Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Lords Chamber

Debate on whether Clause 1, as amended, should stand part of the Bill resumed.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I was rudely interrupted by the usual channels, who adjourned the House just as I was on the point of delivering my remarks. I shall try to pick up the morale of the whole debate by opening out this time. We are debating whether Clause 1 should stand part of the Bill. What I really want to say, perhaps more than anything else, is that any observer watching the debate on this clause so far would have noticed one thing above all else—that there was absolutely no real detectable enthusiasm whatever for having a referendum: and if we did have a referendum, there was certainly no enthusiasm for the choice of having the alternative vote.

We are having a debate about a flagship Bill of this Government. It is more than a flagship Bill; it is a major constitutional Bill. Indeed, as Nick Clegg has said, it is part of the most ambitious programme of constitutional reform since 1832. Three members of his party at the moment want to be part of this great constitutional Bill, the greatest since the Great Reform Act. I am absolutely certain that if my Government had brought forward a great constitutional Bill, not only would a fair number of people have wanted to take part in the debates, they would do so enthusiastically. It does not happen very often—we have the statistics and it happens only once every 170 years, or however many years it has been since the last huge reform, according to Nick Clegg. That has been noticeably absent. The overwhelming majority of the speakers have either been very strongly in favour of first past the post, as I am, or else they have been people like my noble friends Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Rooker who, while not being supporters of first past the post, have given so many good reasons why the option that is being delivered to the electorate is a very bad one. That is something that any neutral observer would have to report on. I do not know whether that will change during the passage of the Bill, but I doubt it.

I have to say that I was slightly fearful of contributing a lot to this debate, because I acknowledge that I am one of life’s anoraks when it comes to looking at electoral systems, and I really do not want to be labelled as an anorak, although I have not got past first base on being an anorak. Another thing was really noticeable in, for example, the exchanges between my noble and very good friend Lord Campbell-Savours and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. It scrambled my brain, and I do not know what it would have done to the electorate in the course of a referendum. That is one of the many, many reasons why this is a bad Bill and this clause is a bad clause. Although the debate is important and significant, it has been in some parts almost unintelligible, certainly incredibly detailed. Now, if that is the case when we are discussing it among people who acknowledge that we are in a tiny minority of the electorate who are actually very interested in these things, how on earth will that be a substantial debate in the country? You can just imagine the near impossibility of getting some of these arguments over to the electorate. Of course I am not saying that it is because the electorate are dim, of course I am not saying that. I am saying that it is of no great concern to people, and if it is of no great concern to you, you do not apply yourself to the arguments. That is what I confidently expect will happen as and when this referendum takes place.

We all know that we have the authority of the Electoral Commission in its report, which is in a pile of documents in my office. I am sure that Members on the Front Benches will have read it cover to cover. The report states clearly that the public simply do not understand AV. Noble Lords may check it. If any of the proponents of AV are happy, as my noble friend Lord Snape has said, to go down any road that they are familiar with in any part of Britain, in any constituency, they should ask the public what they make of AV, let alone the single transferable vote or whatever else is on the menu.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

On that question of understanding, when I asked MPs how AV worked, the great majority did not know or gave a completely wrong explanation. So if MPs do not understand it, how can we expect the great British public to understand it?

[Lord Grocott]

As we know, my noble friend is a reformer who supports change, and he is honest enough to acknowledge just that. The debate that we are having—the subject that we proposing to spend a large sum of money on and put to the public—is basically of interest to only one or two university departments. I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Norton, who is sound on a lot these issues, in his place. If I was the parent of a university-age son or daughter who was thinking of taking politics, I would say, “Go to the University of Hull”.

[Lord Bach]

I agree absolutely with my noble friend, and I think that my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath does, too. His son, as I understand it, has just started a course at the University of Hull.

[Lord Grocott]

That is very wise. I bet that he comes out of his course sensible on Lords reform.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I should say that my daughter also studied at Hull, but she is absolutely staunchly in favour of AV. She had the right influence from the noble Lord, Lord Norton.

