Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill (Money) (No. 3)

I fear, Sir Alan, that if I stray into that debate, I will be brought up short very quickly. The holding of a referendum is not in itself a particularly massive gain. I do not remember there being a referendum to bring in first past the post—it is the starting point simply because it is the status quo. There is a bias in favour of it simply because it is there. I should like to mention one thing about the Prime Minister. I heard what the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield said about the Prime Minister's previous views on electoral reform and I agree with the former's position. That is another reason why I suspect the proposal is a manoeuvre. The hon. and learned Gentleman referred to the diaries of Lord Ashdown. I appear in those diaries, especially in volume 2, with a degree of accuracy for which I would not entirely vouch. Nevertheless, it was true at that time that the Prime Minister was seen as a fundamental block to reform. But, as my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) pointed out in the debate on the money resolution, the question before us is not whether the proposal comes from a cynical or a bad source, it is whether the idea itself is worth supporting. It is true, however—I fully concede this—that AV has a large number of disadvantages. It is not very proportionate. It can be less proportionate, but proportionality is, for us, an important measure. It does not seem to be an important measure for the Conservatives when they support first past the post, and I am glad to welcome them to the camp of those who believe that proportionality is an important aspect of fairness in an electoral system. It is true that very few seats proportionally would have changed hands under AV at the last election, if we make certain assumptions about whether people would have voted for their first preferences in the same way and what their second preferences would have been. In the end, however, there is one advantage to AV, which is that it ends tactical voting. The hon. Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris) was of the view that Liberal Democrats are the main beneficiaries of tactical voting—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position that AV formalises tactical voting. What it does is end the need for tactical voting because people can vote in their real order of preference and do not have to guess about a situation in which they are voting for their fourth choice in order to keep out their fifth choice. That is an enormous advance for the legitimacy of the electoral system, because people are expressing their real political views in a way that they have not done for many decades.