---

Electoral System

rose to call attention to the workings of the British electoral system in the 2005 general election; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, I should first remind the House that I am chair of Make Votes Count, the voting reform campaigning organisation. Voting reform has never been a terrific crowd pleaser but that does not make it any the less important. This is our first ever ““debates Thursday””. The House is in a holiday mood and so I shall start with a little fairy tale. A Martian visits London. ““Take me to your leader””, he says. But he is swiftly told that that is not quite so simple here and is whisked round to Parliament to have explained to him—perhaps by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who chairs with such distinction the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House—the wonders of our democratic election-based governance. Being by definition an intelligent being, the Martian is, of course, much taken by what he hears. In particular, he wants to know all about the results of our latest general election. So he ““googles”” the Internet—Martians, of course, have the Internet built into their brains and so no connection is necessary—and he comes across an analysis of the results from the Electoral Reform Society. This is what he learns. Of the total electorate, just three in five people chose to vote. Of those, a little under 35.2 per cent voted Labour, by far the lowest share of any winning party in the last century and this. Labour won the votes of 21.6 per cent of the electorate but was rewarded with 55.1 per cent of the seats in Parliament. If the Conservatives had polled the same vote share as Labour, they would nevertheless have had 116 fewer seats; Labour would still have had an overall majority of 26. To get as many seats as Labour, the Tories would need to poll at least 6 per cent more votes. Only around two-thirds of MPs got the support of   50 per cent or more of the voters in their constituencies; no MP got the support of as many as half of their electorate. Every million voters who voted Labour secured 37 MPs; every million Tories, 22 MPs; every million Liberal Democrats, 10. Almost one voter in five voted not for the party they preferred but for the party that tactically they felt it best to vote for. I could go on and on and on. Noble Lords should ask themselves this question: would the Martian be more likely to conclude that none of this mattered—that the advantages of strong government outweighed these affronts to justice—or would he more likely reel away wondering how his distinguished and brilliant interlocutors such as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, could be so blind as to defend such a travesty? In particular, there is one minimal test which any system which claims to be democratic should have to pass. It need not be proportional—I shall come back to that—but it must be unbiased. That is to say, the rules of the game have to be such that parties that do equally well in the votes that they collect do equally well in seats. As I have shown, the British system now abjectly fails that test. Indeed, it now fits more readily into the various distortions of democracy seen around the world, where gerrymandering is employed to keep those in power in power. In a recent case involving postal vote manipulation, the judge said that our system would disgrace a banana republic. But that is not only true of postal voting. Our system now stands barely better than the systems that your Lordships regularly deplore in other nations without the law—banana republic Britain. Does this matter? By being present today in gratifying numbers your Lordships indicate that for you these matters at least need debate. I thank all who are present and those who will be speaking. I think I can illustrate the concern that I have by reporting the reaction that I have had to this debate from some of my colleagues on the Labour Benches. I do not criticise them for this—it is quite natural—but they have asked ““Why are you raising this issue now?   You are casting doubt on the Government’s mandate””. By God I am, my Lords! Elections are the supreme authority in any democratic system. They—and they alone—confer on the Government the right and legitimacy by which they rule. If therefore the elections are manifestly faulty—as under our system they are—so then is the basis for that legitimacy and so then is that authority undermined. We have seen this in the first days and weeks of the new Government. On some days Ministers seem to recognise that the election result was something less than a wholesale triumph. The humble, listening Prime Minister who limped back from Sedgefield illustrated this. But on other days we have seen an arrogance that defies belief, a wilful ignoring of the message delivered by the electorate on the basis that it can be ignored because, after all, the Government have an overall majority in the House of Commons. So far as the people are concerned—and it is the people that we serve—as soon as the Government start doing things that they do not like, as they will quite soon, the people will be perfectly able to retort, ““But most of us did not vote you””. What will be the answer to that? The legitimacy genie is out of the bottle. It cannot be stuffed back in by the political elite. Either our electoral system is re-examined or there will be a rottenness at the heart of our democracy. I am sure—as I can see from the nods of noble Lords opposite—that this will come as music to the ears of the Liberal Democrats and I cheerfully embrace their support. However, the two big parties still seem determined to defend the system, warts and all. Perhaps I may first say a word to the Conservative Party. I am told that, by some strange alchemy, those taken prisoner by terrorists fall in love with the people who are inflicting such terrible cruelties on them. It is the same with the Tories and first past the post. Here is a party which is being extraordinarily disadvantaged by first past the post and we do not have yet a single Conservative MP—unlike some Members of this House, I am pleased to say—who has dared to stand up and tell the evident truth. It will be very kind of the noble Baroness to defend the system when she winds up for the Conservatives, but does she know