Voter Engagement

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. We shared the experience of sitting on the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, which lasted for one Parliament only. The Committee had many enlightening evidence sessions on this matter.

It might be as well to record that in our last meeting with the Electoral Commission, it gave special praise to electoral registration officers in two constituencies—mine and the Vale of Clwyd—for their energetic activity after Christmas until the election date. The result in my constituency was interesting, with a swing of 0.0%, so what it lacks in volatility it makes up for in consistency. The sad effect in the Vale of Clwyd was the removal from Parliament of the person who knew more about electoral registration than anyone else—Chris Ruane, who is greatly missed in this Chamber.

Democracy was started in Greece 2,500 years ago and it has come to us on the instalment plan, in stages and imperfectly. It is still possible to buy a place in the House of Lords and still possible to buy influence and privilege from Governments by putting money into the pockets of lobbyists. We have done virtually nothing to reform that system. It is still possible for retiring Ministers, generals and civil servants to prostitute their insider knowledge to the highest bidder when they leave this place, to get a lucrative retirement job and buy their hacienda in Spain. That is going on and we are doing very little to limit it. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments is a bit of a joke. It is not the Rottweiler it should be; it is a pussy cat without teeth or claws. We have an imperfect democracy.

The Government’s only argument for redrawing constituencies is arithmetical tyranny: doing it entirely on the basis of population. Let me give one example of how things do not work that way. A main area of our work in my constituency office is immigration. In the local authority area I serve, there are at this moment 439 asylum seekers—that is just one group; there are others as well—all of whom require a great deal of work. There are also language difficulties. It is a huge burden on an MP’s office. Where is the fairness in this, when in the constituencies of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary, there are a grand total of three asylum seekers?

We could talk about many other examples of the unfair burden of work in different constituencies. The Government are planning, again, to undermine the number of constituencies and disturb the system. There certainly are arguments for bringing the system up to date, but there is no argument for doing so at a time when the Government are awarding places in the House of Lords to people who are unelected. Sometimes places are given because of cash.

There is certainly a link between contributions to parties—all parties—and places in the House of Lords. There are also links between those, such as Ministers, whom the Government wish to reward for failure, as a consolation. That is normal now. We have a system of political awards set up by the present Prime Minister. The system has existed only since 2011; it is entirely new. Why should anyone want an award? People lust after the same honour that Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith had. Why anyone would want to be tainted with such a thing is beyond me.

There was something of a triumph in the last election for the Electoral Commission, which gave us evidence on many occasions, as you will recall, Mr Turner. The result of the election showed some remarkable changes. We spent many hours in the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee looking at how we could encourage people to register, particularly those groups that were largely under-registered. Organisations such as Bite the Ballot did a great job on that. Sadly, in spite of my repeated requests, we never had Russell Brand along to give us evidence. We wanted to get hold of him and say, “You realise how badly young people are treated by all politicians. They look after rich pensioners such as me very well indeed, because we are the group who vote.”

Young people have had a terrible deal from the coalition Government and previous Governments because they are not viewed as being of any consequence. Russell Brand made that foolish statement to his 9 million followers on Twitter—rather more than you or I have, Mr Turner—telling them not to vote and not to take part in the election, but instead to march around the streets making demands. He tried to get 1 million people on the street outside here a few months ago; he managed about 200, I think. He took those people out of the electoral process. Although he eventually recanted under the wise advice of my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), it was too late for them to register and get on the electoral roll again. I wish we could have had him before the Committee, where we could have persuaded him that his view was counter-productive and not achieving his aim.

The Electoral Commission reported a record-breaking 469,000 people in one day registering online to vote in the 2015 general election. That is an incredible number. There were 2,296,000 online applications to register to vote from when the campaign began last year on 16 March to polling day. Those are enormous figures. Voting habits have changed. The public are ahead of us in many ways in their willingness to use electronic media to register and to vote, and we have to take into account the fact that people have got into the habit of voting for television personalities and so on in that way. We should look at the success of the Electoral Commission and such organisations as Bite the Ballot, which have done a great deal to maintain the number of people voting.

In my campaign, I spoke to many thousands of voters. I found the contempt for politics distressing; it has not improved since the screaming nightmare of the expenses scandal. One party managed to sell itself as being close to the voters. The man in the pub with a fag and a pint was who they related to, not politicians. That party made inroads in my constituency, but it did not affect my vote in any way, because the sensible Lib Dems deserted their party and voted for me. However, some 6,000 people in my constituency, which has been wise enough to elect me since 1987, voted UKIP.

