Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Mann]

We have had this slippery slope with the European Parliament and with how we choose its Members. Of course, the Deputy Prime Minister, apparently, was once a representative in my area—no one seems to have realised that fact, because such Members are rather distant and remote, whether they do a good job or not, because of the size of the constituency.

The interrelationship between individual and electorate that has been the basis of democracy in this country—one that other countries have, too often, moved away from in their determination to have either proportionality or equality and to have mathematical solutions to how they build a legislature—is the foundation of participative democracy. We are not just a representative democracy in this Chamber: if we are effective, we are a participatory democracy as well. That principle would be somewhat undermined by an arbitrary mathematical solution to how many Members there should be.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

If the hon. Gentleman is going to give us a long history lesson, will he at least assure us that he realises that Members of the House were elected using a transferable voting system until 1945 in some cases?