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Elections: Voting Systems

My Lords, in the course of one or two minutes, I clearly cannot do justice to a very wide-ranging debate. I agreed very much with the Minister on one point: this has been a fascinating discussion. I hope that the other place will in due course also discuss these issues. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed. I hope that I will be forgiven for especially thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, who broke from the otherwise rather conservative attitudes on the Labour Benches. At one point, I was wondering who would be more reactionary, but the Conservative Party’s Front Bench came back very well at the end. I am also extremely grateful to my noble friends Lord Goodhart, Lord Steel, Lord Roberts and Lord Rennard. I hope that we have been able to present a geographical spread of evidence to the House. I was very impressed by the extent to which the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, in his inimitable fashion, was able to give us yet another tutorial but I was depressed by the extent to which other people seemed to follow him. There are quite different academic interpretations of the so-called disproportionate power theory. It is significant that we had the issue of disproportionate power under first past the post; it is not only under proportional representation systems that minorities can exert more influence than they perhaps should have. I am a relic of the 1974 Parliament, which was elected under first past the post and in which there was no majority. Do not let us fool ourselves about the only circumstances in which you might have a problem of minorities being powerful—it can happen under first past the post. As Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Oxford pointed out, the Ulster Unionists were thought to have disproportionate power between 1992 and 1997, when they had a fulcrum role in the House of Commons. However, because the Liberal Democrats were supporting the then Government over Europe—irony of all ironies—they could survive. Our Parliament is clearly not as incapable of dealing with those problems as we should imagine. I want to make it absolutely clear that I and my colleagues believe that the best system for the House of Commons—and it may well also be for your Lordships’ House—is the single transferable vote in multimember constituencies, because that gives power back to the citizen. That is what I have found slightly depressing about this debate; all too often, people address these issues as if the only thing that matters is the view of the parties in the Westminster bubble. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said so clearly, people look at these issues quite differently outwith that bubble. We are all small parties now; that is the big change since the 1950s, as all parties have fewer members and less natural, automatic support. We must recognise that point of view. This issue will not go away. All parties and all politicians have to address the disenchantment of the electorate and the extent to which that is due to distortion from our system, which is not working. For those who do not believe that this will be on the agenda in the next few months, I warmly recommend reading No Overall Control?, published by the Hansard Society just a couple of days ago. It points out, for example, that the betting odds—and sometimes the bookmakers are more accurate than the opinion pollsters—are showing that it is much more likely that there will be no overall control in the next Parliament than an overall Labour majority, and much more likely again than an overall Conservative majority. I suggest, then, that we all have to address these issues, as we are going to have a different Parliament in future. This has been a very interesting and timely debate. I welcome the extent to which the Government are, clearly, going to take advantage of the useful work done by the report; I, too, give credit to its Civil Service authors for being reasonably dispassionate and balanced. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers. Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.