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Electoral System

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, not only on initiating the debate but on his summary of the statistical evidence drawn from this election, making it unnecessary for those who follow him to re-describe the factual fallout from the recent election. If I were motivated purely by partisan considerations—or, indeed, even predominantly so motivated—I am bound to say that I would be not unattracted to supporting what I understand to be the Conservative position at this time on electoral reform; that is, to allow our present system ineluctably to self-destruct, so that the British public would regard it no longer even as a matter of debate, but as self-evidently the case, that the first-past-the-post system produces results in parliamentary elections which are neither representative of their views nor fair to the political parties. I say to the Conservatives that if they are prepared to put all their trust in a Boundary Commission sorting out their party problems, let them live with that illusion until it is disproved. I see no need to answer point by point the hypothetical presumption that they will be saved in such a way. On past evidence it seems overwhelmingly clear that what is happening to our population is not going to be taken into account in time, and no amount of gerrymandering can adjust boundaries to make our system fairer to parties. The thrust of the speech given by the noble Lord, Lord   Lipsey, was to focus on the system’s unfairness, and particularly its unfairness to parties. That is not a point that needs labouring; it is also unfair to individual electors—those who have the sense that whatever they do, their vote will make no difference. Many of them have had that experience all their voting lives; that is the ““wasted vote”” argument. But apart from the individuals who feel that the system is inevitably canted against them, there are also groups to whom the system is singularly unfair. The under-representation of ethnic minorities in this country, and of the female gender, owe a great deal to the distortions of our voting system, and   could be rectified, as has been seen in many other countries, by embracing a fairer voting system. Such a   system would allow open lists for the top-up arrangements, as was recommended by the committee led by the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, of which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, was a distinguished member. But I do not wish to direct most of my remarks to the issue of fairness, powerful though that case is. My principal concern about the voting system is with its impact on our democracy and our decision-making system, and particularly on its impact on Parliament in its legislative role and its role of holding the executive to account. When I was first involved in public life, the electoral system was far from perfect; it sometimes produced rather freakish results—as in 1951, a little before my time, when there was a Labour majority of votes but a Conservative government were elected. That has been repeated on other occasions. But there was, in the early   post-war period, a much greater measure of correspondence between the votes cast and the seats received than there is today. The distortions that have come about in more recent times, which have been particularly destructive of public respect for our democracy and for the quality of government, are those which have produced very large majorities for parties that have not enjoyed that kind of support. The question is, how have those very large majorities played out in practice? It has to be said that decisive and strong government has not produced the delivery even of the objectives of the government who possessed those strong majorities. We saw under Mrs   Thatcher’s government an attempt to grapple with what were perceived to be the unsatisfactory aspects of local taxation. It was not through lack of majorities or the weakness of the government that a system was chosen which had to be reversed very speedily. It seems to me that weakness in decision-making is not the problem that governments in this country have faced. There are many examples of similar failures to grasp opportunities on the part of the Labour Government. The main problem is the party politicisation, the narrowing of choice, to exclude alternative points of view at decision-making moments. In an area such as pensions, which is being considered at this time, and which was considered earlier, so far from being interested in the views of other political parties, the Government put on their blinkers, talk to themselves, descend from Ararat and deliver the Tablets. The result is that this majority piled up in Parliament is not questioned by the Government but is accepted. People sit in the committee chambers like the famous tricoteuses, dealing with their constituency correspondence, if they are on the Government side, and helplessly spitting in the wind if they are on the opposition side. Is it surprising that the public are switched off by British parliamentary democracy when it is seen to be working in this way in   the legislature? That is not to caricature what is happening; what is happening has changed from the past. It has certainly changed from the days when governments had modest majorities and when the views of an individual member of a parliamentary committee could result in a change of direction by the government who were forced to listen. In its holding the Government to account as an executive our system of election is similarly resulting in a complete failure to adapt on the part of our democracy. There were spectacular examples in the previous Parliament with regard to the war on Iraq where we saw decision-making taken over by the Prime Minister alone, marginalising Cabinet Ministers and certainly forcing observers and followers to fall into line. These issues can be directly traced back to the distortions of the electoral system that preclude the possibility of multi-faceted debates and multi-faceted arguments being brought to bear upon the decision-making process. Until Parliament’s position is restored in that respect I believe that public regard for our particular system of democracy will continue to decline. It is not just a matter of fairness to voters; it is a matter that affects the quality of government.