Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to make my first speech of the day. I was just thinking, as my noble friend Lord Kennedy was speaking, about some of the work that I have seen Members of Parliament do. I served for nearly four years on the Intelligence and Security Committee. A number of other Members here have done that. We met every Tuesday morning, and I used to see MPs turning up there regularly, Tuesday after Tuesday, as well as going in on a Monday to read the papers—we could not take them away because of their security level. That is inevitably some of the unseen work of Members of Parliament, yet vital work supervising the activities of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. I am not supposed to say much about the work of the intelligence agencies and the Intelligence and Security Committee, but I can say that we got a list of things that were defined by the United Nations as unacceptable and degrading behaviour and torture. Just above waterboarding came sleep deprivation. I know why now. After a while, you get disoriented, you get confused, you start repeating yourself and you are not sure what day of the week it is. I can see why it was used as a torture and still is, allegedly. The last time I intervened, which was yesterday, I was thwarted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who everyone has been praising today, for reasons I cannot understand. He may have been nice today, but he was not so nice to me yesterday. Noble Lords may remember that, just as I got up to make a modest intervention, he got up to the Dispatch Box in a slightly atypically aggressive way to try to conclude the debate. I had to come in afterward, by which time I was flustered and not my usual self and did not make all the points that I wanted to make. That is why I am glad to be able to contribute to the debate on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, which I think is the best of the bunch, if I may say so. The one thing that I did say yesterday was in relation to flexibility for the Boundary Commission, particularly for England. I would like to elaborate on that. I mentioned that Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales were used to being given specific numbers, particularly minimum numbers, but in relation to England, if we say a rigid number, that will make it very difficult for the Boundary Commission to fulfil its task, particularly where it is constrained to plus or minus 5 per cent—we will come to that later. It will be very difficult for the commission to get it exactly right, to go around the country trying to fit in, in an artificial way, a specific number of constituencies of a specific size and, at the same time, corresponding with natural boundaries wherever possible, so that we do not end up with constituencies which have one part on one side of the Tyne, or whatever river, and another part on the other. We saw it in Glasgow. Noble friends from Scotland will recall how the Boundary Commission for Scotland was concerned about constituencies which straddled the Clyde. I hope that we will give consideration at some point, not to specifying the exact number, whether 650, 640 or whatever, but to giving some flexibility to the Boundary Commission. Notwithstanding all that, I think, with respect to the others, that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is the best of the bunch because maintaining the status quo will mean the least disruption for existing Members of Parliament. As I was saying earlier, these Members of Parliament have only recently been elected and I must say, having been in the other place for 26 years and out of it for only five, I think that some of those in the last intake are the best we have seen for generations. I am sure that noble Lords who have been in the other place will agree that it has been a super intake. Even the Conservative intake has been full of talented people; the Labour intake certainly has. I will leave the Liberal Democrats out of this.