Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Austin Mitchell Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

I entirely agree, and I am not defending that element of the Bill.

Neither can I see any justification for a reduction in the size of the House of Commons from 650 to 600. The somewhat bogus argument that it will save £12 million a year is certainly outweighed by the fact that the alternative vote referendum will cost some £80 million to £100 million. It is also argued that our House is one of the largest legislatures, but that argument is destroyed by the fact that this Government alone have already massively increased the size of the House of Lords, by some 56 Members since May. They are now looking to stuff a whole lot more unelected Lords in there, and the proposals to make the other House even larger are an absolute disgrace, at least before there is any reform. It is entirely regrettable that there is not to be reform of the House of Commons and the House of Lords as part of the same package.

I fear, given the comments that a number of colleagues have made, that we have not been able to scrutinise the Bill properly because we have run out of time under the programme motion. It will therefore be the House of Lords that takes up the important work of examining the constitutional impact of what is being suggested. The hon. Member for Rhondda is right that nowhere in any manifesto was there a commitment to 600 seats, and all three parties committed to move to a wholly or largely elected House of Lords at the earliest possible opportunity. That now seems a long way off. I particularly regret that because it has always been the Liberal Democrats’ position to democratise, and to make the House of Lords accountable to the electorate. They now hold the novel constitutional principle that the House of Lords should somehow reflect the voting at the last election. That suggests that 200 or so peers will be added to the House of Lords—a significant number of whom will come from the Liberal Democrat party.

I hope that, in so far as more people are to be added to the House of Lords, close scrutiny will be paid to ensure that former Members of the Commons who were caught up in the expenses scandal are not rewarded with a life peerage. As we have seen from the difficulty with the three peers who have been suspended and the two Conservative peers who face the courts in the next few months, there is no mechanism for getting rid of people from the House of Lords. Yet, as part of the constitutional reform, we are introducing some concept of giving our constituents a recall mechanism to get rid of Members of the Commons. The position is incongruous. Until the House of Lords has been sorted out—and certainly for so long as we stuff yet more unelected peers into the other place, which we have already done since May and will continue to do—it would be wrong to reduce the size of the Commons.

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

I rise to speak about amendments 259 and 260, which I tabled and hope to put to the vote at the end of the debate. Two features of the “General Gerrymander and Electoral Jiggery-Pokery” Bill are the most offensive. The first is the alternative vote, which is a Liberal benefit plan—Liberal Democrats hope that if we get the alternative vote, they will be everybody’s second preference. Fortunately, the alternative vote is unlikely to be carried in the referendum—I shall certainly vote against it. It is rather sad that many people with whom I have worked over the years for electoral reform seem to believe that AV is a form of electoral reform. It is not—it is the stupid person’s electoral reform. The only effective electoral reform is proportional representation.

[Stephen Williams]

If the hon. Gentleman thinks that AV is such a mistake, why did he use it to elect his own leader, and why was it in the Labour party’s election manifesto?

[Austin Mitchell]

The leader now sees the benefits of the alternative vote, but I do not. It is not a halfway house to a system of proportional representation. Only proportional representation will allow us to manage the emerging multi-party system in the confines of the electoral system. We cannot do it with the current system, but I do not want to be detoured from my main purpose.

The second unattractive feature of the Bill is clause 9, to which amendments 259 and 260 apply. It is even more offensive because it is the “Castration of the Commons” clause. It states:

“The number of constituencies in the United Kingdom shall be 600.”

It does not say “590”, “620” or “650”, but “600.” It would be interesting to know how the Government reached that figure. Did they have a séance, as they did for the scale of the cuts that were announced this afternoon: “£240 billion, £120 billion; £600 billion”? Did they split the difference, or did they, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) suggested—I think rightly—arrive at a figure that will lose Labour more seats than the Liberal Democrats?

The Liberals had a smaller figure in their manifesto, but it was proposed in the light of a transfer to STV, which the Liberal party has always supported, with three, four or five-Member constituencies, in which the Liberals have a greater chance of getting somebody elected. The smaller figure was not proposed for first past the post or AV. The Government wanted to cut 10% of the seats. Why? Was it an economy measure? Was it to capitalise on the discontent that The Daily Telegraph’s revelations about expenses produced, and to say, “We’re getting rid of these greedy so-and-sos and reducing the number of people who sponge off the public purse”? Was it that sort of populism? Is that how they arrived at the figure? We need to know before we can make a judgment.

