Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lady Hayter for moving the amendment, because it raises as a serious issue—I hope that it is treated by the House accordingly—the cohesiveness of the United Kingdom. Speaking as a former Member of Parliament representing a Scottish constituency, I would not claim any great authority but I was representative the area that I came from and embody in this place a particular opinion about Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom, which we value a lot. To move to a semi-federal system where one nation imposed its will on another on a constitutional matter would raise issues and give manna from heaven to the nationalists and separatists who would divide up the United Kingdom. Naturally, there have been a lot of contributions about referenda and thresholds. The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, mentioned the 1975 referendum and how he voted one way and then changed his mind some years later. He voted yes in 1975, he tells us, and says that he has changed his mind since. I voted no in 1975 and I am still not yet totally convinced that I was wrong, so there is a twist in that as well. This is about safeguarding and about cohesiveness. I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, has left the Chamber because I think that we witnessed a vindictive, vicious attack by the noble Lord on his own Government Front Bench when he said that any parties that supported first past the post were dinosaurs. To my comrades on the Government Front Bench, the first past the post supporters say ““Welcome aboard””. The charge from the Liberal Benches that those of us who support first past the post are dinosaurs is becoming a bit boring. As for charges of filibustering, I will spend my statutory one minute on the Liberals and no more. We get these continual charges of filibustering—that all we are doing is following a master plan to delay the Bill and kill it. I am in two minds about changing the date of the referendum. I am in two or three minds, because one part of me thinks that if the referendum were to be held on 5 May, it would be thrashed. So there is some temptation there, but I keep coming up against what I believe is a constitutional outrage, which is to try to impose that referendum on the same day as elections in the devolved countries. I wish the Liberals would stop talking about filibustering; this is a party that wants PR. It dismissed AV in contemptuous tones before the election—now, all of a sudden, it is the holy grail. I wish that the Liberals would be politically honest and admit that they do not have much time for AV; they regard it as delivering a battering ram against the system of elections in this country and believe that it will be a magnificent stepping stone to the Valhalla of proportional representation. They are living in cloud-cuckoo-land and should stop wasting people’s time. I believe that the amendment is worth supporting because it emphasises that we should be careful. We have something precious here in the United Kingdom—I believe that strongly—and we should be very careful about tipping the dish out, in the memorable phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. We should handle this carefully so that we can keep all the constituent parts of this United Kingdom. Any major constitutional change, which everybody says this is, should be handled very carefully. Balance, cohesiveness and the safeguarding of this special thing we have, called the United Kingdom, should be at the forefront of people’s minds.