Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, we have heard a number of powerful speeches tonight, not least from the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu. My noble friend Lady McDonagh has posed a real challenge for me. She is an old friend whom I greatly respect, but I am having great difficulty in accepting her amendment. As the debate has gone on, it has become clearer to me that there is no way that we should engage in this process that the Government have begun of dreaming up a number and then trying to put a case to justify it. It is not the job of parliamentarians or politicians of any ilk to get involved in the setting of boundaries. I share the views of my noble friend Lord O’Neill. I think that this legislation will come back and haunt the coalition. One of the most powerful things that you learn as a Member of Parliament is the respect that people have for their individual Member of Parliament and the deep opposition that they have to any attempt to undermine the relationship between that Member of Parliament and their constituency. I was amused when my noble friend Lady Billingham talked about Corby. I represented one of the steel towns in central Lanarkshire that provided a high proportion of the people who went to Corby. On a Friday night in my surgeries, I would have people coming off the bus from Corby to ask me to intercede with the council because they were coming up to retirement age and wanted to come back home. I did not particularly enjoy handling those cases, but I found that when I went to Australia as British high commissioner I had people coming down from Newcastle in New South Wales to make the same point. They had come from Corby and wanted to get back to the United Kingdom now that their working life was over, so I have a great deal of respect for what happens in Corby. The point that that makes is the strong pull that people’s origins exert on them and the sense of community that they feel. That point has been made on a number of occasions tonight. I strongly agree with what my noble friend Lady McDonagh said about the equalisation of constituencies. When the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, was talking about the size of his constituency, I was forced to recall that, on a Thursday night, I would fly home from here, often with the Member of Parliament for Argyll and Bute, the late Ray Michie. We would usually get the last plane, which got in at about 10.30 at night. I would be in my bed before she would have her car defrosted, after which she would have a couple of hours’ drive to get to her home in Oban. Her constituency of Argyll and Bute was so huge that she could visit bits of it only once a year. How can you pluck a number out of the air, regardless of how sophisticated the mathematics? I will have to show my husband Hansard tomorrow to prove that at 2 o’clock in the morning I was listening to a debate about prime numbers, because he will not believe me—he will be sending for the men in white coats to cart me away. How can you randomly choose a figure and try to make that fit the nature of the work in a constituency? An inner-city constituency is very different from a constituency such as that of the late Ray Michie. In that constituency, she had a substantial number of electors for whom English was not their first language; a number of elderly people would have no English. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, was the first Member of this House to take the oath in Gaelic. The scale and the nature of the involvement that she was required to have were very different from the scale and the nature of the involvement that I had to have. I used to think that I was hard done by when I had to travel for an hour across my constituency, but the scale of what she had to deal with was much greater. We will be talking about Argyll and Bute later, because some sweetheart deals have been done about some constituencies in this legislation, not least in relation to Orkney and Shetland. I can see why a sweetheart deal has been done there and it is not to do with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. There is an argument for special treatment for a constituency that is composed of a number of islands and is surrounded by water. There is a similar case for the Western Isles, but why not for constituencies such as Argyll and Bute or the Isle of Wight? Why is there this aberration of putting Cornwall and Devon together? That is one reason why my noble friend has put me in an awkward position. I believe that these issues have to be taken into account, but we are the wrong people to do it. I listened with great interest to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Soley and Lord Morgan, on the previous amendment. They made powerful arguments. The view is inescapable that politicians should not be involved in setting parliamentary boundaries. Somebody said earlier that we are not Zimbabwe; we are not a country that mangles its constitution to fit political need. However, to go down the route of this legislation would put us into that camp. I am undecided whether, if my noble friend presses her amendment to a vote, I can support her, although I think that she has made a powerful point. In normal circumstances, her amendment would be regarded as a probing amendment, but we have seen by the action of Members on the government Benches that the normal conventions of this House are now suspended. That means that it is difficult to go down the route of moving a probing amendment to get a detailed response. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, love him though I do, has never yet given us a straight answer on the criteria for the establishment of these constituencies other than plucking a number out of the air. I hope that my noble friend will forgive me if I feel that I cannot support her in the Lobbies tonight, but I think that she has done a very useful job in exposing this issue, as the noble Lords, Lord Snape and Lord Kennedy, are doing by also choosing numbers out of thin air, although the fact that Labour Members are choosing numbers out of thin air does not make it any more acceptable than coalition Members doing so.