Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I am pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours because he has put his finger on one of the critical issues that has made me feel very angry and frustrated throughout this process. We are dealing with a constitutional Bill that changes the nature of the House of Commons without all-party agreement and without any independent assessment of it, in a way that we would look askance at if it was happening in a country that was emerging from the communist world. We would not accept it. Why is that? It is because we know that normally you change the numbers of a Parliament either by all-party agreement or after some independent assessment. My noble friend has pointed out the central constitutional issue here and has drawn attention to the fact that we all know that we are debating this because of the political deal between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party. I understand that. Indeed, the rather weak argument can even be made that it was put to the electorate before the general election inasmuch as the Conservative Party campaigned on the basis of a reduced membership of the House of Commons. You could also argue, again weakly in my view, that the Liberal Democrats had put before the electorate a view that the electoral system ought to be changed, although not to the system that that has been put into this Bill. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has made the point that this is a very strange deal for the Liberal Democrats. It may be strange, but it has been my view for some time that it is a very clever deal struck by the Conservative Leader, David Cameron. What we have here is a deal in which the Conservative Party and the current Prime Minister get a majority in Parliament and the Liberal Democrat party gets a once-and-for-all opportunity to commit political suicide. It is in the process of doing that; you can see it happening before your eyes. Do we have to worry about that? From time to time people both within and outside this House ask whether this issue is mainly just a party political one. The problem is that while it is party political, it is so because the constitution is being changed in a way that disadvantages other parties—and not just the Labour Party, incidentally. It is that issue on which we need to focus and make the core of our debate. My noble friend, with his newly christened Jessica amendment—I rather like that title—makes the very fair point that if this deal has been done for political reasons, which we all accept it has and I acknowledge that that is a perfectly reasonable thing for two political parties to do, how on earth have we ended up in a situation in which one party gets the guaranteed reduction in seats in the House of Commons and the other party may or may not get a type of electoral reform that it does not really want anyway? It is a very strange deal. My noble friend is saying that if we are to go down this road, at least the other half of the deal ought to be delivered. Personally, I am much more relaxed about voting systems than many of my colleagues. I quite literally have not yet decided whether I would vote for first past the post or an alternative vote system. I am becoming much more educated in the arguments since listening to the debates over the past weeks, but I do not have a strong commitment to either side. It is all too easy to know the problems of the current system but then not to look at the problems that emerge from other systems. Our attention has been drawn to some of those. As my noble friend has so ably and forcefully pointed out, a political deal has been struck between two political parties to enable them to stay in government. Under it, the constitution of the United Kingdom and the structure of the House of Commons will be changed in a way that favours one political party. That is what is so deeply unhealthy about it. We will turn—I hope, on Monday; I do not suppose that we will get there tonight—to amendments that address this issue again. As one would expect from a previous Minister with his experience, the noble Lord, Lord Wills, made an excellent speech on his amendment. It was so detailed that it could have been plonked into any Bill. The amendment would strike at the very heart of the political deal between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. I would have no trouble supporting the amendment, although, frankly, it is really a matter between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party. However, if we are to be forced to change the constitution of the country on the basis of half the deal, it should at the very least be done on the basis of the other half of the deal being delivered. At the moment, there is no evidence of that, and the Liberal Democrats, for reasons that are totally beyond me, have made the politically fatal error of putting forward their half of the deal in a way that makes it highly unlikely that they will get it. One cannot guarantee that they will not get it, because the electorate might vote for it, but the referendum will be hard fought. You then have to ask what they are doing making such a deal and whether it really is just for the sake of getting a few seats in government.