[Lord Grocott]

My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours asked which AV system, but no doubt there is a specialist MA course on that. Does that not give us some of the answers? A few university departments quite properly consider these things, as well as one or two writers for the Guardian newspaper, which seems to think that this is the way that you can solve most of life’s ills, and I assume that these debates take place at branch meetings of the Liberal Democrat party. They must be a lot of fun. I am sorry that I missed them.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

They do not meet any more.

[Lord Grocott]

We are spending millions of pounds on dealing with, as far as the public are concerned, a non-existent problem. That is one of several reasons why I am not sure it is worth proceeding with the Bill, let alone endorsing Clause 1.

On the Government’s defence of the Bill, I should make one or two observations that are fair. Perhaps the most serious is that there has been no attempt, so far as I can see, even to address the issue that Nick Clegg raised: that this is part of a great reforming programme. There has been no attempt to relate what we are doing in this Bill to what is happening on any other constitutional reform measure. This is particularly true when considering electoral systems.

You would not think that somewhere down the track—I hope, or expect, a long way down the track—a Bill will come forward about Lords reform. We are already told that the electoral system to be used is proportional representation. What form of proportional representation? I really do not know. There are far more forms of it than there are of AV. I did not know about all the alternatives to AV until my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours got cracking on it. He will be a joy to listen to when we discuss the various forms of proportional representation in detail. Whenever I have had a debate with proponents of proportional representation—I have had several—and whenever I thought I was close to winning the case for first past the post, their rejoinder was always the same: “Oh, it’s not that kind of proportional representation that we are in favour of. It is some other kind”. So those private debates and discussions go on.

I would really like to know from Members on the Front Bench opposite, before we proceed any further with the Bill, how many different electoral systems they think it is proper for the United Kingdom—a country of 60 million people—to have. We already have five different systems.

[Lord Strathclyde]

I hope that the noble Lord will remind us that in 1997 there was only one system. By 2010, there were considerably more, and they had been brought in, on his watch, by the noble Lord’s Government, whom he avidly supported.

[Lord Grocott]

I have to admit in the privacy of this Chamber that I did my very best to stop them. However, you do not get all that you want in life, as the two parties in the coalition know well enough. It is an issue that must be addressed, and I tell the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, if he would like to report this back to senior management—

[Lord Dubs]

He is senior management.

[Lord Grocott]

He is senior management, but not top management. Perhaps he should bring back a Bill that said, “Let’s have a single electoral system for the United Kingdom”. He can attack the Labour Government if he wants; I would not agree with him on that, although I will on this issue. We have tried all these other systems. They all have serious failures. Is anyone going to challenge me on that on the systems that we have actually seen and observed? They all have serious failures. They do not end the debate. If any Scottish colleague wants to suggest to me that there are no longer any discussions in Scotland about the merits of the additional member system—

[Lord Rooker]

Here is where my noble friend and I part. The additional member system in Scotland gave, for the first time in years, Conservative representation to Conservative voters. So there is a discussion: that is, that it works. That was the problem. My noble friend was defending first past the post at very high levels during our time in government. Can he explain how, during the 13 years while the iron curtain was collapsing and democracy was starting to flourish in eastern Europe, we could not export first past the post to a single country? Add to that South Africa, eastern Europe. There was not one. We could not export the system that we had in 1997, so it is quite right that we tried other systems, because they proved to be wholly beneficial.

[Baroness Adams of Craigielea]

I have to tell the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that the additional member system does not work. We may have Conservatives representing not Conservative voters but Conservative Party policy and cherry picking issues because they do not represent any particular constituents. We have a system in which those directly elected by the local people have up to eight members following them around from the additional list, picking off issues and raising them in policies. I am sorry; it does not work.

