Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I think it is time for somebody on this side of the House to address this issue. I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, both as a Member of Parliament and as a Minister, and therefore listen with great interest to his speech. He was the notable beneficiary of informal AV, you might say—tactical voting—which achieved notable success on I think two occasions in his constituency. The noble Lord may be a staunch, consistent and articulate supporter of reform, but I am afraid that he has been led into evil ways by this amendment. He—by implication—and others specifically on the other side of the House have said they are in favour of the sort of reforms in both parts of the Bill, but not yet. This is classic St Augustine: make me virtuous, but not yet, and certainly not before the next general election. I have to warn the noble Lord that he is going to fall into evil company with the refuseniks who are actually opposed to any reform. That is perhaps his purpose, but I do not think it is: I cannot believe he is naive, not given his past record. Let me ask your Lordships to look at his amendment—nothing effectively should happen until the decision is made on the membership and powers of a reformed House of Lords. We know that the draft Bill will come before a joint committee for pre-legislative scrutiny within a matter of weeks now. I do not know precisely when it will be, but relatively soon. We can also anticipate—and rightly so, as the public and both Houses will be interested—that the process of pre-legislative scrutiny will probably take us right through to the Queen’s Speech in May 2012. I am willing to suggest to the noble Lord, and I think others will agree, that it is very unlikely that the conditions in his Bill will be reached before the end of 2013. So, nothing can start in terms of the second part of this Bill, which rules it out for the next general election—which I suspect is what some Members on his side of the House want. That is absurd. He has not had the advantages I had of listening to the noble Lords on all sides of your Lordships’ House over the past five years saying: of course we cannot start on reform of your Lordships’ House until the reform of the House of Commons is completed. This is the most absurd vicious circle—we cannot do anything about the Commons until the Lords are done; we cannot do anything about the Lords until the Commons are done; and round we go again. This is a simple and deliberate vicious circle of procrastination. It is also extraordinary that for hours we have listened to arguments on his side of the House that there is too much in this Bill, that it is putting together two important issues. Yet now the noble Lord wants to amalgamate the issues of the reform of this House and the reform of that House. If that is not putting together an impossible duopoly of major constitutional reform, I do not know what is. If the noble Lord really wants to make progress and to avoid the company of the undemocratic dinosaurs that seem to inhabit both his Benches and some others, I have to say, surely his amendment is ludicrous. I hope that he is going to withdraw it double quick.