Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Williamson of Horton Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Williamson of Horton]

My Lords, I hope to establish a precedent by posing a direct question to the Minister. That would be a good idea, having sat through all these hours. An occasional question may elicit some response from the Minister which may help all of us. I have a question on this amendment because there is a big difference in principle between the amendment we are now discussing and those on which we spent a long time earlier on the number of constituencies.

Why do I think there is a big difference in principle? In relation to the number of constituencies, we had a voice from the electorate, showing that it wished to reduce the figure from 650 to a lower one. We can argue until the cows come home—indeed, we did—whether it should be 650, 625, 620, and so on. But there was a big difference in that in the electoral manifestos there was a direct statement on that point. Now we come to a completely different amendment relating to the 5 per cent margin and the amendment on the possibility of rising above 5 per cent but not above 10 per cent. Here comes my direct question to the Minister. Do the Government consider that they are in any sense bound by the views of the electorate to stick with 5 per cent? I cannot see that anywhere.

The Government can take 5 per cent as a marvellous figure which they would like to stick with and which they can try to defend. Is there a commitment to the electorate—not to the Government’s friends or anybody else—that I do not see? If there is no commitment, it means that the flexibility we have here is obviously greater than the flexibility we had on some movement below 650 constituencies.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I congratulate my noble and learned friend on introducing the amendment with an analysis that was extremely detailed and lucid. I thought it was quite masterly. He has, more or less at one stroke, transformed the atmosphere of the debates on this subject. The last two contributions—one from the Cross Benches and the other by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, from the Conservative Benches—have shown that the House is now in a mood to discuss the whole issue, pragmatically and calmly, in a spirit of genuine compromise, I hope. A willingness to try to find the right solution and occasionally to accept suggestions from other parts of the House will be a good contribution towards finding that solution. It is a wonderful relief to those of us who have been through a slightly confrontational series of debates during the course of the night.

The amendment tabled by my noble and learned friend addresses directly the issue I raised earlier. As I see it, the Boundary Commission faces in its deliberations—as it always has faced and will continue to face—an equation with three variables and a trade-off between those variables. The variables are, first, acceptability of the extent to which the local electorate is happy with the boundaries within which it is placed, which is very important; secondly, equality of numbers; and, thirdly, the number of MPs. If you fix one of those variables you will have a corresponding distortion of the others. Fixing one will, of course, because of the trade-offs, result in something less than an ideal solution in the others. You will have to pay a price in the others.

If you try to fix two you will produce an enormous distortion. If the Government were determined to maintain the 5 per cent rule at the same time as maintaining the 600 limit for MPs—or any other arbitrary limit for MPs—there will be a tremendous distortion of the important aspect of acceptability in many boundaries in the country. This point has been well made by many colleagues on both sides of the House over the past 24 hours. There would be a great many constituencies where people felt not at all identified with the constituency in which they had been artificially placed. That would be a bad day’s work and we all want to avoid that.

My noble and learned friend has suggested the compromise of not taking away the need to keep within reasonable limits of equality but to have a 10 per cent rule rather than a 5 per cent rule. The effect of that has been quantified by my noble friend Lord Lipsey. If I recall correctly, he said that if the House passes the amendment, something like 30 per cent of constituencies will need to be reviewed because they will be over the 10 per cent limit, whereas under the original draft of the Bill brought forward by the Government, something like 60-odd per cent would need to have their boundaries reviewed because they would be outside the 5 per cent criterion. It is a very substantial quantified difference. In the light of that, I hope that the Government will accept the amendment.

If they do not feel able to accept the amendment, then, in the new atmosphere— which I enormously welcome and, from the remarks of the Leader of the House, I think the Government also welcome it—at the very least the House would expect a reasoned explanation as to why they cannot accept it, together with a better suggestion for achieving what we all regard now as a common purpose. The difficulty we had in the period before the lunch break was—I emphasise to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, who is staring at me at the moment—that there is a genuine concern among many of us on this and other sides of the House that the Government had rigid plans for enormous constitutional reform; that they were not being entirely open about it; that they were unwilling to consult on or discuss the issue before they brought it forward; and that it did not involve only the subjects in the Bill. We know that because they are preparing Lords reform proposals.

There was an horrific moment this morning—I trust that it was a complete misunderstanding—when the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said something which led a number of people to think that he was threatening the House with the introduction of a timetabling system, which would be a real revolution in the House of Lords and obviously not appropriate to a revising Chamber. I trust that the noble Lord did not mean that and that his words were not intended to convey that meaning. I am sure the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, understands that those words were bound to provoke a reaction here. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is not in his place as I make these comments.

While I am discussing this, I should say that I thought I heard him say this morning that in the late 19th century, when the Commons introduced a timetabling system, it did so as a result of filibustering by what he described as “Fenians”. The Fenians were Irish nationalists who were prepared to use non-parliamentary and violent methods, which is a pretty horrific way to describe one’s political opponents in a democratic assembly. I am sure he did not mean “Fenian” in that sense. It is also an insult to the Irish nationalists who were conducting that remarkable filibuster—people such as Parnell, Dillon, Healy, O’Brien and so forth. They were the people who led the Irish filibusters in the 1880s and they were far from being Fenians. They had opposed in Ireland, with considerable courage, those who said that only extra-parliamentary and violent methods would work in dealing with the British. It was a remark that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, might want to withdraw, both as applied to Parnell and the Irish constitutional nationalists of that time and to those of us here.