[Lord Grocott]

I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Adams. I would just like to gently remind my good friend Lord Roper, and he will remain my good friend whatever different views we take on this issue, that the Berlin Wall did not come down during a Labour Government. The new democracies in eastern Europe predated our beloved Labour Government, but the international comparisons—for me, at any rate—can never be as telling and compelling as the operation of different systems in a single unitary system. That is the most telling evidence: not what happens in any other country in the world, but what has happened here in European elections, Scottish and Welsh elections, local government elections, mayoral elections and the rest of it. Let us have an academic debate no longer. Let us have an honest discussion about how well these systems have performed.

The only comments I would make on the performance of these systems are these. First, the question does not solve the debate about electoral reform, for the very simple reason that as soon as these systems come into operation, their faults become manifest. To me, the one good thing about having all these systems is that I no longer have to debate with people on the basis of an existing system with failings—I acknowledge that first past the post has its failings—against some El Dorado of a system that solves all known ills. I am able to say, “You told us this would happen with this particular electoral system, and I can demonstrate that it did not happen”. If someone has continually told you over a period of many years—most of my political career—that proportional representation for Europe, for example, would greatly increase public interest and involvement in elections because it would offer a real opportunity to get Labour members in the south-east or Conservative members in the north-east, where both parties are badly underrepresented, now you can say, “It simply has not happened”.

There are two real characteristics of the various attempts at different electoral systems, and they are crystal clear for anyone who takes an objective view. First, they are associated with low turnouts. There is no greater involvement by the public, and no greater connection that we heard so much about from one or two people before, than between the public and their elected representatives. The second characteristic, which I fear very much for the AV system and which is very noticeable and should be of concern to everyone in the House, is that they are associated with very high levels of spoilt ballot papers.

I do not want to predict what would happen if the AV vote were carried—God forbid that it were—but if it were, you can be absolutely certain that the numbers of spoilt ballot papers would increase, and increase dramatically. There are more spoilt ballot papers for the European elections, where the turnout is about 35 per cent, than there are for Westminster elections, where the turnout is 64 per cent. If that is not a statistic that should be put on the table and be of concern to anyone who cares about our democracy and its operation, then it really should be.

Finally, the only really solid justification that I have heard from the supporters of AV, as it is in this Bill, is that it ensures that MPs are elected on a majority vote. I loved the exchange between the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and my noble friend Lord Rooker, and I thought—you would expect me to say this—that my two noble friends comprehensively demolished the argument that even under AV there was a guarantee that the winning candidate would be a majoritarian.

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Lord does me the privilege of talking about me the moment I walk into the Chamber. Can I just say that I have never made that argument about AV. Others no doubt have but I have not and never would, because it is clearly not strictly true. It is, as noble Lords have said previously, clearly more true than for first past the post or for the supplementary vote, but it is not strictly 100 per cent true. That is obvious. I would never claim that.

[Lord Grocott]

I think that is a very honourable and honest thing to say. I was not so much referring to what he had said so much as to the debate between the two of them. I do wish that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, with his characteristic honesty on these matters, would gently, while we are debating things over here, move forward and whisper in the ear of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who constructs his near total defence of the AV system on the idea that it guarantees that MPs would have majority support. I do not know who is right. Is there another division among the Liberal Democrats on this particular issue? Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord McNally, could address that. I do not know whether he is responding to this debate or not. He is not. He looks relieved as he says not.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I was listening to a “News at Ten” bulletin the other day and there was a discussion about AV. Again the newscaster referred to it requiring more than 50 per cent. We have to get the story out to a lot of people that the 50 per cent issue does not arise under AV. The national media still keep peddling this story.

[Lord Grocott]

I am not surprised. During the time in office of the previous Labour Government, the national media frequently said that Labour had a majority in the House of Lords. They do not know the difference between “majority” and “largest party”: we are used to that. My concern about the constant reference to a majority is more fundamental. I simply report to the House that I was not as clever as some of my friends who ensured that they represented seats in the Commons where there was majority support in election after election. I had that luxury on only one of the four occasions when I managed to convince the electorate that I should be their Member under the first past the post system. I cannot remember the figures. They were about 42, 44 or 46 per cent: then in the end—bingo—it was more than 50 per cent. I did not think that it was of any great significance until I started reading some of the debates in the run-up to this one.