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend said that the Liberal Democrats had always supported the single transferable vote. Could I remind him that he tabled an amendment recently on STV that they voted against? In fact, they should clearly change their position and say that they now oppose STV.

[Austin Mitchell]

The Liberals are in a determined rush to sign their own death warrant. I cannot judge them. I am trying to help them, because people should not sign their own death warrant while the balance of the mind is disturbed. I am trying to take power of attorney over them. The Liberal leader’s constituency—Sheffield, Hallam—will be abolished under the Bill, so a winnable seat in Sheffield will go. He might have told his party, “At this stage in the coalition, chaps, we need a futile gesture. I want you to agree to give up your seats for this Bill.” It could be that that went on, although I do not know the internal processes of the Liberals. Some of my best friends are Liberals, but I will not speak for them. I am trying to help them by tabling amendments such as the one to which my hon. Friend referred and amendment 259, which would keep the number of MPs at 650.

[Graham Stringer]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the single biggest weakness of the British constitution is that elected Members of the House of Commons do not have enough power in relation to the Executive? Clause 9 will further diminish the power of elected representatives.

[Austin Mitchell]

That is absolutely right and I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. The real problem with the British constitution is that we do not have one. The constitution in this country is what the Government can get away with. If they can get away with clause 9, which weakens democracy and the Commons and strengthens the Executive, they can get away with more or less anything, with the willing concurrence of the supine Liberals, who are supporting a measure that will weaken them—hopefully—for their own execution.

There is no mystique to how I arrived at the figure of 650 for amendment 259. I just put it in. That is the number of MPs now and the Commons will function efficiently with it. There used to be 700 MPs in the 19th century when the Irish were here. They had to fit in a Chamber the size of this one, which seats about 420—fortunately, most of them did not come—but 650 is a good working total, which is why I chose it.

The consequence of having 600 MPs, as proposed in clause 9, is that the redistribution will be more brutal and more massive. It will be a blitzkrieg of a redistribution, but there will be no democratic controls on it. The scale of the redistribution is determined by the size of the House.

[Chris Bryant]

I just wanted to correct a fact that my hon. Friend gave. He said that there were 700 Members in the 19th century owing to the Irish, but in fact, the only time that there were more than 700 Members was from 1918 to 1922. That redistribution was brought about by the Liberals.

[Austin Mitchell]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. I took history at university, but my thesis was on the Whig party in opposition from 1812 to 1830, which was very good preparation for being in the Labour party in the 1980s and 1990s. I did not get as far as the Irish settlement of 1922, and I always regret that. I shall go to him for some tutorials. He is obviously better informed than I am.

I arrived at the figure of 650 because that seems to work well, and I do not want a reduction. As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) pointed out, a reduction in the number of MPs and a smaller House will make the Executive proportionately stronger. I would like to see some proposals from the Government to reduce the number of Executive appointments. There are more than 100, which means that they have a huge bought vote in the House to overrule the wishes of the Members. I want Members to be stronger and the Executive to be weaker, but this measure will have the opposite effect.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Although I completely support the reduction in the number of Members, I have huge sympathy with the point that the hon. Gentleman makes about the Executive, because of the lack of voice. Members of the Executive do not speak on local constituency matters, and I would therefore welcome any attempts to reduce Executive numbers to increase the voice of Back Benchers proportionally.

[Austin Mitchell]

If the number of Members is reduced, the voice of the constituencies will be proportionally less in this House, and that is another argument for keeping the 650, as I propose. What will happen if the Executive are reduced in this House? Will we have more Executive appointments in the Lords? Will we appoint more of those grovelling chief executives and chairmen who wrote to The Daily Telegraph to support the Government’s plans for cuts at the expense of their customers, saying in effect, “It doesn’t matter how much damage you inflict on our customers and on demand for our businesses, we support the Government.” That is clearly a plea for knighthoods or Government jobs. Will the Government respond to that by creating posts outside Parliament for these people? How will they reconstitute the Executive to make them less strong proportionally in a reduced House? We have heard nothing on that.

Secondly, the reduction would reduce the pool of talent from which to select Ministers and to make all the other contributions that MPs make. Heaven knows, the pool is not all that big now. We do not have all that much talent, and certainly not the level that we used to have—[Interruption.] Well, we have some, especially from Humberside. Our contribution is big, but it is not enough. I would like a bigger pool of talent in the House to pick Ministers from.

