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Elections: Voting Systems

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for bringing this subject to our attention. I come at this question as one who thinks that we have messed around with our voting system too much already. I see nothing wrong with the well-tried and trusted system of going to a polling station, taking up that stubby pencil on a string and marking my cross. As the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, said, it makes voting tangible, physical and deeply meaningful. Voting should mean something. It should be special and it should be different. I am horrified when people are apathetic, and I am horrified when I hear suggestions that voting should be reduced to some kind of electronic game like picking out the name in celebrity ““Big Brother””. I find it difficult to accept that we should make contrived gestures to those who cannot be bothered to go and vote at most once a year. In the past such gestures have done little to raise participation or increase respect for the democratic process. They have often spread confusion. Many of us found it deeply depressing that the systems of voting have become so complex and contradictory that in London in 2004, one vote in every 14 was spoiled and lost—that amounted to hundreds of thousands of votes. How shameful. Will the Minister say how the Government plan to tackle that problem? I was profoundly disturbed to see that, having again ignored repeated warnings in your Lordships’ House, the Government went ahead with poorly devised and poorly administered systems of ““make it easy”” postal voting that brought to this country the spectre of large-scale electoral fraud. Whatever else may be said of this Government, their undermining of the old instinctive trust in the integrity of the ballot has been one of their bleakest legacies. It is shameful that it is now being seriously suggested that international observers should come to the United Kingdom to examine our elections. The creation of an Electoral Commission has been a mixed blessing. It bears the blame for some of the ill-considered events of recent years, and I wonder how satisfied Ministers really are with its performance. What we need now is simplification and a return to some of the clearly understood, harder to defraud methods we had in the past. So my answer to the question, ““Should we change the Westminster voting system?”” is simple and familiar: no. And my answer to, ““Do we want general election voting by text message and the internet?”” is the same: no. Since 1997, Her Majesty’s Government have piloted too many voting systems at European, regional, local and devolved level government. The results have not caused the ecstatic electoral wave that Her Majesty’s Government might have hoped for. Instead, the pilot schemes have highlighted the problems of different voting systems when applied to the British system, rather than any perceived benefits. As the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, explained much better than I could, Scotland encapsulates the problem. The hotch-potch of new voting systems there has something bizarre about it: the additional member system for MSPs, first past the post for MPs, a party list for MEPs and a single transferable vote for the council—a different system for each level of government. Let us not kid ourselves that legitimacy enters into all this. Why have Her Majesty’s Government created all this confusion? If the answer was to stop the SNP, then a nice mess they made of that, and they still got stuck with the Liberal Democrats as well. The purpose of this debate is to call attention to the Ministry of Justice review of voting systems that was published in January. My noble friend Lord Norton of Louth well explained the ways in which different PR systems operate. Like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, he helped us to understand the problems of each and drew our attention to the undue influence such systems bring to political parties that have not earned the votes that justify that influence. My noble friend rightly pointed out that the great advantage of first past the post is accountability to voters. First past the post realises three major objectives: direct accountability of representatives to voters, stable government and ease of use by all—most importantly, the voter. Like the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, I say stick with it. Indeed, let us bring it back in some places where it has been lost. What really threatens our voting system is not the system itself but, as my noble friend Lord Norton said, those who abuse it. Again, that requires a bit of courage from the Government to stamp it out. I quote the words of the former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Alistair Graham: "““We cannot continue to base our electoral process on trust alone when it appears that this trust is plainly abused and risks loss of public confidence in our democratic system””." Why have Her Majesty’s Government done so little to combat that threat? The Government objected to my party’s proposal to implement individual voter registration by national insurance number on the grounds that it would be too costly. But I wonder how many times the cost of testing and reviewing the many new voting systems, and of running farces such as the referendum in the north-east on a regional assembly that was wanted by no one except a single Minister, exceeded the cost of individual voter registration? We all want to see a better turnout, and I am confident that we will see plenty of action at the polling stations when the day comes to turn out this Government. What matters in raising turnout is not the internet but meaningful, accountable, truthful politics. You can have a thousand Electoral Commission reports but, if parties like Labour and the Liberal Democrats make solemn promises to give the people of this country a referendum on something that profoundly affects their future and then break that promise, it is no wonder that cynicism about politics grows. I say to the Minister: stand up and tell us that the Government and their Liberal Democrat fellow backsliders will give us a referendum. Then he will have plenty of political enthusiasm. He might lose his job, mind you, but he would win more respect than the Prime Minister and Mr Clegg. We all know the obsession that the Liberal Democrats have with PR. For me—I hope the Minister agrees with this—the letters PR stand not for ““proportional representation”” but for ““permanent representation””—that is, permanent representation in office for the least popular major party. I understand why the least popular party wants that but, bitter though opposition is, I, like the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Maxton, and my noble friend Lord Norton, vastly prefer a good old first past the post system that delivers stable government, as here or in the United States, to the kind of PR that leaves politicians horsetrading behind closed doors, as in Italy.