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Electoral System

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, on obtaining this debate. The noble Lord referred to Israel’s parliament as an example of proportional representation. Israel has a pure party list system; pure proportionality with one list for the whole country. Describing that at the type of proportional representation that anyone in this country would want is rather like defending the right to roam on Saddleworth Moor by reference to Mr Ian Brady. That would not be a sensible argument or one that we could take seriously. It is always a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, which I always seem to manage to do in such debates. He referred to the day of judgment. If I ever get a day of judgment with a panel of angels judging me, and nearly two-thirds vote for me, one-third against and I am sent down to the other place despite that, I would not regard that as a fair voting system or a fair day of judgment. People should not refer to the recent general election as a day of judgment, given the figures to which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, referred. There is a groundswell of opinion that the present electoral system needs to be changed. There is also a strong body of opinion in this country that people do not   like some of the aspects of the proportional representation systems that they have been given—particularly closed party lists. There is something wrong in a system which forces people to vote for a political party whereby the individual candidates are determined by the party bosses, according to the order in which they appear on the list. That is the case, whether one is talking about a pure party list system, such as we used for the European elections, or party lists for top-ups, as are used in London, Scotland and Wales—or as were proposed by the Jenkins commission. We must look for a system which moves away from that and allows people to vote both for individuals and for parties. There is a system which allows people to do   that which provides broad proportionality, forces people to vote for individuals, while maintaining the constituency link—the single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies. We see how it works in Ireland and in Northern Ireland. It will be introduced for local government in Scotland and we may well see it introduced for the Scottish Parliament. If that happens, sooner or later, we will get it for Westminster, too, as the benefits of the system become clear. I am not suggesting that there are no disadvantages. Of course there are disadvantages to any system. But, regarding the constituency link to which the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, referred, in my own constituency of Pendle, the Member of Parliament, Mr Prentice—I shall not refer to him as my MP, because I cannot vote for or against him—was elected with 37 per cent of the vote. That means that 63 per cent—nearly two-thirds of the people in the constituency in which I live—voted against him. But they have him as their MP, whether they like it or not. A system which provides constituencies with more than one Member of Parliament, where people can choose which party they go to or between individuals within a party, does not diminish the constituency link—and might strengthen it. I know that some people in Pendle do not want to go to Mr Prentice and think that they can come to me instead. I say to them, ““No, I’m sorry. I am not your Member of Parliament, you must go to Mr Prentice, whether you like him or not, because he has the job of representing you in the House of Commons””. Many people do not like that and, as a result, refuse to see him. Of course, he has his fans and his friends. The problem with the present system is that they are lumbered with their MP, whether or not they like that MP. That is not good. When we discussed the all-postal pilots Bill over a year ago, I said that turnout in this country would probably begin to increase again. Even a few days before polling day in the recent general election, on the basis of talking to people in the street and on the doorsteps, I thought that turnout would increase by, perhaps, 5 or 6 per cent compared with the previous general election. I was wrong and those of us who thought that must ask ourselves why. I do not believe that it was fundamentally due to apathy or that people did not care about the issues. Talking to people on the doorsteps at this election was a more interesting experience than has been the case for some time. There is no doubt that people were interested in the issues. Whether they connected them with Parliament is a different matter. Many people who did not vote were thinking seriously about voting. The results of the survey referred to by my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton provide some of the reasons why people did not vote. They did not believe that their votes would make any difference. They took their votes seriously, but could not make up their minds how to vote. In the old days, many more people voted for tribal, family, class or historical reasons. Far fewer people now vote that way. Far more decide to vote in a particular way in particular elections. Many people at this election could not make up their minds about the best way to vote. They were not uninterested in the election, but they found that the choices put to them by the politicians were not satisfactory. At this election, there was the highest level of postal votes that there has ever been, apart from in all-postal pilots. That may be a good thing. It may have contributed to the miserable 2 per cent increase in turnout—which might have reduced without it—who knows? But, it also provided the largest opportunity for electoral fraud that we have seen in any British election since the reforms of the 19th century. There are organised frauds—particularly the Birmingham fraud, which, helped by Judge Humphries’ slightly racy comments, nevertheless highlighted the type of occurrence that happens in too many parts of the country. But I wish to concentrate on the low level fraud that is involved in postal voting. We know from many anecdotes that people either do not fill in their own ballot papers when they get postal votes, or they all sit around and vote together. They vote in the presence of other people, who know how they voted. The Electoral Commission has mentioned ““convenient”” and ““secure”” voting, but it does not mention ““secret”” voting as much. Last year, all-postal pilots provided a wonderful opportunity for research after those elections, which some of us in this House urged on the Electoral Commission. We wanted it to examine who voted in the previous year’s local elections—particularly where there were local elections in both years as well as European elections. It could have examined who voted in 2003 and in 2004 and two interesting groups of people—those who voted in the all-postal pilots who had not voted the previous year and those people who had voted the previous year but did not vote in the all-postal pilots. By carrying out detailed research of representative samples of such people, it would have been possible to find out how many were voting, and why, and the reasons for voting or not. There could have been representative tests of all people who had postal votes to find out how many people filled in their own ballot papers, the conditions under which they did that, how many people voted when other people were present and how many people showed their ballot papers to other people—I know that one person did that because he knocked on my door and said, ““Look, this is how I have voted. I want to show you that I have voted””. I told him to go away and that he should not have done that, but by that time it was too late. Secret voting should not be an option—which seems to be the current view of the Government and the Electoral Commission—it should be compulsory. Unless it is compulsory, you cannot guarantee against bribery, intimidation and the fixing of elections.