Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Paul Flynn Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 18th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) on introducing the Bill. She referred to this place as the mother of Parliaments. In the past that would be said with pride, but we can no longer claim to other countries, particularly those with newly minted democracies, that we are the example to be followed. Now, sadly, the mother of Parliaments is a dissolute, degraded hag. There are major weaknesses in our arrangements, and the public are losing confidence in them. The number of constituencies is a matter of some importance, but it has nothing to do with the main doubts, the main injustices, and the main unfairnesses in our system.

We see in America a sense of outrage that the person who won the largest number of votes lost the election because of the distortions of the electoral college, but we have an extraordinary system here. When the ambition should be to make every vote count and be of equal value, elections are decided by a tiny number of people, namely the swing voters in marginal constituencies. How people vote in Blaenau Gwent or Eastbourne does not matter; what matter are the votes in the constituencies where changes take place.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Flynn]

I want to be brief, and I want to make this point, because it has not been made so far.

The Government’s proposal will make things worse. According to an analysis by the Electoral Reform Society, reducing the number of MPs will reduce the number of marginal constituencies, and will make the House less representative than it is now.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what is really going on here is that the Executive are reducing the House’s ability to hold them to account, while at the same time creating extra peers so that they can get their own way? That cannot be right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn]

My hon. Friend refers to the crisis of scrutiny in this place. That is another major scandal, although one glorious exception is the meeting of one Committee of the House which is going to be made into a musical.

We should also remember that the Government’s proposal is a pre-Brexit proposal. There will be a huge amount of extra work to be done here. How can it make any sense to reduce the number of Members of Parliament in those circumstances? The Government’s proposal will make Parliament less representative, and it will no longer be a model for those in other countries. The Brexit proposal will impose a huge burden of legislation on the House.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

When the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, the electorate will have 73 fewer elected parliamentarians to represent their interests, and if the number of Members here is reduced as well, a shocking 57% of our lawmakers will be unelected peers. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that reform needs to happen next door before any further changes are made in this place?

[Paul Flynn]

A range of reforms must be made. We are losing the Members of the European Parliament, and we have a crisis in Wales. The Welsh Assembly has only 60 members and their work has trebled, but it is impossible to argue in isolation for more Assembly Members, although virtually every member of the ruling party is a Minister, a deputy Minister, or the Chair of a Committee. The problems that exist in many areas can be dealt with only by a comprehensive and balanced Bill that takes account of the need for more Members of the Welsh Assembly and the need for fewer peers, and that will require a constitutional convention involving give and take and balanced decision-making. But at the moment we have the extraordinary situation of the Executive becoming immensely more powerful. That is bad government as far as scrutiny is concerned.

In the 1920s, 10% of the governing party was on the Government payroll vote. Under the Government’s current proposals to reduce the number of MPs, the Electoral Reform Society says that up to 43% of Government Members will have their mouths bandaged by the discipline of their party, through which they are inhibited from taking a full part in the scrutiny of matters considered by the House. That is a retrograde step.

I urge the House to look at the problems before us. Wales will be particularly hard hit by this. My constituency—my city—offers an excellent example of what will happen and the damage that will be done. There are two marginal seats now; one was won by a Conservative in the past. Those two seats will be merged into one and it will become not a marginal seat, but a rock-solid safe Labour seat, which will be to the advantage of the successor MPs.

The effect is similar throughout the country; this is a diminution in the value of our democracy. People are unhappy that they are not being represented, and the only way we can make sure votes count is with a proportional representation element. Otherwise, politics will be distorted, as always, by the system we have inherited.

If the Government are serious about reforming democracy, they should of course take the boundaries into consideration. The boundaries are an element of the reforms that are needed, but only a relatively small one. In the last Parliament we had a Committee on constitutional reform that produced a long document urging overall reform. At the moment the public are right to be cynical, but the only reform the Government are interested in is the one that will give them maximum political advantage. This is a party political stunt by them, ignoring the problems of the House and the ludicrous situation in the House of Lords where it is still possible to buy a place in our legislature by giving a big enough contribution to a major party. They are ignoring that scandal. Some 261 peers were added by David Cameron, which is outrageous. What has that done to the cost of democracy? The other place does great work in scrutinising this House, but it is hopelessly illogical that its membership is larger than that of this House, which has the role of creating legislation and scrutinising it. Nothing has been done about that; nothing has come from the Government, but that is essential.

We need a constitutional convention; we need root-and-branch reform. We are losing public confidence in our democracy, and rightly so. We have institutions here for discipline, which are very permissive. We also have an Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which is totally futile and has no powers. It is not a watchdog; it is a pussycat without teeth or claws.

There is rising resentment and cynicism among the public about the level of our democracy. That ends up in an obscenity like Trump taking over. We must defend our democracy and the quality of our democracy. That is crucial, and we do not do it by a tiny move by one party to gain political advantage for itself. We ought to come together as representatives and seize the opportunity for a major, massive, overhaul reform.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

It was indeed a choice. What my hon. Friend does not recognise, though, is that it was perfectly clear, having done the sums, that we were not, at the end of it all, going to get anything through, so we would have achieved the miracle of sacrificing almost the entire rest of our programme for the sake of achieving nothing whatsoever. That was not an attractive prospect, and that is why we withdrew the proposal, even though the corollary of doing so—this is the supreme irony of discussing the matter today—was that the Liberal Democrats in the coalition refused to support the implementation of the very changes that we are now discussing.

[Paul Flynn]

I am grateful for the serious attention that the right hon. Gentleman is giving to the points raised. Does he think that given the current situation of intense public cynicism, it is unwise to put forward a piecemeal measure that advantages only one party and intensifies the problems of scrutiny and representation that we have in this country when we are nowhere near to making sure that every vote counts?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

No, because, as I have tried to argue in the first two parts of my speech, first, I do not think that the changes going forward at the moment are simply gerrymandering, but that they are fairer. Secondly, I do not believe that reducing the numbers reduces the quality of accountability. I therefore reject the hon. Gentleman’s argument. I accept that if it were a bad thing to do, it would be a bad thing to do piecemeal, but if it is a good thing to do, it is a good thing to do piecemeal, even though it would be better if we could—unfortunately we cannot—achieve major constitutional reform alongside it.