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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, we have had a very good example of what the noble Baroness has just been talking about. It should not be a government Front-Bench Member who gets up to tell noble Lords when they have exceeded the time limit for speaking. Today, we have seen a classic case of where the Deputy Speaker should have had the power to stop people who indulge themselves by taking more than six minutes. I wish to speak on aspects of electoral reform, although it is too late for change to take place before the general election. I am somewhat astonished that those who have never expressed the slightest interest in having a fair voting system should seek to become the champions of fair voting just before an election when the polls are looking bad. It seems a little bit vulgar, to say the least. The credibility of the argument is diminished in the eyes of the public when it is put forward in that way. In some ways, the real problem is that the Conservative Party has never really woken up to the fact that, for the past 20 years at least, there has been a bias in the first past the post system against the Tory Party. It has never really realised that. The fact that the Conservatives need an 11-point lead in the popular vote to get a one-seat majority in the Commons must be a worry. It is obviously not a worry for the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, who has spotted the way to deal with it within the present system. In the early 1990s, the Tories recognised this difficulty and thought, "We’ll speed up the Boundary Commission timetable because there is a problem with population changes being taken account of under our rigid first past the post system". Their problem was—I know this to my certain knowledge—that the Labour Party took control of the Boundary Commission process in the early 1990s in order to create an extra-large number of marginal seats. I also know to my certain knowledge that Labour MPs were sent to public boundary inquiries to argue for less safe seats for themselves in order to create some more marginals that we could win. The result, of course, was 1997. None of that is right or fair for the voters. Taking an example almost at random, I can say that Tory voters in Sutton Coldfield will be taken for granted by the Tories, and Labour, even with its excellent candidate, will not put any extra resources into that seat. Likewise, Labour voters in Ladywood will be taken for granted by the Labour Party and the Tories will probably not appear. Having this great swathe of safe seats where the electorate is taken for granted means that the battles are all happening in the marginals, which is what the battle with the Boundary Commission was all about. That means that people’s votes are not of equal value, and in our modern constitution that has to be wrong. The solution would be to have the Tory Party fighting its case in every back street of every inner-city ward in this country, in the same way as it would in rural areas, because then the votes would have equal value. The same applies to the other political parties. That fairness can occur only in a system based on one of the many variants of proportional representation. The alternative vote system is not proportional representation but is as fixed and rigid as first past the post. It is a stopping-off point for every person I have ever known who has moved away from first past the post and towards PR. I did it myself for a few months in the late 1980s. Then, from 1988 to 1992—here I declare an interest—I became chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform. The alternative vote is a majoritarian system, with all the problems that that entails, and it still leaves us with safe seats and marginal seats. My noble friend Lord Plant set out the advantages of AV, although I was a bit surprised by that because I would rather have the German system, as that would solve our problems. I would prefer the system that we imposed on Germany after the war, rather than AV, because we would get the best of both worlds. AV, on the other hand, would leave millions of people in this country unrepresented. They would have voted for a party but would have no link whatever with representation. If AV is ever brought before Parliament for approval, I shall oppose it, and actively so, because in reality it is as fixed, rigid and unfair as first past the post. The Liberals need to be warned about that and warned not to buy a pig in a poke. They may be everyone’s second choice and they may think they will gain a few extra seats, but they will still leave millions unrepresented, so they should not buy it if it is offered.