Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, that was a fantastically revealing debate. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, delivered an extremely good speech that was rational, reasonable and sensible. It basically said that, if we are going to have a debate about constitutional reform, let everyone have a reasonable choice. Unfortunately—this is no fault of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky—he has absolutely no understanding of what is going in relation to the proposal for constitutional reform that is being advanced. For the past 13, maybe 20, years, our approach to constitutional reform as a nation has been that this House has the role at least of producing as good a constitutional reform as we can. The work of the Cook-Maclennan report, which had lots of years behind it, was to produce the best constitutional reform. Extraordinarily, this constitutional reform, unlike any other constitutional reform I can remember, is being conducted without Parliament having a view on it. Individual parliamentarians like the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who delivered an excellent speech, have a view on constitutional reform, but neither Parliament, nor indeed the Government, has a view on this reform. They had a view on devolution in 1997, and Parliament had a view on the Common Market in 1975, but this is a process, not support for constitutional reform. The perfectly reasonable amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, therefore meets a car crash. The first part of the car crash is the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, who, with eyes popping with sincerity, tells us that he is strongly in favour of AV, having never supported AV before. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, then gets up and says that he has been talking about constitutional reform since he was 15—I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, when he says ““poor Lord Rennard””, whom we greatly admire in this House—and he says that he supports the alternative vote system. This lot on the Liberal Democrat Benches are therefore standing on their heads. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has the nerve to say that they are doing this to restore the people’s trust in our parliamentary representatives by adopting a system that the Liberal Democrats have opposed for so long and which, as has often been said, is described by Mr Nicholas Clegg as ““a miserable little compromise””. The public think that they are doing this to get more seats, not because they are sincere, so they are eroding public support. Sensibly, the party opposite has remained completely silent throughout this debate in relation to whether there should be a change to the electoral system. Members opposite looked patronisingly on the Liberal Democrats for being so easily gulled into behaving in a way that brings the whole system into contempt. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, in an embittered little speech, had the nerve to say, ““I have been privileged to listen to a seminar on electoral reform from the Labour Party””. Yes he has, and he is lucky to have done so because no one else in the whole country appears to be debating what the right system is. Surely the least the public could expect is Parliament debating what the best system is, because no other debate is going on. In answer to the noble Lord’s question about how to bring all the strands together, I have great sympathy for the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. There are problems with it. It is pretty eccentric to choose an electoral system on AV when you are asking the public to determine whether they like AV best. I understand why that is being done—it is a rational way of doing it—but I am afraid he is wasting his time because this constitutional reform is motivated not by what the best constitutional reform is but by a grubby deal that was done that had no reference to what was best for the public.