---

Electoral System

My Lords, I hope that there are few noble Lords sitting on the Liberal Democrat Benches today who will endorse the strictures heaped on my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor for being absent during the debate. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat MP for Kingston and Surbiton, charged in Tuesday’s Independent that that was simply because my noble and learned friend was avoiding scrutiny. He was joined by a new Liberal Democrat MP, Chris Huhne, who insisted that the matter was so serious and important that it should be dealt with at the highest level—a side-swipe at my noble and learned friend. I intend to try to find Mr   Huhne when we return after the break and quietly tell him—he will discover this in due course—that in a similar debate in the Commons he would get an extremely junior Minister winding up a Back-Bench debate and certainly no one as illustrious as my noble and learned friend. I must confess to some slight amusement about why my noble friend Lord Lipsey and noble Lords on the Liberal Benches believe that this unelected House is the right place to start looking at electoral reform. And I am not sure that my noble friend’s Martian friend would have made for this Chamber when on that quest. I believe that he would have gone down to the other end, where people get in only because they are elected. The Independent claims to have inspired this debate and has launched what it grandly and rather pompously calls its ““Campaign for Democracy””. But, lo and behold, although Simon Kelner seems short of real news and devotes the whole of today’s front page to this great campaign for democracy, tucked away on the inside, under the heading ““24,417 and counting””, we can see the massed ranks of the troops assembled carrying the banner of the campaign. I have to tell your Lordships that 24,000 people is just about half the number of a crowd which would turn up at Birmingham’s Aston Villa football ground for a home match—and I do not believe that that is evidence of a great groundswell of interest. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, that it has nothing to do with process. I agree with much of his analysis. Of course we want more people to use their precious votes at local and parliamentary elections as well as for the European Parliament and so on. However, there is no magic answer to increased turnout in any system of PR, AV and so forth. I agree with my noble friend that the system that we unhappily have for the European Parliament elections hands power to political party officials rather than to party members and electors. Perhaps I may try this on your Lordships. Can any noble Lord name his Member of the European Parliament?