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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, I really am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for introducing this debate. It is becoming a part of our unwritten constitution that every few months he introduces a debate such as this. We all have an enjoyable discussion, and today has been no exception. We do it with the imminent election in mind and in the certain knowledge that virtually none of the issues that we have been discussing today will be mentioned on any of the doorsteps that we will be standing on in the next few months. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the next time the noble Lord introduces a debate such as this, in two or three months’ time, it will interesting if he and other noble Lords can report on the number of occasions when any of these issues were raised with them on real doorsteps in real parts of the country. However, last time, the noble Lord did me the honour—I regard it as a note of affection—of calling me a dinosaur for my views on some of these subjects. As other noble Lords have reminded us, dinosaurs are remarkable creatures from a bygone age. To me, that pretty well describes the Liberal Party on the 100th anniversary of the last time it managed to persuade the people of this country to elect a Liberal Government. I gently suggest that one of the reasons may be that it concentrates rather too much on these issues and rather less on more practical issues. However, I take the accusation seriously. I do not want to be a dinosaur any more, so I will do something different today. Perhaps this will be an innovation; instead of addressing all my questions to my noble friend on the Front Bench, which is what we normally do, and bearing in mind the imminent election, I will address them first to those on the Conservative and Liberal Front Benches, and then to my noble friend. Let us deal with those on the Conservative Front Bench first. I do this very much against the background of knowing that there is a problem with trust between Parliament and the people and that things must be done to repair it, and being alarmed by something that the Conservatives are proposing, and which I am certain the Liberals will propose, that will further undermine trust between Parliament and the public. What alarms me about the Conservatives is their suggestion that we can connect better with the public by reducing the number of Members of Parliament. That is a bewildering argument, and I speak with a little authority, because if you reduce the number of MPs you obviously increase the size of constituencies, both geographically and in the number of constituents. When I was in Parliament, I represented the fifth or sixth largest constituency, and believe me, representing 92,000 or 93,000 people is very hard work. With the best will in the world, you cannot do as good a job as you can with a smaller electorate. I want to hear from them how that will improve our democracy. I am particularly interested in their suggestion that somehow it is justified because it will reduce the cost of democracy. I simply cannot understand how a party can propose on the one hand reducing the number of MPs in the Commons by about 100, and on the other proposing 300 or so elected Members of the House of Lords to reduce the cost of democracy. That is one thing that it will not do. Directly elected Members of the House of Lords will certainly need the same support as properly elected Members of the House of Commons. The Conservatives will also have to address costs such as those of the boundary commission, which costs about £12 million and takes about six years to deliberate, so this needs a bit of work. I turn now to the Lib Dems, although I will also have to address my remarks to one or two colleagues on my side of the House. What they all had in common, including my very good friend the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was that they all talked about proportional representation. However, not one—I listened carefully—mentioned our experience of it in this country in the past 10 years. I find that quite astonishing. They make all sorts of assertions about the joys of PR without pointing out the faults that have occurred in the systems that have been introduced. My noble friend Lord Rooker played with the idea of all these people waiting to vote in all these areas of the country where they have so far been disfranchised. That simply has not happened. It did not happen in the European elections, for which the turnout was even lower than under the first-past-the-post system, and—I have said this before but will say it again because it needs a wider audience—it clearly has not happened mathematically. Where the two systems—the first-past-the-post system and the list system—exist side by side, as they do in Scotland, wonder of wonders; more people vote in the first-past-the-post system than in the list system. That is exactly what happened in Scotland in 2000. How on earth can you say that a list system liberates people and they all turn out and vote, when the clear mathematical evidence is that people prefer to participate in the first-past-the-post system? That is demonstrable. I wish that some attention could be paid to this. The Labour Government should be thanked—they should not thank me because I did not want it—for the changes that have been made in relation to PR, but please let us know what all the benefits have been and let us see the letters of thanks from the electors and the other bits of evidence, which no doubt they simply omitted to pass on to us. My final request is to my noble friend on the Front Bench. I know he will be able to say yes, so I put it to him. Please will he assure us that the Ministry of Justice will approach constitutional reform on the basis that one or two speakers have already mentioned: identifying a problem and finding a solution? That is the way to do it. Let it not look for the joyous solution to all problems, which is the implicit promise of people who look at this in a grandiose way; let it address the problems and find the solutions. That is what my noble friend always does, so I thought that I would end with an easy request.