Equality Bill

My Lords, like the most reverend Primate and the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, I enter a cautionary note before the amendments are incorporated into the Bill. I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, in his place; when we served in the other place, I served as Chief Whip of the old Liberal Party and the noble Lord was the Deputy Chief Whip. In that capacity I was chairman of the party’s candidates committee. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lester, I had anxieties about the failure to provide sufficient candidates of a variety to show the make-up of society as a whole, but unlike him I did not come to the conclusion that we therefore needed all-women shortlists, any more than I believe in all-men shortlists. I was able to change the rules at that time so that candidate lists of three would always include one person of the opposite sex, whatever that might be. I felt that that moved towards the idea of a more representative balance of candidates while avoiding some of the problems of quotas. Ultimately, merit should surely be high on the agenda, and we should be choosing people who will serve in both Houses of Parliament. I have enormous admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton—we served together in another place—and I know that it was as a result of his experience on the ground that he was such a tremendous voice for people from difficult backgrounds because he himself understood those backgrounds very well. I sense that we have created in Parliament a class of people who may represent the Westminster village but often do not represent life in the world outside. Maybe that is one of the reasons why organisations like the BNP have been attracting support. We must be careful that we do not so organise ourselves as to tick so many boxes that Parliament itself becomes unrepresentative of the nation. People should be chosen on the basis of merit. I argued in your Lordships’ House, in a short debate that I initiated a couple of weeks ago, in favour of the single transferable voting system. The reason why I did so was that when you draw up lists of candidates under STV, it is impossible for a political party to put forward a list that is entirely drawn from one particular background. Sometimes we do not go for the more fundamental solutions, but look for the cosmetic answers to issues. I hope that we will look more deeply at that question, rather than rely on something that in itself may distort the picture. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, people will be free not to give information if they do not wish to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, referred to that when he said that privacy is an important issue. If they do not give such information—someone may have a religious affiliation and may change later—it makes a mockery of the data that have been collected. The data would not then be accurate and would make all sorts of judgments on the basis of things that are not necessarily true. The most reverend Primate also spoke about the balance that has to be struck between privacy and openness. It is strange that things which one would imagine should be open in society often are kept secret and things to which people should have access often are concealed. Many times these concern grave issues of public policy. However, issues that are legitimately private are trawled across the front pages of national newspapers. Sometimes, rather than peering into people’s souls or under their bed-clothes, it would be better to look at the type of matters in which Parliament should be involved, which affect the lives of people every day. As I have suggested, religion is particularly difficult to assess. Not only do people sometimes change their religion by converting from one to another, there are so many religions and denominations within religions that it would be very difficult to measure. Do the Government need to make sure that 0.7 per cent of Labour candidates, for instance, are Jedi in line with the results of the 2001 census? What about local concentrations? In Brighton and Hove, the Jedi make up 2.7 per cent of the population according to the census, whereas the population of Easington has just 0.2 per cent. Is Brighton more likely therefore to get a Jedi MP? I make the point for obvious risible reasons. We are in grave danger sometimes when we go down this route of constantly looking to try to make sure that every group is represented in a particular way, but we end up with something that is not representative at all. At a time when there is great cynicism about Parliament and people feel very disillusioned about the political process, I hope that we will do nothing to reinforce that.