Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I want to make a brief intervention, encouraged by the very positive response from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, to the previous debate. We are talking about very much the same subject here. I make this intervention on one issue only: the question of political party organisation. This is, perhaps, a direct plea to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, who I know is an expert on this. I think that he told us on one occasion that he became secretary of his local ward party at the age of seven. He has moved onwards and upwards ever since. When we are talking about trying to get boundaries as coterminous as possible, we are not just talking about community cohesion—although that is important, as my noble and learned friend said—about trying to reduce the public’s confusion over who their elected representatives are or about keeping to a minimum the number of local authorities or health boards that MPs have to deal with. It is also vital in relation to political party organisations. Political parties are absolutely essential to democracy. When I go around in seminars organised by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, I explain to new democracies in eastern Europe and north Africa—I have been to Macedonia and to Egypt to talk about this—the importance of having active political parties with good organisation. The experience in Scotland has been that, because in both Ayrshire and Edinburgh, the two areas that I know best from a constituency point of view, we have ended up having different boundaries for the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, was lucky in this, because Orkney and Shetland have been given special treatment on so many occasions—great difficulties have been caused in terms of party organisation. It really has confused people and made things more difficult. The kinds of things that are difficult are, for example, fundraising activities. As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer said, political parties are run by volunteers. When you get them in, they are not paid in most cases, apart from national organisers, but they are the ones organising the coffee mornings. At this time of year, we should perhaps think as well of the Burns suppers that are taking place to raise money. There are Labour Party Burns suppers around the whole of Scotland at the moment. All those kinds of activities are much more difficult if you have different party structures. If you have to have a ward structure or a local liaison group for another party organisation, as we have in Scotland—we have a CLP and a regional party structure—it makes things very difficult. People can spend hour after hour organising just meetings and minutes for meetings. They are trying to get things organised within their party structures rather than doing the fundraising. Parties should also be involved in political education. We should be having much more political education run by the parties, getting young people in and getting them to understand what democracy is about, as well as what our parties are doing. It is therefore vital that we should not strangle or snuff out this voluntary political activity by a complex overlapping of boundaries. That is why I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, will be as sympathetic to the proposal in this amendment as he was to the previous one.