My Lords, as my noble friend the Leader of the House has reminded us, the Companion states in specific terms that it is expected, in the circumstances that have arisen, that the Clerk’s advice will be followed. He was absolutely right in the warnings that he gave about the possible unintended consequences of the actions now being taken. That seems to be one powerful reason for rejecting this amendment. It is not a sensible way to change the conventions and practice of the House.
I want to concentrate on a second reason for opposing the amendment, although I will say this about the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Hart, about the information being incomplete and the register being inaccurate: of course, it is freely acknowledged that under the present arrangements the information is substantially out of date and often very substantially incomplete.
Last Wednesday in the Constitution Committee, I questioned the Deputy Prime Minister on the subject that we are now debating: the implementation of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act. I do not refer to this exchange with any great expectation that I can persuade my Liberal Democrat friends to abandon their stated intention to support the amendment but because I think that noble Lords in other parts of the House should be clear as to why they are being asked to act in the same way.
Both in our committee last Wednesday and in the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the other place on 13 December, the Deputy Prime Minister made it quite clear that his decision had absolutely nothing to do with merit and was entirely due to a political judgment that the implementation of this measure must be postponed to keep,
“the overall balance of the packages of the things that we included in the Coalition Agreement”.
He rejected my opinion that the balance argument did not hold up and that a desirable Bill should not be dropped simply because the public had given “a big thumbs down” to the measures or because he had not persuaded the House of Commons that the House of Lords Reform Bill was a good Bill. He equally firmly rejected what I described as my “old-fashioned” point of view that you should support or reject a measure because of its merits or lack of them.
The Deputy Prime Minister could not have been clearer about the merits of the Act. At Second Reading in the other place, he had identified,
“three problems with the current electoral map. Constituencies vary too much in size, they are based on information that is out of date, and there are too many of them”.
He provided specific examples of these grave discrepancies, saying:
“On the broken scales of our democracy, 10 voters in Glasgow North have the same weight as 17 voters in Manchester Central”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/12; col. 36.]
Later, referring to the number of Members of Parliament that we ought to have, he said, “600 is about right”.
In both committees, the Deputy Prime Minister said that he was strongly in favour of the Act and hoped that it would be implemented, but that he wanted its implementation delayed for a full electoral cycle. He wanted that to happen for one reason only: because Conservative Members of the Commons had by their votes blocked his House of Lords Reform Bill. He repeatedly asserted that they had done so despite being elected on a manifesto commitment to reform the House of Lords. My noble friend Lord Lang of Monkton pointed out that the Government voted in support of the House of Lords Reform Bill and tried to ensure Back-Bench support and that the manifesto commitment was to seek a consensus, which is totally different.
In my view, we are not dealing with two measures that can be put neatly on each side of the balance scales, but with a whole string of measures covered by the coalition agreement, some of which, to use the Deputy Prime Minister’s own words, the public had given “a big thumbs down” to.
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I think I was right when I said to him,
“you are saying that the next general election should not be fought on a fair basis. You have described why the present basis is not fair and yet you are arguing that we put it off into the next Parliament and that it is entirely reasonable that we should fight the next election on a basis that you have described, in eloquent terms, as being unfair and as producing more Members of Parliament than we need and unbalanced constituencies, some small and some large. That seems to me a most extraordinary position to attempt to argue”.
I repeat my final comment to him, which seems to sum up the issue before us this afternoon:
“You referred to the broken scales of democracy … What you are actually saying is, ‘We will not go ahead on the merits of this proposal; my party is insisting that the next election is to proceed on the basis of the broken scales of democracy’”.
This House should not allow that to happen.