Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in this group and my noble friends Lord Foulkes and Lord Lipsey in their attempts to improve this legislation. I genuinely believe that and I will explain why. I am glad to adopt the arguments put by my noble friends Lord O’Neill and Lord Liddle, and indeed from the Cross Benches by the noble Lord, Lord Palmer. I am also grateful for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, because he cleared the decks for my contribution. I will not adopt any of those straw man arguments he set up and knocked down. I am speaking on the basis of my experience of campaigning in a number of elections in Scotland using a number of different systems, because that is what we have to do now in Scottish politics, and on the basis of my experience of campaigning in referenda. I predict that what will happen in Scotland is that holding the Scottish Parliament elections on the same day as the referendum will do further damage to the reputation of politics in Scotland and to the relationship between politicians and the electorate. I say so for this reason. There is an argument for holding elections for different purposes on the same day if there is an analogy between them. That was partly why I and others both in this House and the other place supported attempts in 2007 to do just that. We thought that, despite the complexity of the ballot papers, we would not confuse the people of Scotland about what we were seeking to do. Essentially, we were asking them to vote for political parties that had analogous arguments to put forward in the elections to both the Scottish Parliament and local government seats. There is a clear synergy between what is done by local government in Scotland and what the Scottish Parliament does, so it was easy to do. We embarked on that course. None of us had any doubt about the intellectual ability of the people we were asking to vote in that election, and we were confident in the infrastructure of the electoral system. All the way along the line we were assured that they could carry it off, just as they are assuring the coalition Government. I have to say, though, that there were some significant volte-faces, particularly in the case of the Electoral Commission, which I shall come back to in a moment. But we were assured that it could be done, and in turn we assured the people that it could be done. So we set out to hold local government elections and Scottish Parliament elections, and by the end of the process we had 147,000 spoiled ballot papers. I repeat: 147,000 spoiled ballot papers. That was not because the people of Scotland were inherently unable to understand what they were being asked to do, but because the infrastructure and the environment—the process—were incapable of delivering a way to guide them through it. The failures happened inside the process, in the polling stations and in how the ballot papers were handled thereafter. We failed. As a consequence of that failure, as a nation we agreed that we would not do it again. There is now a universal view across the parties that we should not try to do it again because we failed to do it properly last time. Another set of elections in which the electorate is disfranchised, allowing the media to run amok with stories of how the political classes have let the people down, could have a destructive and perhaps terminal effect on the relationship between politics and the people of Scotland. Not only did we decide not to do it again, we also set up an independent inquiry to try to identify what we had done. That inquiry came back saying, ““Don’t try to run two separate polls on the same day ever again””. We accepted that advice. All of us in all the parties have conditioned the people of Scotland to the view that it was a bad thing to do. Not only have we conditioned the people of Scotland to that view, we have also encouraged our media to think that to do it at all is of itself the wrong thing. And now what are we about to do? It would appear that we are about to transgress that collective apologia and reconditioning by trying to do it again. Not only that, we will be trying to do it again using two electoral processes that are not analogous with each other. In fact, as my noble friend described it, they contradict each other. We will be giving the people of Scotland mixed messages. We will be saying, ““For the purpose of the referendum, the four of us who represent these parties all agree with each other and are right, so you should support us. But for the purpose of the other thing being done that day, we entirely disagree with each. This man’s judgment is not to be trusted. This woman’s judgment is not to be trusted. She is not to be trusted with making important decisions in your life—except, of course, for the way in which we decide to elect the House of Commons””. The confusion does not lie in the electorate, because the electorate will respond to us in the way in which we deserve. The confusion lies in us, in seeking to do this when we still have clear in our memory the history of our ineptitude in doing it before. If we have not learned from that, I can tell you now that the media in Scotland and the people of Scotland will, throughout the whole course of this campaign, remind us every single day. The fact that we are trying to do this will dominate the early part of the elections in Scotland. That is my first point. The second point is that we are a comparatively small part of the United Kingdom. The debate that will dominate in the United Kingdom in the period up to the election—to the extent that it can, and I will come back to that in a moment—will be about the referendum. We will relegate the issues of Scottish politics in a determination of who governs Scotland, for a substantial part of the things that matter to people, to an also-ran category. Politicians, of course, are above doing that, and we will not do that, but the media will; and the UK media, the London-centric media, dominates our media. Consequently, try as our politicians will, with their meagre resources, to fight against this and get some reasonable debate going about the issues that matter to the people of Scotland and about who should make decisions about health and education and other related issues that have been devolved, they will not be able to do it. The great debates that will take place—and there will be televised debates about this that will be beamed into all of our houses—will be about the referendum. That is what those of us who argue about respect for the people of Scotland mean. We have no right, in my view, to do this to the people of Scotland, given our own experience of giving them a complicated choice before which we failed to manage properly. I will make one further point. We will be doing this in an environment where, the fortnight before the date of the election, there will be four public holidays. That is where my experience of campaigning comes in. I know, as does everyone else in this House who has knocked on doors, that you cannot touch these issues over a holiday weekend—and we are going to have two of them. My noble friend says ““and a royal wedding””. We will have two of these weekends now because of the royal wedding. Therefore, we are going to deny ourselves the opportunity, in campaigning terms, to find a space to get these issues up for the consideration of the electorate because of the date that has been chosen. We are going to do, in my view, significant and terminal damage to the relationship between the political parties and the people of Scotland, and we have an opportunity in these amendments not to do that. Never mind the arguments for the rest of the United Kingdom. Never mind the arguments about differential turnouts because we do not have concurrent elections in all parts of the United Kingdom. Never mind the fact that, when these issues were debated in the other place, the debate took four hours. There were, in those four hours, one and a half contributions in support of the Government’s position. In the Minister’s response, there was no answer to the comprehensive arguments that were put forward from academic sources, from political sources, from the Electoral Commission and from other sources as to why this was the wrong thing to do. I warn the Liberal Democrats that, if this happens, and if the consequences that I predict ensue, then other political parties, including the coalition partners, will be very quick to tell the people of Scotland where the blame lies for us.