what it is doing to her own party? The bias in the present system makes it extremely hard for the Conservatives to win an overall majority. To do so they would need to poll, at a bare minimum, 42 to 43 per cent of the national vote. From 1997 to 2005, the Conservative share of the vote rose at a rate of around 0.2 per cent per year. On this basis, I calculate that they might hope to achieve an overall majority in the election of 2061. Never mind choosing their next leader, on this basis the next Prime Minister of a Conservative government with an overall majority has yet to be born. But my main argument today is aimed at my own party, the Labour Party, of which I have now been a member for cracking on for 40 years. I understand, of   course, that my noble and learned friend the Lord   Chancellor is not able to be with us today but I am absolutely delighted that he has such an eloquent and appropriate deputy in my noble friend Lady   Ashton, who we welcome to her new responsibilities. Although my noble and learned friend could not be here today, he was able to appear on the ““Today”” programme earlier in the week and to state his views on the subject. My noble and learned friend put forward three arguments with which I wish briefly to take issue. First, he said that change would mean endless coalition government; secondly, that it would encourage extremist parties; and, thirdly, he said that there was no groundswell of opinion for change. At the heart of the first two charges lies a basic—I could almost say ““schoolboy”” if it was not of such a brilliant man—error which equates electoral reform with proportional representation. Of course some electoral reformers support PR—good luck to them—but I am emphatically not one. I support the broad thrust of the report of the Jenkins committee, of which I was a member and which took a quite different approach. It recognised—indeed, its terms of reference stated—that   electoral systems have to balance various, and sometimes contradictory, considerations—for example, proportionality, strong government, voter choice and so   on. Jenkins concluded—and developments since strongly reinforce that conclusion—that our system was out of kilter and that balance needed to be restored. As Jenkins clearly argued, coalition government is not necessarily—contrary to the Lord Chancellor’s view—weak government. The post-war history of Germany, until very recently, shows that. Nor is majority government necessarily strong government. We remember John Major’s majority government, and I wonder whether things will turn out all that differently for this Labour Government, majority and all. Be that as it may, Jenkins would not mean permanent coalition. The AV+ system it recommends is rather more proportional than the present system but by no means totally proportional. A Government, Labour or Tory, who got around 42 to 44 per cent of the vote would have every chance of an overall majority. Ironically, this is no more than the Tories require to get an overall majority under the present system. It is only Labour which benefits from the present system at all. Nor would the Jenkins system encourage extremists. Pure PR systems do that—Israel, for example—and that is why I am against them. But under the Jenkins system of county top-ups, extremist parties would not win seats with less than 10 per cent of the vote. The British National Party, in particular, would not come anywhere securing a seat in Parliament. The final point that my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer made was that there was no groundswell of support for change. While my putative Martian was en route for London, it seems that my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor was en route for Mars. On every possible indicator of public opinion, concern about the electoral system has dominated debate since the general election. NOP’s poll for the Independent showed 62 per cent support for reform. I have never seen a figure like that in all the years of polling on this subject. Some 20,000 people responded to the Independent’s campaign on electoral reform. Phone-in programmes such as ““Any Questions”” and ““Any Answers”” have been dominated by the debate. Three hundred and fifty angry reformers—the largest public meeting I have seen in 40 years in and around this House—filled Committee Room 14 for a meeting of reformers just after the election. And so on, and so on. The only places this clamour fails to penetrate is the closed mind of my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor and, I fear, of the Prime Minister, under whom he serves. But the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and even—I say this with genuine personal regret—my noble and learned friend the Lord   Chancellor may not be with us for ever, and after they are gone, perhaps wiser counsels will prevail. I conclude with some questions for my noble friend who is replying to this debate and who is endlessly solicitous when asked specific questions. Can she say a little more about the review of voting systems promised by the Government in their election manifesto and now under way? What are its terms of reference? Is it intended to receive representations and take evidence from outside parties, or is it a private, hole-in-corner government review designed simply to park the issue? What steps are being taken to test the proposition of my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor that   there is no public demand for change? Will the Government conduct their own polling? Will they use citizens’ juries? Will my noble friend study the recent consultation on the subject in British Columbia, which developed the citizens’ jury technique and produced, incidentally, a 58 per cent majority for change when the people were fully informed? When does she expect the review to be complete? What consultations do the Government plan to undertake on their findings? I conclude with a final question—or perhaps, more honestly, a challenge. Will the Government now agree that, after the review, they will fulfil their 1997 election pledge to hold a referendum on the electoral system, a referendum that would test once and for all whether the Lord Chancellor’s claim that the public are not eager for change is true or, as I earnestly believe, wholly false? I beg to move for Papers.