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House of Commons (Effectiveness)

I could not agree more. Of course, we are talking about the very people who do not often go online or read local newspapers. We should be attempting to engage with all our citizens, not just the informed minority. I remain sceptical of people who argue that parliamentary reform and making the House of Commons more effective can be achieved by some kind of magic bullet and that proportional representation will be the answer. I remain convinced—I was 13 years ago and I am now even more so—of the importance of the constituency link. It is our responsibility to try to drive up turnout. I have done some work for the Wright Committee, looking at Australian models. Compulsory voting will drive up turnout, but my goodness it changes the way that politics is done: in a compulsory voting system there is no longer a need to have to inspire, because people have to turn-out, so politics becomes even more negative and even more about trashing the other side and fear. The level of abuse in the Australian Parliament makes that point. I think I shall bottle it rather than mention a particular instance. [Interruption.] Actually, as it is my last speech I really do not care. Perhaps the worst example of abuse was from Mark Latham, the former Labour leader, who managed to get into Hansard that the Opposition Front Bench was""a conga line of suckholes"." How lovely! Our reputation may have fallen, but we still have some way to fall yet. Radical reform of this place needs radical leadership, which is why I backed Mr. Speaker for election to this place and why, in the previous election for Speaker, I backed the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young). I will always back the reform candidate. May I say a little about the nonsense that has come out—the plot that has been hatched—in the Procedure Committee? The suggestion that the current Speaker of the House of Commons was not subject to the secret ballot that he is calling for his deputies is fundamentally wrong. He is the only Speaker who has been elected by a secret ballot. At the start of the new Parliament, we have a procedure to trigger deselection. If Members of Parliament want to deselect the Speaker of the House of Commons, they should not hide behind a secret ballot; they should walk through the Lobby, and put their names on the record. Not so to do is a coward's charter. I believe that Parliament made the right choice. I really do. Our current Speaker has proved himself to be a reformer. We have already seen a brisker style of dealing with oral questions. More Members are called, which is fantastic, and more urgent questions have been granted. There is a tracking system for written questions, and more pressure on Ministers. The Speaker is considering restoring cross-cutting questions in Westminster Hall on subjects covered by two or more Departments. He is a reformer and, goodness me, we need a reformer in the Chair of this place. Have we ever been popular? I thank Peter Riddell of The Times, who is probably our most eminent political commentator, for drawing my attention to the following quote:""Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greatest freedom because, a politician myself, none can regard it as personal."" Those were the words of Abraham Lincoln in 1837. There has never been a golden age when politics and politicians were revealed—I intended to say revered, but they have certainly been revealed! The theory that we are all scoundrels has been a constant refrain. Of course that is unfair, but we do not always help ourselves, do we? The rush to American-style triangulation is dangerous. We could triangulate away and focus-group away, but what would happen to principle? We would achieve the lowest common political denominator. A collective, political class would chase after the lowest common political denominator. Sometimes, we must lead. We would not have delivered civil partnerships by referendum or votes on Sky. Sometimes we must stand up for what is right, and lead public opinion. What I am perhaps most proud of in my constituency is not when I was everyone's sweetheart and followed the herd, but when I stood up to my constituents and called for, supported and campaigned for a new mental hospital in the middle of my constituency in a public park, because the old Victorian practice of consigning the mentally ill to asylums with no bus routes and so on was inhuman. When we lead, the public sometimes respond, and some of the fiercest critics of that hospital eventually sat on the steering committee to make the project successful. We must never, ever allow the campaigning process to triumph over the principles of why we seek people's trust to allow us to govern in the first place. No valedictory address, even a semi-valedictory one, can be completely depersonalised, so please forgive me, Mr. Fraser, if I take a few moments to describe how I arrived in this place to represent my constituency and my home town of Reading. I was blessed with politically engaged parents who cared. I was blessed with a grandfather who was prepared to make sacrifices for his political principles. He went to prison as a conscientious objector. After experience in the voluntary sector and the trade union movement, I arrived in Reading in 1980 not to become a councillor or an MP, but to go fishing. I bought my first house on the banks of the River Kennet. I have always been suspicious of people who had their lives mapped out on the back of an envelope and who intended to make their first million in their 20s, marry well in their 30s, enter Parliament in their 40s, and become Prime Minister in their 50s. The former right hon. Member for Henley, much as I like, admire and respect him, may have been in that mould. The present hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) is much more modest.