My Lords, I intervene having heard the three previous speeches. First, to listen to a strong advocate of almost any electoral system except the first-past-the-post, single constituency arrangement, fight for this proposal was a surprise, particularly as the noble Lord will go on to support a misuse of the electoral system to ensure that we have an unfair electoral system for even longer. That is a peculiar case to put forward.
Then we heard the internationalist party explain how people who lived abroad might not understand what was happening in Britain. Sometimes I think that a number of people living abroad understand rather more clearly what is happening in Britain than some of those here who do not appear to follow the newspapers or the media very closely.
Then we heard the definition of how people voted. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that those of us who have been elected to the Houses of Parliament know that the reasons why people in this country vote and the logic on which they make their decisions, people who have never travelled abroad, certainly would not meet the conditions which he put forward as reasonable conditions for anyone who is voting.
Then there was the argument that because we might find that people who are at the moment, in their view, penalised because pensions for which they have paid out of taxation and national insurance are, because of their particular place of residence, refused, that they might vote in a different way than that which the Government might like, that evidently is a reason to deny them the vote. That is the argument of totalitarian regimes down history. That is why people did not want the extension of the franchise in Britain. People said,
“My goodness, if those who are at the moment misused are given the vote, they might object to that”. I find that an odd argument to come from any part of the House, but to hear it from the party opposite, which is about to say that some voters in this country are to have a bigger vote and more say for a longer time than would otherwise have been the case, seems to me to be an affront.
Although I have no particular view on this—I think that roughly speaking, what we have is perfectly reasonable—I hope that this House will take seriously the fact that we have now heard three speeches designed to say that people should not vote if by their voting they might do something which was inconvenient for noble Lords on either side and should therefore be refused the vote. That is precisely the debate that noble Lords are about to have, which is to say that because a particular reform proposed in this House today would give people a fairer vote but thereby might give a different result, we should not change the voting system to accommodate them. That is an attitude to democracy about which we should be ashamed. Our decision should be on what is fair, what is equal and what is reasonable. I happen to think that the present rules about 15 years more or less meet that, but the three speeches that we have heard show that some people are prepared to use the system to get a particular result rather than seeking to have a system in which the result is the decision of the public.