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Christmas Adjournment

I do not think I can speak quite as fast as the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon). Many subjects have been mentioned in the debate so far. It is an appropriate time of year to talk about the middle east, but I would prefer us to be peacemakers in the middle east, rather than taking one side or the other. Christmas is a time of good will and an opportunity to thank people, so I take the opportunity of this speech to thank both the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats for introducing the highly successful proportional representation system in Scotland. I am doubly appreciative because we have it both in the Parliament and in the councils, especially in Glasgow. I have to accept that I have been elected under the first-past-the-post system on four occasions out of five, so I have benefited from that system, but I remain convinced that the PR system is much better. We have to thank Tony Blair and Donald Dewar for introducing PR for the list system for the Scottish Parliament in 1999, which has led to fairer government and greater consensus. The first two terms, of course, were coalition government. PR also opened up the opportunity for minority government. Some had reservations about that in 1999 and 2003 and no one dared try it, but now it has been tried and it works. The First Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), is to be congratulated on the tremendous success he has made of that. The second form of proportional representation for which I am grateful is PR by single transferable vote, from which the 32 Scottish local authorities benefit. That was introduced in 2007, thanks largely to the Lib Dems, who insisted on it in 2003. In Glasgow's case that has been a huge improvement. First past the post had latterly been a total failure in Glasgow. In 2003 Labour took 71 of the 79 seats, which is 90 per cent. of the seats on only 47 per cent. of the vote. By contrast, in 2007 that was reduced to 58 per cent. of the seats, even though Labour was still in control. But the system means that representation is much closer to the actual vote and the will of the people. The advantage of STV is that as well as being more proportional, it maintains the strong councillor-ward link, or potentially the strong MP-constituency link. There are clearly different forms of proportional representation—the list in the Scottish Parliament, and STV in Glasgow city council and elsewhere. STV has the added bonus that the public choose both the party and the individual. It would be good at this time to acknowledge, as I hope all Members of the House would do, the hard work that many councillors do throughout the country. As the Member who has most recently been a councillor, I see the huge amount of work that councillors put in. They often get little support and are not well paid for that work. Another advantage of proportional representation is that the public prefer us to consider issues on a case-by-case basis. They get fed up with issues being pushed through by one party no matter what. PR encourages more of a shared agenda between parties. It means that we are more likely to get a result that is in tune with public opinion. Minority government takes that even further by making it essential that each individual case is looked at. It depends on how mature the Opposition tend to be. In Scotland we have seen co-operation—with the Conservative party, I must admit, which is perhaps not our expectation—on getting more police on the street. That has been a practical success of PR and STV. We have smaller class sizes—