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Democracy: POWER Inquiry

My Lords, I hope they teach the noble Lord well. We were discussing the book by Tip O’Neill, the former US Speaker of the House, who said that ““all politics is local””, which often gets misunderstood. He was talking about a translation from what happens in the political process to people’s everyday experiences. There is loads of evidence on that, and all political parties suffer from it, both in central government and local, where people do not see the connection between what you do on the ground and what is being said. They will say ““My local school is very good, but the education system is hopeless””. It is about how we make that connection for people, so that they understand the value of politics. We are no doubt living in a more individualistic society, more atomised in many ways. That is not good for collective organisations, of which political parties are a classic example, but that does not mean it cannot be changed. That is important. On the idea that it is too important to leave to politicians, I go back to the right reverend Prelate. It is the same thing: too important to leave to the Bishops but, actually, we need them. It is important that we pay tribute at some point in the debate—I know some noble Lords have done so, but I want to do it formally—to our local councillors, MPs, Members of your Lordships’ House and our MEPs; people who get involved in politics and are willing to put their heads above the parapet. It is not an easy life, as we know, and we should pay tribute to them. There is a huge amount in what has been said, both within the report and, particularly, in your Lordships’ House, about the relationship between the citizen and local government. Sir Michael Lyons’s report, which will be published as a White Paper later this year, is looking at how we determine the role and functions of local government. Although not everyone may agree with our conclusions, the Government are very alive to make sure that we develop that relationship appropriately and recognise the value and importance of local government, which I certainly do. I was hoping that we would get on to voting systems because I love it when we can talk about d’Hondt and all that, but we did not. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that last year this House discussed the question of what we use voting systems for. To repeat briefly what I said then, we choose an Executive, and we choose a legislature that represents the full range of political views and the different localities. Some people would say that there is another legitimate concern, which is to keep out extremism. The core problem is that no single electoral system achieves everything we want. One of the big debates that we must continue to have is what we are trying to achieve when we have elections. We have different voting systems for different purposes, and we continually have to think about whether we achieve what we want for the system that we want to have in place. There are issues about turnout compared to turnout in other countries. There were high turnouts in Australia in the past three elections, partly, of course, because voting is compulsory; turnout is something like 94.7 per cent, so somebody got away with it. In Malta, which has a population of 300,000, turnout is 96.1 per cent. I am delighted to say that South Africa has a very high turnout. Some countries that are newer to democracy have lower turnouts. There is a raft of different reasons for there being lower turnouts. Those are worth exploring and no doubt we will have an opportunity to do that. On some of the specifics about the House of Lords, I was a little unsure about only people over 40 coming into the House of Lords because some people of 40 have fantastic experience, and some have none. Some people who are 25 have lots of experience, and some have none. I would rather have an experience bar, if I were going to have a bar, not an age bar. We have debated at great length the question of voting at 16. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, said that there are some people of 66 who he would not want to see voting. I disagree with him; I want everybody at 66 to vote. I want everybody from 18 upwards to vote. We have talked before about what is an appropriate age and what we expect people to think about when they vote. I think 18 is about right. That does not mean that I do not believe that younger people should be involved in democracy in all sorts of ways, in schools and through other opportunities. We should make clear that we expect everybody to participate and what it is that we are asking them to do. I am nervous about £3 for every vote because I, like many other people, read the interesting analysis done by Philip Cowley at the University of Nottingham about what would happen to the British National Party if we had that system in place. We would end up providing a huge amount of funding for it. One may say, ““That’s how life is””, but I am not convinced that that is the direction in which we want to go. There were 200,000 votes for that party, which means it could get about £500,000 of state funding each year. The Power report also considers scrapping the deposit requirement. We think that that is one of the constraints that prevent extreme parties, particularly the BNP, standing in every constituency because they would be bankrupt. I am not convinced that we would not, in a sense, encourage them to do more. It is not for me, but I thought I would mention it because it has been raised as an issue, and we would have think about it if it were to be put forward. As for the Whips, my noble friend is a living testament to the ability of parliamentarians to defy their lash.