Voter Engagement

Natalie McGarry Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Natalie McGarry (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

Thank you for allowing me to speak, Mr Turner, and for your immense patience in understanding that the 90% of Scottish National party Members who are new are finding our feet with regard to parliamentary procedure.

This is an extremely important conversation, and I thank the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) for bringing it to the attention of the House. In Scotland, we have just come out of a referendum process where we had massive engagement. There are huge lessons to be learned about how that process was conducted. Perhaps the House should consider the level of engagement in Scotland.

Our electoral system leads to issues with parliamentary democracy and legitimacy. I am delighted to be here, but, as a democrat, I find it somewhat problematic that the SNP has 95% of Members with only 50% of the vote in Scotland. To me, that is a legitimacy problem. The Tories are in government with the votes of 35% of the overall UK electorate. The system is set up in a very binary way, so that we have a big, strong Government, but that leaves a majority of people voiceless as regards representation. If we are honest with ourselves, as democrats in this House we need to look at why people feel voiceless and why that stops them from getting engaged in the democratic process. I am not a fan of the UK Independence party, but many people voted for it and they have only one Member of Parliament.

In Scotland, we need to have a conversation about the link between poverty and exclusion from society, which is manifested in lower turnouts in areas of multiple social deprivation. My constituency, Glasgow East, is one of the most deprived in the whole UK. The turnout in Glasgow for the Scottish referendum was 75%, compared with 91% in East Dunbartonshire, one of the richest constituencies in Scotland. Work must be done to encourage people in such areas to vote.

There is definitely a link between indebtedness and being on the electoral register. People are terrified about putting themselves on the register if they are worried about debt catching up with them, so if we want to increase participation in democracy, we must make it safe for people. That requires education, but that also leaves a burden on us as parliamentarians to go out and speak to people in our communities and engage with them. If the Scottish referendum showed anything, it was that going into communities and having legitimate, open conversations is a way of encouraging people.

We should have events that allow people to come along and question politicians, because the problem with politics, which was exemplified in the expenses scandal, was the sense of them and us. It should not be them and us; we are all together and there should be no division between the people and their representatives. We have to come from the people and be among the people in order to represent them. That is the type of legitimacy that we get from considering and really engaging with people at community level. In that way, we will grow democracy.

In my constituency, the turnout in 2010 was 52%, but in 2015, following the referendum, it was eight percentage points higher. That is not a huge amount of people coming out, but there is a distinct upward trend that is not replicated in the rest of the UK. We therefore need to use that as a lesson.

The referendum was a binary choice: people understood what they were voting for. Whether they voted yes or no, they knew what the consequences were. We do not necessarily have that in party politics, so people do not feel as engaged in that or the manifestation of that in one person. That needs to be addressed going forward.

We need to look again at the electoral system and be really honest with ourselves. Are we keeping first past the post because it suits the Government of the day, or the Opposition, or is it because people truly believe that to be the best democracy that we can have? I do not think that it is and I strongly recommend that we look again at the type of country that we want to live in and the type of representation we have for people in the House.