There is all the other stuff about Europe and so on, but part of the reason why people voted for UKIP—they repeated this again and again—was contempt for the political system and this House. We are trying to do something about it, but we put on a pantomime every Wednesday—a national embarrassment of exchanged insults and unanswered questions. In one of the last Prime Minister’s questions before the election, the Prime Minister was asked a question on immigration, and in his answer he mentioned nine other subjects, not one of them immigration.

Last week, the Prime Minister asked the Leader of the Opposition four questions, which is almost more than she asked him. I have usefully suggested that it would be helpful to change the name from Prime Minister’s questions to Prime Minister’s answers, just to give him an idea of what is expected of him and to let him know how the system should work.

The system used to work. We did not like the answers that Margaret Thatcher gave, but she always referred to the question asked. If I asked the Welsh Minister a question about tidal barrages and he told me the price of cabbage in Cardiff on that day, the Speaker would rightly call him out of order, but that does not work with the Prime Minister. Prime Minister’s questions are an object of derision for politics and the system. People show contempt for us, and that contempt is to the advantage of such parties as UKIP. Prime Minister’s Question Time reduces our chance of restoring the trust and confidence that the public used to have in the political system.

A great amount of reform is needed, and it is a lot more urgent than changing the constituency boundaries. The Government wish to do that, and it is to their electoral advantage, but I have always been in favour of proportional representation. We stand in contempt of the country because all parties reach their conclusions on PR based on their party interest. The Conservatives and the Labour party benefit from the current system. The Lib Dems have always taken a principled line on PR, and now we find it coming from UKIP and other parties, such as the Greens, that suffer greatly under the current system. It is a travesty to suggest that the system we have represents the public view, because it does not.

We did a splendid report in the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee last year. One of its suggestions was to have a democracy day, which is a magnificent idea. In my constituency of Newport West, the Chartists lost at least 20 members when they were killed raiding a hotel to release a prisoner, Henry Vincent. They were protesting on principle about the cruel treatment they were receiving and asking for the vote. Every year on 4 November, there are celebrations and commemorations to mark that day, and it is a great way of getting the meaning of democracy across to schoolchildren. Lord Tredegar held the one vote in the town. He decided everything and the working people had no votes at all. We should have a democracy day to celebrate the joys of democracy.

In this place, we have at least 1,000 depictions of royalty. They are everywhere, and include paintings, statues and a tower. What has royalty done for democracy? It has obstructed almost every advance in democracy. It could be argued that they donated one head, but that was grudgingly.

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is discussing voter engagement and the franchise, which as far as I know have nothing to do with royal pictures. Will he stick to the topic?

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn]

The difference between us and royalty is that we have been elected. [Interruption.] That is slightly off the subject, I agree, but where are the tributes to the heroes of democracy, who are the reason why we are here and the reason why we exist? Thanks to Mr Speaker, there is a tiny exhibition about Chartists on the top corridor, and that is welcome. There are a few tributes to suffragettes around, but mostly they are outside this building.

The Putney debates were a great celebration of democracy. They were hugely important, but they are hardly known. We hear about Magna Carta, but not about the Putney debates, which took place in 1647 between late October and early November and laid down the whole basis for the Bill of Rights. The Women’s Social and Political Union—the suffragettes—had a notable occasion in 1903.

If we are to win back public trust and belief in democracy, we must energise people in the same way as the young people of Scotland were energised when they voted so strongly in its referendum, which was a magnificent piece of democratic action and an awakening of responsibility among young people. It showed them the strength of the vote and the democratic process.

We have a long way to go, but as beneficiaries of the democratic system we should be working towards a system that is by far the best in the world. It is not at the moment. The mother of Parliaments is now a disgraced hag heading for future scandals; we must do something to improve it. We have done nothing to improve our status since the expenses scandal. People do not believe us and they do not trust us. Virtually every story about MPs that appears in the papers is negative. We are being blamed for a pay rise that none of us asked for or wanted.

There has to be a serious campaign by all parties to improve the House’s status. That can be done only by changing radically how we behave and appear to the public. Prime Minister’s Question Time is the House at its worst. We put on a national embarrassment show every week—it is time we reinvented it as an event that, although still robust and full of questions, is nevertheless conducted in an atmosphere of calm, dignity and mutual respect.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—