Most importantly, the change would reduce the service that we provide to our constituents. I have always found constituency work exciting and interesting, and a solace for my failure to be appointed to any ministerial job—or my ability to mess up any ministerial appointment that I have been offered, which has always been very short-lived because of the joys of constituency work. I find it very satisfactory—

[Mr MacNeil]

May I take this opportunity to place it on the record that I would have loved to see the hon. Gentleman as a Fisheries Minister at one time?

[Austin Mitchell]

I was hoping that the SNP would appoint me Fisheries Minister for Scotland, but that post would have been a little difficult to handle from Grimsby. I never even achieved the rank of PPS to the Minister—[Interruption.] I apologise, Ms Primarolo. I was led astray.

There is a genuine issue about the service that we provide to our constituents. I know that we have changed over the years from senators to servants of our constituency, and I know that the amount of work has steadily increased. That is a necessary development, because our constituents want to be heard more. We no longer have the same sort of subservient, quiet and loyal electorate that would vote for parties and did not want their voice to be heard. People want to be heard and they want us to listen to them. They want to communicate with us and they want us to raise the problems that they raise with us. That is the job, and we would be less able to do that if there were fewer of us here.

[Mr Heath]

I am bemused by this concept that the figure of 600 would prevent Members of Parliament from being able to represent their constituents adequately, because the electoral quota suggested—about 76,000—already applies to a third of the House, give or take 5%. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that a third of Members are incapable of representing their constituents properly?

[Austin Mitchell]

The bigger the size of the constituency and the electorate, the harder it is to represent them adequately. It may be that evening up constituencies leads to areas being more adequately represented, because those areas will have smaller constituencies, but in my case it will mean a bigger constituency, and many of us are struggling to do the job now.

For example, the amount of mail is increasing all the time. Not so long ago, I read the biography of Hugh Gaitskell by Philip Williams, which was about Gaitskell in the 1950s. It said that Gaitskell’s papers showed that in 1958, when he was the MP for Leeds South East, he got 50 letters a month from his constituents. I get 50 letters every couple of days, and that is in addition to all the e-mails, surgery visits and stoppings in the street in Grimsby, with people asking whether I will ask this or do that, and so on, all of which I have to scribble down. That must mean that in a larger constituency it is more difficult to serve everyone in it. That is an obvious fact. Indeed, it is getting difficult to do the job adequately with 650 Members. We need more and more staff. Fortunately, we have been given more staff, but it is not enough, although it depends on the seriousness with which one does the job.

[Mrs Laing]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Nobody could do the job more seriously than he, but right at this moment he is representing his constituents in that other way. He is once again confusing his job—the job of us all—as a social worker, providing pastoral care and advice, with the job of representing our constituents as part of the democratic process. He cannot possibly argue that a man of his calibre, or the calibre of anyone sitting in the Chamber right now, cannot cope with a few thousand more constituents to represent.

[Austin Mitchell]

I have to say that I cannot. If the work is done properly and the job is properly tackled, it is difficult. Indeed, I cannot see how people can have outside jobs and be here.

[Mr David]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the important point is not just that we take up individual cases, but that having that direct contact with our constituents influences our work as parliamentarians?

[Austin Mitchell]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. Many of the ideas that I raised, the questions that I have asked and the things that I have debated in Westminster Hall come from constituents and constituency problems. That is the nature of democracy—that is how it has to be. We have to face the fact that the state is interacting with people and imposing things on them more than ever before.

Let us look at the flood of problems that we have had with the Child Support Agency, and the fact that a special hotline has had to be created for MPs, so that they can get through to Belfast and have incomprehensible conversations. [Interruption.] I appreciate the difficulties that the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) face doing that kind of job—if I could make it easier, I would—but it creates an enormous amount of extra work for us. The same is true of tax credits, which are extremely complex. There is all that interaction, and believe me, Ms Primarolo, there will be a lot more interaction as a result of the cuts announced today, as people come to us with problems to do with benefits, invalidity and cutting off job support. That is going to create a lot more work for us in our constituencies and a lot more work in our surgeries.

[Mark Durkan]

I just want to reinforce my hon. Friend’s point. He has to ring Belfast about CSA cases, but he is not the only Member who has to ring people in remote parts who know nothing of the situations that we are dealing with. We in Northern Ireland experience that regularly when we deal with tax credits. In fairness, the conversations that we have with Frank in Preston are comprehensible; it is the other officials who are the problem.

