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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My noble friend might ask, ““What’s wrong?””, and there may well be people in the Labour Party all over the country repeating, ““Yes, what’s wrong?””. I will tell you what is wrong: we know it is wrong. We know if we were being reasonable, we could never have cut back the Conservative Party to 110 seats in 1997. It would have been a ludicrous result, producing, as the paper states, "““less than 19 per cent of seats in Britain compared with their vote share of 31.4 per cent””." So here we have it. This system, we are told, is about fair votes; it is about somehow matching the number of seats with the votes cast in a general election, turning out in 1997, in the Labour landslide victory, 19 per cent of seats in Britain compared with their vote share of 31.4 per cent. That is a huge difference, and it is wrong that we should be introducing a system that potentially can lead to results on that scale. "““Such an outcome would be the most severe under-representation of the Tories in British history. The biggest reduction in Conservative seats would occur in the south west””." It might well be there would be those who would argue, ““Well, they are only Conservative seats that are being lost””, but it works both ways because AV exaggerates results and swings. You can get huge swings against a party which could just as well be the Labour Party and we, too, could be reduced to a rump. The Conservatives have simply failed to understand the dangers inherent in the system they want to introduce. The paper goes on to point out: "““Under SV the Liberal Democrats would have won another 38 seats on top of their existing 46””." We now know why they want to introduce the system. It clearly distorts. Then what does it say? "““Under SV Labour would also have gained 17 more seats, buoyed up by extra transfers from supports of eliminated Liberal Democrats, further boosting their already disproportionate majority, giving them over 68 per cent of British seats in Parliament on the basis of 44 per cent of the vote””." This is this super system that we are introducing. This is the system we are told is fair votes. On the basis of the 1997 general election, the landslide victory for Labour, we would have won over 440 seats. What a ludicrous system. What a ludicrous proposition has been put before Parliament. I go back to the amendment and the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree. People have not done their homework, and something needs to be done about that. We need a referendum question that invites people to say no to first past the post. Then let us get the inquiries established because the homework has not been done. On the classic Queensland AV, the authors go on to say, "““We assessed AV’s impacts by examining whether the tiny differences in second preferences from the SV ballot would have changed any of the SV simulation outcomes in any constituency but we could not identify any such cases””." The proposition before the House is that we do something we should not be doing. The Tory Government should stop this, and stop it now. We are on Report. They should go away and come back at Third Reading having fully considered the implications of the Dunleavy work from 1997. I know that the Minister will get up and say, ““It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone through. It was approved by the House of Commons””, but they did not know what they were doing. They did not understand the implications of this system. We are dealing now with a major change in the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom. If we produce exaggerated results that would have given Labour 444 in 1997 and a massive majority much larger than we actually had, we are making a major error, and I appeal to the Government to think again before it is too late.