I assure the House—and if any noble Lord wishes to intervene, they are welcome to do so—that I do not know whether I had 50 per cent of the vote. I had to check it because I am now a fully paid-up member of the anorak society and had to know the facts about my own electoral history. It does not make a shred of difference. First, your voters do not know whether you have a majority. If I did not know, I am sure that they did not. It does not make a scrap of difference to your work as a Member of Parliament. The notion that it is vital for Lib Dem, Conservative or Labour voters in constituency A, B or C to have a Member of Parliament of their party is wrong, because 99.9 per cent—and that is a low estimate—of the people who come to you when you are a Member of Parliament do so irrespective of your party or theirs. They come to you with exactly the same range of issues whether you have a majority or not.

[Lord Rennard]

If the noble Lord is so convinced by the strength of his arguments over the past 21 minutes, why is he so frightened of putting this to the British people in a referendum so that they can decide the issues?

[Lord Grocott]

I would not have taken so long if I had not had so many interesting interventions. I am afraid that I will have to toss this back at the noble Lord. If the Lib Dems are so convinced, as they have been telling me ad nauseam over the years, that the British public are crying out for electoral reform, why on earth are they desperately putting the referendum on the same day as other elections, in the hope that they might get 30 or 35 per cent of the electorate to turn out? I understood that the public were queueing up to take part in any opportunity to get rid of the old, discredited system, as the Lib Dems call it. I am afraid that that is another theory that has been tested under fire and found wanting.

This clause will stand part of the Bill. It has limped along, drawing no enthusiasm from any of its proponents. I understand that there are always dilemmas about whether you can support your own Government in office. I do not criticise anyone, but I have no doubt what would happen if we had a good old-fashioned secret ballot on the Bill, nor about what would have happened if a secret ballot had been held in the Commons before they sent the Bill here. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, knows this as well as I do. He is well versed in the machinations of the higher echelons of parties—at least he was when I knew him—and he knows perfectly well that this is a friendless Bill and that this clause is certainly a friendless clause. I hope that we will remember that when we continue debating the Bill.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has been rather unfair on his noble friend Lord Lipsey, who gave an excellent and much briefer speech in support of Clause 1. I will follow the example of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, by being brief and to the point. I will concentrate for a few minutes on the issue of turnout, which has been a constant concern of all of us across the House this evening—and rightly so, because we are all anxious to look again at the involvement of our fellow citizens in the way in which we vote.

There have been one or two trips down memory lane this evening, and I hope your Lordships will indulge me for a couple of minutes. On the last wintry day of February 1974, in a very scattered rural constituency in Cornwall, 83 per cent of those who were registered to vote turned out. In those days, there were many fewer postal votes, so most voters went to the polls. Why? Because those very wise Cornish men and women knew that the result would be very close. It had been relatively close at the previous election. They were right: I had a majority of nine, which, even in those days, was thought to make mine a rather unsafe seat. In subsequent elections I did better. I confess to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that I cannot remember whether I constantly got more than 50 per cent of the vote, but I certainly did on one or two occasions, and I built a majority of 9,000. What happened?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

I am grateful to the Leader of the House, who has been very patient and good humoured. However, perhaps I might ask him one final serious question while he is dealing with the referendum. He thinks the referendum is absolutely right and is the proper thing to do when you are making a constitutional change of this kind. Given that we were told that all the constitutional change Bills were part of a coherent whole—I repeat, 1832—he must be able to confirm now that should there be a proposal to abolish the House of Lords in its present form he would clearly want to see that referred to a referendum.

