Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

That is not something that I condone, but it is insignificant compared to what happened and to what we picked up on the doorstep during the course of the three campaigns to which I referred. I remember the Bermondsey campaign, which was utterly appalling. The Liberal Democrats believe that they can break through on the back of AV, and they will ruthlessly use this system. I warn the Conservative element in this coalition that this will backfire.

[Lord Lipsey]

It is very tempting for me to think that, having heard the formidable argument put forward by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, it is necessary to reply to each of the points he made because as a supporter of AV, I could, and would, readily do so. I think I have some sense that the House would prefer to proceed a little more rapidly than that would imply, and therefore I will resist that temptation and keep my remarks as brief as they can be in view of the substance that I need to impart.

I noticed that during my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours’s speech, the Lord Speaker deserted our proceedings. I can only think that she was so convinced by my noble friend’s arguments that she realised that she was not a legitimate Speaker of this House. She was elected by AV, a system which my noble friend was destroying, and perhaps because she had not heard me put the counter-case, she felt it necessary to desert her seat. However, I can assure her that she was legitimately chosen by a proper AV system, as are the leaders of the political party of which I am a member, and it is a very good system too.

When debating between SV and AV, as opposed to between first past the post and AV, I sometimes feel that I am back watching television some years ago and watching the Tooting Popular Liberation Front fighting it out with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tooting. As I am Lord Lipsey of Tooting Bec, I particularly enjoy that contest. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours and I agree on one thing. It is more important than the things on which we disagree—SV against AV. We are both electoral reformers and therefore hope to see electoral reform emerge eventually from this Bill.

There is at least as formidable a case to be made against SV as my noble friend made against AV. Let us take a point on which the House has spent much too long this afternoon; that is, whether AV requires someone to get 50 per cent or more of the vote. Without going into detail, quite apparently, SV leads to people being elected with a much lower share of the eventual vote than does AV. This can be very serious in four-party marginals, particularly in Scotland. SV simply does not allow the same breadth of choice and the same degree of voter choice as AV. That is just one example of the many points that could be levied against SV.

I shall go through some of the arguments put by my noble friend. He said that this was a panic creation by the coalition. Clearly, it was stitched together in order to create the coalition, but there is nothing panicky about AV. My party has stood for it for quite a while. The Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, favours it. If noble Lords care to look, there is a long list of signatures of very distinguished members of my party who favour AV. Whatever the circumstances that have brought it on to the stage now—I would much rather that it had come on to the stage as the result of a Labour victory in the general election and a Bill containing this clause was being put forward by a Labour Government—I do not think that they are sufficient reason to be against it today. It is not a newly forged system, as noble Lords opposite have pointed out. It has been about for about 100 years and quite often nearly came about.

Moreover, it has been closely examined in recent times by the Jenkins commission, of which I was a member. AV formed part of what was recommended by Jenkins. SV did not. AV maximises voter choice whereas SV gives a relatively limited voter choice. I regard the issue of lower preferences being of lesser importance as being completely without foundation. I would greatly prefer, for example, a Green candidate to a candidate from the British National Party. That is quite low on my list of preferences. If I am wholly honest, once upon a time I did not terribly care whether I voted Lib Dem or Labour, but I always voted Labour, of course. That seemed to me to be a much less important choice. However, at the next general election, as a result of this coalition, I daresay I will approach that question in a different frame of mind.

I would not claim that AV eliminates tactical voting altogether. Of course, it does not. But it eliminates the most difficult choice for a voter; namely, what will a person do with his single vote if it is a first-past-the- post-system? Will he put first the party that he really prefers or will he put first the party that he would prefer to the third party for which he might vote? That becomes vastly more important between SV and AV in four-member seats.

We will have a long referendum campaign. Whatever system comes out of this Bill and is the system debated in the referendum, I very much hope that all electoral reformers will choose eventually to rally behind it, although having heard my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, it may be that that is an overoptimistic prediction. It is certainly true that the great majority of electoral reformers, including the electoral reformers in the Electoral Reform Society, which historically is almost keener on STV than the Liberal Democrats, have chosen to back this system.

Let us have the debate. This clause will enable it to be put before the people in the referendum, particularly if, in the course of further amendment of the Bill, we make sure that that referendum does not take place, as the coalition proposes, on 5 May 2011.