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Electoral System

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for obtaining, with the help of the ballot, a debate on this highly important and topical subject, and for introducing it so powerfully. I am in general agreement with the noble Lord, Lord   Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, and I certainly agree with the speeches of my noble friends, except that, as I shall explain later, I am not quite as enthusiastic as my noble friend Lord Greaves is about STV as a system for Westminster. I should add that I am quite happy that the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, for whom I have the greatest respect, will be answering the debate for the government today. We have a plethora of electoral systems in the United Kingdom. In addition to first past the post, we have STV for elections in Northern Ireland, the European Parliament and the Assembly. We have a closed party list system in regional constituencies for European elections in Great Britain. We have top-up Members for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the GLA and we have the supplementary vote for the election of the London Mayor. Those alternatives to FPTP have now been in use for several years. None of them has caused significant difficulties for voters or deterred voters from voting. Of course, none of those systems is perfect. That is certainly true of FPTP. All have flaws, as do other systems that are not used in this country, such as the alternative vote. We must ask how serious are the flaws of FPTP, and whether there is a better alternative. I do not want to spend much time on the respective merits of the different alternatives to FPTP. We have to start from where we are, although I accept that there is clearly strong public support for the principle that each constituency should have its own individual Member in the House of Commons. That suggests that if FPTP is to be replaced for the House of Commons, the most acceptable alternative may be the top-up system used for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, or the broadly similar system, described as AV plus that was recommended by the Jenkins’s Committee in 1998. When we get elections to your Lordships’ House, we shall of course start from a clean sheet, and there will be strong arguments for STV or an open-list system. The chief advantage of FPTP in the eyes of its supporters, such as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is that it produces single party governments. Why is that an advantage? Weak governments are bad governments, but FPTP can and does produce weak governments, as it did for the Labour governments from 1974 to 1979 and the 1992-97 Conservative government. Equally, coalition governments in other countries have shown that they can be strong. Since the restoration of democracy to West Germany in 1949, it and its successor, Germany, have had coalition governments for all but four years. Until the mishandling of reunification in 1991, it had one of the most stable and effective governments in the world. Even worse than a weak government is a strong government who abuse their powers, as the Thatcher government did when they introduced the poll tax, as my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart said. FPTP makes that result much more likely. We now have a unique situation. A party has been elected to government with a comfortable working majority that has just over 35 per cent of the vote. The two main opposition parties between them got over 55   per cent of the vote. What kind of mandate is that? Are the Government saying that they have a mandate to force on the people of this country measures that have been rejected by both opposition parties? If they have a mandate, something is utterly wrong with our electoral system. I am not saying that you cannot have a single party government unless that party wins more than 50 per cent of the vote. No government since 1935 have achieved that result. But once you get below about 40 per cent of the vote by the winning party, doubts about the legitimacy of single-party government become serious. Until the recent election that had happened only twice since 1945. In the two elections in 1974, Labour took office first with 37 per cent of the vote—in fact, on a smaller share than the Conservatives had in that election—and in the second election with 39 per cent of the vote. Those elections introduced one of the worst governments since the Second World War, alleviated only by the Lib-Lab pact, which created a quasi-coalition from 1976 to 1978. Now we have a government elected with an even smaller share of the vote than the Labour Party had in 1974. What we need, and what we have not got, is a House of Commons that bears some real similarity to the wishes of the voters. FPTP utterly fails to do that. By contrast, AV plus, the system recommended by the Jenkins commission, would have achieved that result. It would have given the Labour Party a working, but smaller, majority in 1997 and 2001. The sort of landslide that we had in those years is undesirable in the interests of this country. We remember what the noble Lord, Lord   Pym, said—I think concerning the 1983 election—about landslides. He was absolutely right, although the noble Baroness, his Prime Minister, did not agree with him. AV plus would not have given the Conservatives a majority in 1992 or Labour a majority in this year’s election. AV plus, or other systems of PR, would have produced results that on all four occasions—1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005—would have been better for this country than the actual results. FPTP is simply unable to cope with the three-party politics that we have had in this country since at least 1974, still less the four-party politics in Scotland and Wales. In 1974 and 1992, it created single-party governments. In 1983, 1987, 1997 and 2001, it gave huge majorities to parties whose share of the vote was in the low 40s. This year, it has given a working majority to a party with 35 per cent of the vote, and far less than that of the total electorate. None of those results can be justified. They are blots on our democracy. We have available alternative systems that would have prevented them all. It is time that we got on with reform. Our voters deserve no less.