Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I rise to speak to this amendment not having spoken before in any of the debates about the number of Members of Parliament that there should be and what their role ought to be once they are elected. I speak now because I have listened to three Ministers over the past however many hours, each struggling to identify why they have come up with what they have in the Bill. In my view, none of them has been able to address the issue adequately. I was extremely bewildered when I first heard the Leader of the House. He was quite belligerent and aggressive, and actually quite offensive to some of my colleagues. I could not understand it. Then I heard the noble Lord, Lord McNally, sort of lose it a bit earlier, which I put down to lack of sleep and other things. I have also read in Hansard what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, said on previous occasions when I have not been in the Chamber. During all those debates, I worked out why they cannot tell us, and it is because they have come to this decision from very different perspectives. Because of that, they really cannot reveal to the Committee why and how they have done it. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, gave some of the game away when he said that he wanted fairer votes. We can argue about what fair votes are, and indeed we did so when considering the first part of the Bill. But I do not think that we will ever hear the Leader of the House say that the rationale is that he wants fairer votes so that people are able to feel that their votes are valued because of the changes that are taking place. That has absolutely not been a Conservative argument at all in any of these debates or, indeed, in the lead-up to their manifesto. Those of us who were in the other place when the current Prime Minister was making his arguments about reducing the number of people in the House of Commons know that he simply wanted to reduce costs and that that was a sufficient rationale to reduce the number of Members of Parliament. I find that a difficult argument, partly because of some of the arguments that my noble friend Lord Anderson has been making. He is right to say that, 40 or 50 years ago, people came to the other place knowing that they would not be able to manage on the inadequate salary and that therefore they would be doing another job. I come to this place with a strange history. For 23 years, I was a Member of the other place for the constituency of North West Durham. It so happens that, before me, my father was also the Member for North West Durham for 23 years. Uniquely, I took the seat that my father had held, but it was not a matter of inheritance. It is important to say that in this House. But it means that I have 46 years of personal experience of representation of a single constituency. I think that this experience helps explain why there are differences and trouble on the Front Bench. Before my father came here, he had been the head of a primary school, and he actually came to Westminster on a lower salary than he had been getting as a primary head teacher. There were no expenses and he lived in extremely grotty circumstances in a B&B in Victoria. My mum and I were never allowed to go there because he was too ashamed of it. Indeed, in those days he was one of a minority of Members of Parliament who returned home to their constituencies every weekend. Before that, it had been the norm for Members of Parliament not to return to their constituencies every weekend. I remember great stories about Barbara Castle going to her constituency once a month—doing meetings on the Friday, doing the party meeting on Friday night and then going to the market in Blackburn on Saturday morning before she got on the train to depart. She would do that once a month and it was seen as perfectly normal and absolutely what Members of Parliament did. One of the reasons why my father gave up being an MP was that he knew his methods of doing things were outdated and had to go and that they needed a new broom. I was lucky enough to be selected and then elected in that constituency. One of the reasons why I decided it was time for me to go is that it was becoming clear that you had to start using things like Facebook and Twitter. I know that some of my noble friends are happy doing that but I was not. That was not what I was comfortable with and I was not going to be able to provide that service for my constituents. But it was the way that things were going, and it is the sort of thing that constituents now expect. They expect the full attention of their Member of Parliament. I wonder if that is actually part of what is in the mind of the Prime Minister. I have listened with increasing dismay to the Prime Minister talking about the need for Members of Parliament to be cheaper. He has suggested that Members of Parliaments’ wages should come down and insisted that Ministers’ wages should do so. It is almost as if the only people who should be involved in public service are those who have private means. If you cannot obtain private means in any other way, you might find them by working in business or in other areas while you are a Member of Parliament. I want to be sure that no Minister thinks that that is the right way to proceed—or perhaps they do think that that is the right way to proceed. It may be that some of the Executive think that there should be a return to the time when Members of Parliament attended Parliament and saw their role in the legislature very differently from their responsibilities in the constituency. My dad rarely held surgeries but he went to local football matches every week. They knew him very well there, and they always knew that they could see him if Stanley, Crook or Tow Law were playing. He would be there, and of course he would also preach in chapel twice every Sunday. He would go round all the chapels in the constituency. They always knew that he would be somewhere at the weekend where they could find him. They say to me now what a wonderful and accessible Member of Parliament he was. But the job as it was then is very different from the job as it is seen and experienced now. He used to handwrite all his letters, as someone has mentioned, and the stamps on the letters he posted were paid for out of his own salary. I still go to houses where they show me the envelope and letter than Dad had written to them. I went to see one lady and she actually had to get me to translate a letter. He had obviously been in a great hurry and this letter was not written in his usual careful hand. The role of an MP has changed, but are we content that it is the right role now? There has been much written during and since the expenses scandal, with several leaders in newspapers saying that the MP’s role should be looked at again and there should be greater consideration of it. I think that it is time to do that. I think that it is time to do that and then to legislate. My concern and my real fear is that there is a hidden agenda because Ministers cannot be honest with us about why they want to reduce numbers. I believe the motivation of the Liberal Democrats is different. I intervened on a colleague earlier but I do not think that the Minister was here, so I will repeat what I was hinting at. If you support proportional representation you need to break the link of representation of a place and a community. While that link persists a form of voting for one person to be the representative has got to be there. Many Liberal Democrats want to move away from that, and I understand why they do. I do not want to move from the reality of having to represent a place because I think that it is a discipline which brings an accountability that simply does not exist in other countries. I believe that the role of the MP should be to represent Parliament back to the constituency as well as to represent the constituency to Parliament. Going back week in, week out even when you are a Minister is absolutely invaluable. When I would go home to Crook they had seen the telly, they had seen what people said, they had seen Prime Minister’s Questions and they wanted to chat about it. I had the most wonderful constituents. They were never aggressive or over-demanding and they did not think that I was there every week. Although I would go back every weekend, when they saw me they would think that I was there because something was wrong. None the less, people knew what was going on, they wanted to talk about it and they wanted representation. I believe that is a strength of the British system and I want to be sure that we are not on the slippery slope to something else. That might be the consequence of the proposals—and if the Liberal Democrats had got their way on the 500, it certainly would have been the consequence. We would have been moving that way. That is why I believe there are different motivations on the Front Bench opposite. That means that we cannot have the sort of clarity—dare I say honesty?—that we need in this debate.