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree absolutely with that.

A number of Members would like to see us as some kind of intellectual elite, or as the senators that we perhaps used to be in the 19th century. The fact that we are now the street cleaners and the sewage cleaners of the constitutions—the slaves in the galley of the ship of state, albeit somewhat differently whipped—offends their dignity, but that is the job as it is.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is unreasonable to deride one-to-one pastoral care of constituents as social work, partly because it necessarily informs our work as MPs but also because the more ordinary constituents meet their MP, whether at church, in an advice session or in the supermarket, the more they will respect us?

[Austin Mitchell]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. There has been a lot of damaging criticism and abuse of MPs as a result of the revelations in The Daily Telegraph last year, and some of that was, frankly, scandalous. It has lowered us in the public’s estimation, but people still turn to us. They need us for all the problems that they come up against. We are the defenders of last resort. We are the ombudsmen for our constituents.

[Chris Bryant]

But is it not also true that, especially for some of the most vulnerable people in some of the most vulnerable communities, we are the only advocates they can afford, whether we are advocating their cause here or, for example, at their bank? We represent them in all kinds of circumstances that no one would have conceived of as part of the job 50 years ago.

--- Later in debate ---

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree with my hon. Friend absolutely; he has made that point very well. That is another good title for MPs: the advocate of last resort—the people’s advocate. Well, in my case, I would be their last resort because of the inarticulacy of my advocacy! But that is the nature of the job, and it is no use complaining or saying that it is beneath our dignity to tackle all these problems. It is no use doing as Enoch Powell used to do when anyone raised an issue—

[The Second Deputy Chairman]

Order. I realise that the hon. Gentleman is making some broader points to support his amendment, which proposes 650 Members, and if he could return to that subject I would be enormously grateful.

[Austin Mitchell]

I am sorry, Ms Primarolo.

I should have said that it is much easier to do this job with 650 MPs, and that it will be much more difficult if the clause passes unamended and reduces the membership of the House to 600. That is the essence of my argument. We are straining to do the job as it is, and we have had to take on more staff. We shall need even more staff if the number of MPs is reduced. It is difficult to do our job, but it is well worth doing.

[Mrs Main]

I had a degree of sympathy with the hon. Gentleman when he was talking about the strength of the Executive, but if he has time to make TV programmes and do other things outside the House, I cannot believe that he does not have a spare moment, or that a reduction in the number of MPs would not be feasible.

[Austin Mitchell]

Some of us labour under the misfortune of being better looking than others—[Laughter.] We might appear more on television for that reason, although my days as a television hero are long gone. The essence of my argument is that this demand comes to us from the people. This is not about us putting ourselves forward to do the work; the demand comes from the people and they have to be served.

[Phil Wilson]

The people who support the idea of reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 600 say that it will save about £12 million, but even they are saying that we will need more resources to look after our constituents and that we will therefore need more staff. That £12 million will disappear overnight to pay for the extra resources that we are going to need.

[Austin Mitchell]

My hon. Friend is right. We cannot economise on democracy. We are a basic part of our democracy. We are the protectors of the people and we cannot economise on that because the demand comes from them, and they have to be served. That is our job. Some people argue that 650 MPs is too many and that this legislature is bigger than others. Yes, it is bigger than many other legislatures, but we have to bear in mind the fact that most other systems are federal. In other words, countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States have elected representatives at several levels of government. We do not. We are the only elected representatives who can act for the people in that way. That is why the figure of 650 appears in my amendment and why there should be no reduction. The proposed reduction in clause 9, which my amendment would stop, is based on a contempt for MPs and the work that they do. I want to reject that contempt.

--- Later in debate ---

There are only two principles here. First, somebody, somewhere has to choose the correct number of Members of this House. It was strange to hear the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) speak about the number 600 as if it had—or lacked—some mystical force.

[Austin Mitchell]

How about 666?

[Mrs Laing]

I cannot resist the hon. Gentleman’s sedentary comment. I believe that there is something about 666, though I am not an adherent to that principle either—for me, it goes with Benthamism. I am therefore glad that we are not discussing 666, but why not 600? It is a reasonable, round number. We have to choose a number for Members of Parliament. [Hon. Members: “No, we don’t.”] I am arguing that we have to choose a number; that it is correct for Parliament to do so. We have talked much about the Great Reform Act of 1832, but the subject of how many Members there should be has not been properly discussed for a long time.