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Scotland Bill

I think that we are going down a road that will not take the argument much further forward. When the constitutional convention drew up the plans for a Scottish Parliament, there was a strong case that the Parliament should be elected by a system of PR, and there is certainly no case for changing that, even if we look at it simply from the narrow point of view of Labour's party political advantage, which, as I have said, we should not do. It is also about how democracy can be improved and how the public relate to the political process, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Cathy Jamieson) has said. If we accept that there should be some system of PR for the Scottish Parliament—I know that there are Members on both sides of the House who do not accept that—the obvious question is which PR system should be put in place. There is a wide range of PR systems, as there is a wide range of electoral systems generally, and there are arguments for and against all of them. My hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun has pointed out some of the disadvantages, and I agree with her about the STV system that currently operates in local government. Some council wards in my constituency, for example, now have 28,000 voters, and so local councillors are in no sense local in the way that they had been, and I presume that that is the case in her constituency. If we had an STV system for Scottish Parliament elections, Edinburgh would have four MPs for the entire area, but no local MPs. There might be two Labour Members, one Tory and one SNP, according to present opinion polls, but that would certainly not allow any of them to have a local affiliation in the parts of Edinburgh where there is a strong local identity, such as my constituency of Edinburgh North and Leith. STV would certainly not be the right answer. I do not think that anyone would seriously go for the complete proportional list system in which seats are allocated to parties simply on the basis of the number of votes received nationwide. That would give too much power to the parties, so no one would support that system. Therefore, the additional Member system, which combines the constituency element, so that people know who their local MSP is, and the top-up level which balances out the disproportionate effects of the first-past-the-post system, is in my view the best compromise, which is why it should be maintained. There are certainly problems with how some list Members operate. I could refer to one Member in my region and the way in which she has presented herself in the run-up to Scottish Parliament elections, and other examples could undoubtedly be provided from across the country of MSPs from different parties acting that way. In my case, I have been fortunate, but by and large we have had no great problems of representation in working with list MSPs. There are times when we have political disagreements, but there are also times when we can work together in the interests of the area. Perhaps I have just been fortunate, but I do not think that there have been the dramatic difficulties that my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire has suggested. For all those reasons, I see no case for changing the additional Member system for the Scottish Parliament, and I remind Members—with reference to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell)—that the system for election to the Scottish Parliament was not dreamed up out of thin air by someone in the Labour party; it was a product of a long period of discussion and consultation involving not just Labour and the Lib Dems, but the Greens and other small parties, and not just political parties, but local government, the trade unions and a wide range of civic Scotland. Together, they wanted to come up with a system that they felt would pass the test of time. The additional Member system is not perfect, but in my view it has worked relatively well. Some anomalies need to be addressed, but that does not mean that the entire system should be thrown out. I believe the Scottish Parliament has been a success, and it has been a success under the current electoral system. Clearly, I would rather there had not been an SNP minority Government for the past four years in Scotland, but the way for my hon. Friends and my party to change that preposition is not to change the voting system to suit what we believe is our short-term political gain, but to get a lot more votes, which is what I believe will happen on 5 May.