chamber down the corridor.

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[Austin Mitchell]

Exactly—that is the point. What we want to do in the amendment is quite simple. We want to give the people the choice that the Liberal Democrats did not have the strength or the guts to give them. The Liberal Democrats are in favour of a system to allow people to vote in a referendum on the alternative vote, which is largely irrelevant—it is a system that allows people to list candidates in one constituency in order of preference—because they hope to benefit from the fact that they are everyone’s second preference, but the first preference of very few people.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

As far as I recollect, in New Zealand there were two votes in sequence: one on whether people wanted to have a change, and a separate vote on which change to have. The hon. Gentleman must also recognise what my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) said: in the House, given the way in which the Labour and Tory majorities have voted, there is not likely to be a majority, whatever others think, for a wide proportional system. There is a majority for progress, but not for what we might want. We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[Austin Mitchell]

I know that there are a thousand excuses for gutlessness, but that is just another one. The Liberal Democrats are going to have to live on a diet of their own words for the next few months. It was the leader of their party who called the alternative vote “a miserable little compromise” before the election. Now it is central to Liberal Democrat policy.

The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) is mistaken about the referendum in New Zealand. The first referendum, which I have discussed, gave the exact alternatives that would be given in our Bill. I want to make the case for proportional representation. We are working in a system that has become a multi-party one. Fewer people are voting for the two main parties, whose share of the vote has gone down from about 90% to about 60%. A multi-party system is in the process of being born, with nationalists, including Welsh nationalists, Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence party, and all the rest of it. We are trying to fit that within the constraints of a first-past-the-post system that works well only with two parties. [Interruption.] I forgot to mention the Greens—I apologise, but that is another indication of our multi-party system.

We cannot fit the burgeoning multi-party system into a first-past-the-post system, which works only with two parties. The question is still why did the Liberal Democrats, in pushing for a referendum—I congratulate them on securing one—not give people the real choice between a preferential system, an alternative vote and first past the post, as that is the choice that they have to make? I would want them to choose the preferential system, but it is not up to us. It is not my views that are important, or those of Government Members—it is the views of the people. That is all that we are asking: let us consult the people on a system, and let them have their say. Every Member here thinks that the system that elected them must be the best system in the world, but that is not important. We are prejudiced witnesses, and we should give the people the power to speak. That is all that our amendment does.

[Mr Mark Williams]

May I reiterate to the Committee and to the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) that the Liberal Democrat party still believes in STV, has done so for years, and will continue to do so? However, the reality is that the advances that the Bill represents will be jeopardised if we adopt the amendment on STV. The agreement before us was made on the basis of a referendum on AV. Without that, we will not secure a referendum, so there would be no referendum at all. That is the reality of the debate. We still believe in STV, and this is a staging post to something towards which our party will still work, but there is no majority in the House for STV. Without that majority, there will be no referendum.