Draft European Parliamentary Elections Act 2002 (Amendment) Regulations 2018 Draft European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2018

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2018 General Committees

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon.

I certainly empathise with the intent behind this move: who would want to continue incurring the cost of elections for a Chamber that will have no further relevance in a few months’ time? There are the obvious additional benefits for the Conservative party, too, in that local difficulties such as Belinda Don and Alex Story can be easily swept under the carpet. Jilted candidates cannot make too much of a fuss if the principle of nomination rather than election has been established, can they? That, though, runs counter to democracy. The idea that a party, or indeed an individual in the case of independents, can simply nominate a new parliamentarian is not one that sits easily with me, and I suspect it will not sit easily with many people.

I accept that the d’Hondt system used on a list appoints rather than elects people to a casual vacancy, but at least those who were on the lists at the general election were put before the voting public. If we run down the route of nominating a party favourite who was not on the lists for the election in question, we are in danger of endorsing the idea that people can become parliamentarians without being subjected to any public scrutiny. The electorate will not have had the chance to endorse—or, more pertinently, to reject— them at the ballot box.

The Minister might be interested to know that the Scottish Parliament operates a d’Hondt system for the additional Member lists for regional MSPs, so if a list is exhausted, the seat lies vacant until the following election. That has happened. The death of Margo MacDonald in 2014 after being elected as an independent on her own list meant that her seat lay vacant for two years, before being filled at the 2016 Holyrood general election.

Personally, I would like to see Ministers take this away and have another think. It would surely be better to be short an MEP or two than to take the democracy out of the system—potentially take the democracy out of the system altogether. However, that is not what is on offer here today and I gather I will be in the minority, so I simply place on record my concerns about possible abuses of the system, and I request that the Minister keep a sharp eye out for such possible practices in future.