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Electoral System

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, on having secured this debate in the ballot. I scarcely know a tithe of what he knows about the subject, but I congratulate him on a balanced and comprehensive opening to the debate, for which I think your Lordships’ House is extremely grateful. I volunteered very late to speak in the debate and have found myself promoted to speak rather early, on a day when, I gather, Mr Michael Vaughan has won the toss and put the Bangladeshis in. I am, on the whole, sympathetic to that view. However, given my place in the batting order, I should perhaps say that I am not speaking on behalf of the Association of Conservative Peers, of which I am an officer, nor am I speaking on behalf of the board of the Conservative Party, of which I am an ex officio member. I should like to dwell on three issues; I am picking up things that the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said. I refer first to the relationship between the number of seats gained by certain parties, the number of votes cast for them and the number of votes required to   win a seat. The noble Lord dwelt on that. Before Mr Lynton Crosby left for Australia, on the sad day when Kylie Minogue was discovered to have breast cancer, said of her that she was not a whinger and that the Tory Party should not be whingers either. I hope that we are not being whingers on the subject of votes. But there are implications relating to the   Boundary Commission and, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, to proportional representation. When I say that we are not whingers, my recollection, going back to the period when I first started taking an interest in these matters in the 1950s, is that the position then was exactly the reverse. The Labour Party was piling up huge majorities in seats, but the number of seats they secured did not reflect the number of votes that they were getting. The views of the Liberal Party on the subject are well known and have been reiterated exhaustively—and exhaustingly—over the years. I realise that the country is becoming more mobile than it once was. In the ““Reader’s Digest”” atlas of the United Kingdom, published in the late 1960s, there was a map devoted to the colour of hair that demonstrated an exact correlation to how far the Vikings got. I think we have speeded up in the course of the past 35 years. The differences that occur in the sizes of seats are occurring faster than they used to, which may have an implication for the Boundary Commission’s periodicity. Against that, there is an advantage in having enough time between one set of Boundary Commission decisions and the next one to see whether it has got right the recommendations that it has made. I should like to make a personal observation out of my experience in Westminster, which admittedly is an odd seat because it is an inner-city seat with very great mobility of voters. The Boundary Commissioner, against the advice that I submitted to the inquiry in 1991, gave me the whole of Bayswater and the whole of Lancaster Gate. In the process, it took the boundaries of the second seat in Westminster outside the city boundaries of Westminster and took in five wards in north Kensington and Notting Hill. I thought that that was a mistake because the population of Westminster was growing at a pace that warranted retaining the two seats. I went through the difficulties in the 1997 Parliament of having those two extra wards. The Boundary Commission has now agreed that the point was right and has reversed the situation so that at the next election, if the orders go through, Westminster will go back to being two seats and not one and a half. So, you need enough time between sets of recommendations to see whether the changes have been validated. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is right about the attitude of the Conservative Party to proportional representation. I shall not dissent from those views today. In that sense, I am not serving as a whinger either. I want to say a brief word about postal votes because that subject came up serially in the previous Parliament, particularly in the year before the election. There was a curious event before the election to which the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, responded. In your Lordships’ House, certain Peers and Peeresses on the Labour Benches sought to argue that the behaviour of Labour councillors in Birmingham had absolutely nothing to do with the Government. I did not say that the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, said this; it was an argument that came from behind her. The fact remains that quite a lot of other people in your Lordships’ House think that there is a connection. No one can say that the two main opposition parties did not warn the Government of the hazards that they were running with their postal arrangements and, likewise, the consequences of not accepting the Electoral Commission’s advice on the same subject. We had a series of referendums in the period immediately after 1997, as part of the constitutional package, and it was noticeable that the rules for the referendum varied from case to case—as if the kind of rules that we were gong to have for referendums could be made up as we went along. The arrangements happened to be quite favourable to the Government; and because of that series of referendums, I was delighted when the Electoral Commission was set up. It seemed to be introducing continuity and order into a situation that had become somewhat disordered. The contribution of the Electoral Commission would be much more convincing, however, if the Government did not so readily cherry-pick what they liked and ignore what they do not like. The Government claimed proudly on one occasion that they accepted 70 per cent of the recommendations that the Electoral Commission had made, but the minority of 30 per cent that they did not accept is still a large minority to pass by—particularly if you notice that, in those recommendations that were followed and those which were not, there were certain indices of government advantage or disadvantage in the decisions taken. I have read the Electoral Commission’s new publication, published earlier this month, entitled Securing the Vote. I congratulate the Electoral Commission on its comprehensiveness and its timeousness. Obviously, postal voting is only one of the features that the commission includes. The Labour Party, which of course underpins the Government, about once every generation behaves in a way that taints democracy. I think back to the LCC elections of 1949, when the letter of the law was upheld   but the spirit offended. Then we had the late Lord Callaghan’s advice as Home Secretary to the parliamentary Labour Party that it should vote against the Boundary Commission recommendations that were being brought in under his administration. Now we have postal votes. I believe well of the Government and, after what has happened so far, expect them to act appropriately after the latest Electoral Commission report, just as the Late Lord Williams of Mostyn rewrote the Bill on electoral reform in Northern Ireland—literally—in this House. The Bill was completely changed, and he went back to the Northern Ireland Office and said that there had to be changes and that what the Opposition were saying in that instance was right. In the mean time, I hope that the Minister will deny categorically the rumours that came up in the election of a leaked Cabinet minute. The rumour was that, in the discussion on whether change should occur in postal voting, the decisive factor was the position of the Labour Party as a potential beneficiary. That leaked Cabinet minute cast an unkind light on a hearsay account during the general election. When a heckler shouted at the Deputy Prime Minister that he should have legislated again on postal votes before the election, the Deputy Prime Minister replied that they did not have time. If the leaked Cabinet minute is correct, they had plenty of time to legislate, if they had done so at the right time.