European Parliament Elections Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-09
Topic: Government Operations
Jonathan Peter Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great pleasure to rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on the introduction of this Bill. He rightly informs the House that the Conservative party has historically been in favour of open list elections to the European Parliament. Of course, we used to have individual first-past-the-post elections until 1999, but in the run-up to the introduction of proportional representation in the European Parliament elections in 1999 the House had to give its attention to what form of elections should be undertaken. One requirement we had to take into account was that for proportional representation itself Although this House has generally set its face against change in favour of proportional representation, let me clearly declare my hand: I have always been a strong supporter of proportional representation. Being a Member of Parliament who serves the Conservative cause in Wales, I know that there would have been significantly more such Conservative MPs in this House over the years had we had a proportional system rather than the first-past-the-post system. The Conservative party has generally had the support of about 25% of the Welsh electorate—on occasion, it has increased to about 33%—yet in two general elections we ended up with no Welsh Members, notwithstanding the fact that one fifth of the electorate voted for our party. That has its impact on the way in which people look at the provenance of a political party The Conservatives have suffered from that in Wales and, in fairness, the Labour party has suffered in vast swathes of England from exactly the same phenomenon. I therefore make no apology for the fact that when proportional representation was introduced, I was very much in favour of it. When I was subsequently selected as the lead candidate for Wales in the European elections in 1999, I was in the happy situation of saying that I had no embarrassment about topping the list in an election on a proportional basis, given all the support I had publicly given to that change What I found to be absolutely unacceptable, however, was that the choice by my party members to put me at the head of the list meant that every vote cast in the Conservative cause was a vote for me to be a Member of the European Parliament. I say that notwithstanding the fact that, perhaps slightly differently from my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), I have always been an enthusiastic supporter of British membership of the European Parliament. I do not claim for a moment, however, that all the party members in Wales shared my view. They selected me to head their list, but they have a range of views and undoubtedly some among the electorate would have found it more acceptable to cast a vote for a Conservative who shared their more cynical views about our European engagement. That was not permitted because of legislation passed immediately before the elections in 1999—in 1998, I believe At that time, the Conservative party argued strongly against that legislation, taking the battle up to the other place to hold it off, in order to ensure that we had an open list system. Clearly an open list system is thoroughly more democratic, so one has to wonder why we have a closed list system. I must tell hon. Members that the reason goes back to an advertisement published in The Guardian at the time of the debate on the scrapping of clause IV—its removal was led by the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The advertisement was a direct challenge to his authority and it was signed by 10 Labour MEPs. After the introduction of the closed list system, all 10 were purged from the European Parliament by the Labour party in subsequent selections, so we can begin to understand why we ended up with legislation that is anti-democratic: it was an opportunity to control what happened in Strasbourg and to control the choices voters would be permitted to make. Our party rightly opposed that, but, bearing in mind the immediacy of the election in 1999, there had to come a time when a system had to be agreed and eventually the Conservative party’s opposition was withdrawn so that we could have a system we could work with. It is a matter of great disappointment that in the intervening period no effort has been made to change the system My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is not trying to reinvent the wheel here, because eight other countries in Europe operate an open list system—I do not know how welcome that news will be to him. Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Finland and Sweden all have variants of open list systems. Those countries all allow their voters to make a selection from among individual candidates who may well all be from the same party, if they wish to support that party in the election Only five countries have a closed system. During my time in the European Parliament I found the French system to be the most pernicious, and it is therefore disappointing that in certain aspects we follow that example. At least we can say that we have a regional closed list system. France has a national closed list system, which means that the votes for the respective parties are counted across the republic and the seats allocated thereafter, but not to the people who stood in those elections—they are allocated to the parties. Hon. Members who have visited France during European elections may recall seeing photographs of the main party leaders, because their names appear at the head of the European list, even though there is no prospect whatsoever of their accepting a seat in the European Parliament. What happens thereafter is that that person’s name is expunged and the seat allocation is decided by the parties in the weeks following the election. For this House, we are used to seeing the television coverage of debates that take place during the election campaign and on polling night a declaration is made as to who has been elected as the Member of Parliament. In France’s European elections we do not know probably for two or three weeks after the election who will be serving in the European Parliament, because that decision has not been made by that stage by the leadership of the individual parties We can see that the closed list system concentrates power at the top of the political party. That is why it was introduced by Tony Blair, and it is why the Conservatives rightly opposed it back in 1998. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch began his remarks by saying that he wanted to make a constructive contribution to the formulation of the Conservative party’s next general election manifesto, which is why I very much hope the Minister will accept that all the arguments are in favour of the Bill and that it will make progress—if not perhaps in this Parliament, in the next one.