Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

I have absolutely no idea whether such modelling has taken place. If someone tells me afterwards that it has and I can get my hands on it, I will send it to the noble Lord, but it really is—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

[Lord McNally]

Oh, come on.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

If the Minister has no idea, will he answer the Written Question that I tabled yesterday on that very matter? He will then be able to trawl the department and talk to his special advisers to establish the truth.

[Lord McNally]

For goodness’ sake, here we are, with everyone telling me that this is a constitutional Bill of the greatest importance, and the Labour Party gets obsessed with some conspiracy theory about the number 600. Perhaps we should have chosen 666; that would really have frightened them. Let us have the debate—we are certainly going to have a good debate and, I suspect, a lengthy one—and I am willing to go through all these points.

If you want to be mentioned in the debate, the key thing is to be either a Liberal Democrat or a Conservative against the Bill or a Labour Member who is speaking helpfully as far as the Government are concerned. On the question of thresholds, Mr Chris Bryant, spokesman in the other place, said that they are not a good idea:

“We should have a straightforward system where people fight to win their side of the argument. They win that side of the argument by getting people past the ballot box to vote either yes or no”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/11/10; col. 850.]

The amendment to have a threshold was defeated by 549 votes to 31. Again, we can discuss this, and I am sure that amendments will be tabled.

On the number of Ministers in the Executive—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

As so often in my career, my noble friend comes over the hill like the seventh cavalry.

I turn again to the British Academy report. We heard a lot about local inquiries. It is interesting that the British Academy report says that these,

“would not significantly impair the consultation process”.

The Bill proposes a two-stage process, with 12 weeks, instead of the current four, in which the public may make representation to the commission, and another 12 weeks for the commission to revise its recommendations.

I will deal quickly with a point made by my noble friend Lord Phillips about expenses. There will be reimbursement of all reasonable expenses. We are committed to ensuring a high level of participation but we are unlikely to change the £600,000 basis for the two campaigns. On the two campaigns, several noble Lords will remember the yes/no campaign for the EU referendum. Whatever else may be said about that, the system of two groupings to fight the campaign worked. I have absolute confidence that it will work again. Therefore, I look forward to the Committee stage. I say to my noble friends behind me that I have seen redistributions and psephological calculations but I do not know who will win this referendum. I have heard people say that we are bound to lose it. I am willing to trust the people. I am willing to see this in place and then take our case to the people.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Is one of the problems with the referendum now not the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement that this is a “miserable little compromise”? Have we not effectively got that around our neck now? It will be used constantly throughout the campaign against those who are in favour of electoral reform. Does that worry the Minister?

[Lord McNally]

As we all know, there is an absolute industry in dragging up politicians’ past statements.