---

Elections: Voting Systems

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness in that thoughtful and constructive speech. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Tyler on introducing this debate. I hope it does not become too obvious in the next few minutes that I have been dragooned into speaking very much at the last minute, unlike other noble Lords with their carefully researched speeches. But I am the only one on these Benches who has had the actual experience of voting in all four of the different systems and who has been elected on two of them. That is my claim for participating in this event. Many colleagues are constitutional and electoral system anoraks, which I have never claimed to be. During the 12 years that I was leader of the Liberal Party I was regularly chastised, with considerable justification, by the late Enid Lakeman for never making a speech on electoral reform and only making glancing references to it. I have to admit that that is true. I have only once in my life made a speech on electoral reform and that was in the safety of British Columbia during the referendum campaign, which was narrowly lost. It did not reach the 60 per cent threshold. One reason for hesitating was that when I was elected to the other place, I was the only Member in the House of Commons to represent three counties. I had a very large constituency and I always had doubts about the effect of multi-Member seats in creating even larger areas to be represented by the electorate. The other reason for my hesitation was that during the by-election which I won in 1965, we had 53 public meetings, three a night, again because of the very large area. That meant finding other people to hold the first two meetings while the candidate was getting to the third one. I distinctly remember that out of all the meetings that I held, most of which were extremely successful, the one disaster was in Melrose. Two of my local stalwarts were holding the meeting and I was detained by the enthusiasm of the two previous meetings so I was an hour late. When I got there I could tell there was something quite wrong in the atmosphere. The two stalwarts had each delivered a half-hour lecture on the virtues of the single transferable vote. They were assisted in this by one of these roller blackboards in the schoolroom covered with hieroglyphics of the d’Hondt formula. The audience were stupefied by the time I arrived and I was never quite able to recover them. I was reminded of that when I read this quite mind-numbing document. I cannot honestly see the great British public rushing to the bookshops to spend £33.45 to read the review of electoral systems, but I admire the enthusiasm of everybody else for this subject. I should like to pick up something the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, said when he talked about the constitutional convention in Scotland. It is quite true that the additional member system which we arrived at was a compromise between the two parties. But, with respect, I do not agree that the motivation for the compromise on the Labour side was out of deference to, or fear of, the Liberal Democrats. It was quite simply that we looked back to the failure of the referendum in the 1970s. This is an illustration of the fact that electoral systems can matter to the public. In 1970, one of the great fears that the electorate in Scotland had, which meant that the referendum did not carry, was that we were adding another tier of government. We had two tiers of local government at that point but by the 1990s it was reduced to one. Secondly, there was the anxiety that the first past the post system proposed in the 1970s would result in virtually permanent Labour majority rule in Scotland. That was a major factor, and when it was changed to offer the people of Scotland a proportional election system, there is no doubt in my mind that that was a significant factor in the enthusiasm with which the whole package was greeted in the referendum in 1997. It demonstrates that political systems can have an impact. Even if the public are not interested in the details which we are arguing here today, the principle of proportionality was, in my view, a major factor in the enthusiasm for the Scottish settlement. The system that was agreed as a compromise between the two parties was the additional member system. I know that confession is good for the soul but I must admit that I very much welcomed that, for the reasons I have explained. I had doubts about the single transferable vote. Whereas most of my party regarded this as a slightly unhappy compromise, I was delighted. I have now to admit that I think I was wrong. I do not believe that the additional member system has proved a success in Scotland. Both this report and the Arbuthnott commission referred to the tensions between list members and constituency members. As Presiding Officer in the Parliament, I became very aware of the fact that we had two classes of Member. That is why I say to my noble friend Lord Goodhart that if the day ever comes that we have a vote on an elected system for the House of Lords—which I doubt—I will be in the Lobby voting for a wholly elected system and not one which has two classes of Members. It is more than just the atmosphere within the Chamber I am talking about. At a constituency level, the present system is extremely destructive. Let me give the example of the constituency where I live. The Member elected to the Scottish Parliament is a former assistant of mine—as one would expect, a very talented, young man, well trained—and he is elected as a Liberal Democrat Member. At the previous election, two of his opponents—the Scottish Nationalist and the Conservative—failed to get elected, of course, but were elected on the list system. So they sit in the same Chamber and take great delight in criticising the Member who has been duly elected and interfere in his constituency. Why? Because they intend to stand again at the next election. Indeed, the Scottish Nationalist, has stood four or five times, with a distinct lack of success. Although she is written off by journalists in Scotland as being part of the batty tendency of the SNP, batty or not, she can be a real nuisance in the democratic system where there is an elected Member in the constituency and a regional list member meddling in constituency affairs with a view to increasing their vote at the next election. So it is not a happy system and I believe that the single transferable vote would have been a better choice for the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, although my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno will tell us that the Welsh Assembly has to some extent overcome this problem by stopping people standing for both the list and in the constituency, that is a temporary compromise. The system itself is defective. I am more and more convinced of that by the experience of the introduction of the single transferable vote for local elections. Again, I am now represented in my area by several councillors of different political persuasions. The system has worked well and has been well received, and the atmosphere and co-operation between the councillors are good. There is a strong contrast on the ground between that and the additional member system as practised in Scotland. This will astonish my colleagues, but my support has come around to the single transferable vote. Even if—God rest Enid Lakeman’s soul—I never again speak on the subject, I am in favour of it.