[Lord Strathclyde]

That is a good question. The committee on which the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition sits is discussing these issues. No final view has been taken but, when it is, no doubt it will be transmitted to the noble Lord—if not directly by her then when a Statement is in due course made to Parliament at some stage in the new year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

How much I admire the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, for his courage at every stage of this Bill. This is obviously not an appropriate Bill to make a change in relation to whether Members of this House should vote, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, accepts. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs is right, however, to put the amendment down. Under this Bill, Peers will have the right to vote in the referendum on what the voting system should be and yet, once they have played their part in deciding what the voting system should be, they have no right to vote using that voting system. This is an opportunity for a short debate as to what the right course in relation to Lords voting is.

It is obvious, historically, why the Lords cannot vote in Commons elections. The nature of Parliament was that the Commons were elected because they were representative. We were not representative. The whole lot of us turned up in the upper House. Therefore, there was no need for any elections. The whole lot of us still turn up in the House, except for the hereditary Peers, who vote for hereditary representatives. Does that mean, therefore, that we do not need to have a vote in relation to the Commons? The answer is no, because the Lords no longer select the Government. The Government are selected exclusively by the Commons. We have influence in relation to Bills. We have a say in what happens in relation to policy. However, it is only a say. We do not vote in relation to the body that selects the Government.

Therefore, once the prisoner issue is dealt with, we, and we alone, are the only group in the country that has no say in selecting the Government of the day. The fact that we do not have the vote is an historical anomaly. There are 700 or 800 of us; no doubt the figure would go up to about 2,000 if the coalition had its way. Therefore, the number suffering the effects of this anomaly will increase, but it is an anomaly that no longer has constitutional justification. In those circumstances, one is obviously looking not for agreement from the Government that this matter should be dealt with in this Bill, but simply for the Government’s view on the matter. I do not expect any time to be allocated to this matter in any legislative programme, but if the Government were to express the view that it needed to be dealt with at an appropriate time, that would have a very significant effect on the processing of the issue.

I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that if we have the vote people will want us to be elected. The public will not think that because we can vote we should be elected. The question of whether we should be elected depends very much on the quality of what we do and the extent to which we persuade the public either that we should go on as we are or that there is a need for change. It is an important issue and one that will not get an airing in this House except on Bills such as this.

I return to the point that I started with. We are rightly accepted as participants in the decision-making process of whether there should be a change in the system. We are accepted as participants in that process because there is no basis on which it could be said that we should be excluded from that. That is the view that the Government have taken. We are included in Clause 2 as people entitled to vote in the referendum. The Government think that it is wrong that we should be excluded from that. There must be a basis on which the Government have come to that conclusion. I support that conclusion, because the obvious reason for saying that we should be included in the process by which a voting system change should be effected—if it is to be effected—is that there is no democratic reason why we should not be allowed to be included. It is wrong to say that this is a matter for other people; everybody accepts that it is a matter for us. It is an important issue. It is like a whole range of anomalies that you can say do not really cause any problems. However, how you put the constitution together and the extent to which there are consistencies in the constitution are very important. A justification for Peers not being entitled to vote is now required in a constitutional sense. If there is not one, the right course for a Government who are prepared to follow the logic of their constitutional position is to say—

[Lord Grocott]

Does my noble and learned friend acknowledge that it is an enormous privilege—obviously, it is not a unique privilege, but it is given only to the 800 or so Peers—to take part for life in the determination of the Bills that go through one of the two Houses? If you have that near unique influence on the legislative process, I do not think that it is too much to ask that you should not then have a clear determining role in deciding who the Members of the other House should be. It is rough justice but it seems to me a kind of justice. You forfeit that voting right because of the advantage that you have over all your fellow citizens of being able to take part in debates and influence the progress of legislation.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I disagree with what my noble friend Lord Grocott says for two reasons. First, there are other people who have very important roles in relation to what happens to policy legislation. Even in the period of my noble friend’s pomp, I suspect that the Cabinet Secretary was more important than he was, but nobody ever suggested that he should be deprived of his vote. The Chief Justice is more important than almost everybody in the country in determining what legislation means, but nobody suggests—