Scottish Parliament (Candidates) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. Perhaps I may say as a preamble that I speak as a committed devolutionist unlike some of those on the Conservative Benches but like my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart. I speak as a campaigner for the Scottish Parliament for over 40 years. I was very pleased to see it ultimately established. I campaigned in both referenda in favour of a Scottish Parliament. Of course we had a positive vote even in the first referendum although the Cunningham amendment thwarted the creation of the Scottish Parliament. I speak also as someone who believes that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive are doing a good job. In the Scottish Parliament there have recently even been some speeches that appear to bring the roof down. Nothing about the Bill is intended in any way to put any aspect of devolution in jeopardy. Although I do not like proportional representation and never have done—in this case I may agree with some Members on the Conservative Benches—and the way in which PR invariably results in a coalition government, the Bill is not designed and will not affect the balance of the parties within the Scottish Parliament. It will have no effect on the political balance whatever, however tempting that might be. It is a simple Bill with one simple purpose only—to prevent individuals standing for both the constituency section and the list section in elections to the Scottish Parliament. I hope that I am not giving too much away when I try to play what I think is the trump card in all the arguments that I put forward and play that first. I believe that the Bill should get the support of the Minister and of the Government because it is precisely what the Government are currently seeking to enact for Wales—no doubt Welsh Peers who are present will go along with it for that reason—in the Government of Wales Bill which has just completed its passage through the Commons and will soon be before your Lordships’ House. I am sure that the Minister will have read the very strong arguments in the debates in the other place in favour of what I propose today. I am sure that he, like all government Ministers, believes in consistency on this issue. I have already received criticisms from people who have read about the Bill. It has been suggested by some, including Fergus Ewing, SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament, in a radio discussion in which he and I took part that it is somehow odd, perhaps even wrong, that the Bill should be initiated in the unelected Chamber of your Lordships’ House. Quite apart from the fact that I, like a number of noble Lords present, have been an elected Member for a substantial period of time, that criticism is absurd. This House is an integral part of Parliament and each of us has every right to initiate any legislation. There is no point in pretending that we do not exist. The Scottish Parliament is a devolved parliament but ultimately, decisions in relation to elections to that Parliament are decided here in Westminster. Other critics of the Bill argue that the Arbuthnott committee does not support what I am proposing in the Bill. That is true. However, the Arbuthnott committee report has been subjected to sustained criticism throughout Scotland, particularly from Members of Parliament, on the ground that it is doubly flawed. First, the Arbuthnott report went well beyond its remit and pontificated on issues that it was not asked to address. It did not properly answer the questions that the Secretary of State wanted resolved. Secondly, the evidence that it received does not support its conclusions, or, perhaps more correctly, the conclusions are not supported by the evidence that it received. Purely the opinions of the members of the committee came through those recommendations, not the basis of the evidence that was submitted. I have received further critical comment from some who point out that it was a Labour Government, of which I was part, who enacted the current legislation. No doubt someone will say that today. That is also true—forgetting the fact that I supported it out of my usual loyalty—there is no reason why we should not anyway review any part of that legislation and change it if we think that it is manifestly wrong, and that is certainly the case with this particular part of it. The voting system for the Scottish Parliament arose from the Scottish Constitutional Convention and was part of a deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. We are seeing again and again in deals between Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the Liberal Democrats always tend to take rather than give. It is a one-way street and they seem to do remarkably well out of it. Although the new voting system for the Scottish Parliament devised by the constitutional convention was clearly disadvantageous to Labour, the Government were totally honourable and stuck by the deal. However, since then we have seen other parties manipulate the system to their advantage. I go back to October 1998 when the late Donald Dewar said of the two votes in the new system,”” The first ballot gets you a Member of Parliament. The second gets you a government””. That is the important difference. He went on to say:"““In fact, the second ballot is not a second choice. It is the basis of the corrective mechanism to bring the percentage of seats gained in the Parliament into line with the percentage of votes cast for a party””." So we in Scotland, as the Liberal Democrats constantly say and praise, have the most proportional system of election in the United Kingdom. That is not changed in my Bill. I might like to change it, but the Bill is not intended to do that. The problem that the Bill seeks to tackle is the anomaly whereby losers at the constituency level turn up as MSPs on the list. People who have been rejected by the electorate nevertheless get in on the list and then go on to purport to represent the constituents who have rejected them. To give one example that I know only too well of my old constituency of Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, in 1999 Cathy Jamieson beat Adam Ingram by over 8,800 votes, but Ingram was elected on the SNP list and he set up a local office and purported to represent Cathy’s constituents. Even worse, in 2003, Cathy Jamieson had over 7,000 votes more than my redoubtable friend Phil Gallie, and this time she had over 10,500 votes more than Adam Ingram. Yet they both turned up on the Tory and SNP lists respectively, both of them setting up local offices and both purporting to represent the constituents who had rejected them. I do not think that some of these statistics have been published before so that people have recognised them; this is a revelation. Out of 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, 73 are elected to represent constituencies and 56 are elected in the eight regions, with seven MSPs in each region. Out of the 56 list MSPs, 12 did not run for constituency seats, and I have no quarrel with them. But 44 are basically losers of constituency seat elections; that is 78 per cent. That means that more than one third of all the MSPs are people who the public rejected at a constituency level. Out of those 44, 18 are nationalists; 15 are Tories; five are Trotskyite SSP; three Labour—so we are going to be affected by what I am proposing; two are Liberal Democrats; and one is Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party. In fact, 15 out of the 18 Tory MSPs are losers; that is 83 per cent. Some 18 out of the 27 nationalist MSPs are losers, which is two-thirds. On average, Conservative candidates who lost at constituency level but got into Parliament by the back door gained only 23 per cent of the votes in constituencies, and in one case it was as low as 14 per cent. For SNP candidates, the average is similar at 23 per cent, but their least successful candidate only got 12 per cent of the constituency votes. The biggest constituency level losers who nevertheless got into Parliament are John Swinburne of the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party, who got just over 6 per cent in the constituency but got in by the back door; Frances Curran from the Trotskyite SSP—