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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, I want to use the short time available to argue in favour of supporting a referendum, or some kind of national debate, on a choice between first past the post and the alternative vote. I believe that that view is supported by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and many other members of the Cabinet. Taking my cue from my esteemed teacher and noble friend Lord Parekh, I say this not for theoretical reasons but because the alternative vote would be a way to answer two quite deep problems that we have in British politics at the moment. First, after the expenses scandal, we need to do as much as we can to repair the legitimacy of individual Members of the House of Commons, but in a way that does not destroy constituency accountability. That is one risk, at least, with the single transferable vote in multimember constituencies and it would certainly happen under a national rigid closed list system. The alternative vote would keep the constituency link while enhancing the individual legitimacy of successful candidates, because they would have to gain 51 per cent of the vote in their constituency. Secondly, the alternative vote would mean that candidates had to broaden the appeal of their electoral pitch in order to have a chance of collecting significant numbers of second-preference votes. That would be ideal. It would allow an individual candidate to preserve his or her political identity—as a member of the Labour Party, say. However, they would also have to reach outside that form of identity to engage with other people with different points of view in order to secure second-preference votes. That would break down some of the tribalism of British politics, which people who are not political nerds find completely maddening. That tribalism does not in any case map on to what, in non-electoral terms, we know about how people generally perceive political issues. The alternative vote would also help us to deal with two other problems that will be intractable for the next generation: climate change and international terrorism. They are challenges of a quite different sort from those that previous Governments have faced because they are general, highly complex and long term—they are likely to be, anyway—yet they are also less obvious, palpable and tangible. Terrorism is not like having an army facing you in northern France, or something like that. Climate change is about the balance of probabilities and the precautionary principles that we have to follow in the light of that for the long-term future. Yet facing terrorism and climate change will require us to change our behaviour now, and make sacrifices now, in favour of some rather intangible challenges in the future. In order to do that, it seems to me that we cannot pursue the policies to meet those challenges on a highly partisan basis. We need an electoral system that will allow and give an incentive to parties to reach out to other groups, so as to create greater strength and legitimacy for the policies that they are devising to tackle some of those very problems. We need to mobilise more consent and legitimacy around those policies if, as I have suggested, they are to be able to do the work that we need them to do. Of course, it is perfectly possible that an electoral system such as the alternative vote would lead to cross-party or coalition government. It is argued strongly by those who believe it that this means weak government. That is not true. There is a distinction to be drawn between effective and strong government. We have had two or three examples in the past 15 or 20 years of strong government. The poll tax was an exercise in strong government. The Iraq war was an exercise in strong government. However, these constituted some of the greatest misjudgments in modern British politics. Exercises in strong government of that sort we could do without. We need effective government, which needs a high level of consent behind it. Germany has had extremely effective governance. It was in the front line during the Cold War. It managed to deal with an unforeseen reunification process in an extremely capable way. You cannot just say that coalition Governments are always weak; that is ridiculous. Coalition Governments can be extremely effective. If they rest on an electoral system that gives parties an incentive to reach out beyond themselves while retaining their own strong identity, they could mobilise a great deal more consent behind the policies that we need to deal with some of the long-term and intractable difficulties that we face.