Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I was going to go on to refer to the noble Lord and I will do so in a minute but that is yet another nitpicking point. It is up to the Boundary Commission to decide whether to preserve Brecon and Radnor. I said that in my speech. I did not mislead the Committee on that point. The chances of the Boundary Commission deciding to preserve Brecon and Radnor and then saying, ““Perhaps we’ll have a little bit of that in or take a little bit of that away”” is so absurd a notion as to cast doubt on what could be going on in the mind of the person who did it. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, does indeed have a close relationship with the constituency of Brecon and Radnor. The people of Brecon and Radnor were very pleased to see him make the long journey to attend Lord Livsey’s funeral service and it was good to see him there. Frankly, I am surprised that he has not fallen in love with it and that he wants to see it dismembered by this Government. As I said, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, did not seek to address the specific questions that I raised but just made some general points, the main one of which was wholly spurious. It is believed—we have heard this from other Ministers as well—that this Bill creates votes of equal weight. It is possible to have a system in which all votes have equal weight. It is called PR and most of us are against it. However, in our system all votes do not have equal weight. The only votes that determine the result of a British general election are those cast in marginal seats, so the great majority of voters cannot hope to have any impact on the eventual result. That is why politicians of all parties pay particular court to the middle England voters, as they used to be called—sometimes it is Worcester man or Essex woman or whatever. Theirs are the only votes that count because they are in marginal constituencies. In using that argument, I fear that the Minister merely illustrates the vacuity of the Government’s general case, and it is only a general case that he has put up against the particular factors, which I believe to be of some force. We have learnt quite a bit from this debate—I hope that the Government’s supporters have learnt something from it—which is that the Bill needs to be looked at in detail and improved to reflect the realities of the electoral geography of our country, not theoretical concepts dreamed up by backroom boys who have no experience of the geographical realities of the great country in which we live. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 72 withdrawn Amendment 72A not moved. Amendment 73 Moved by