Queen’s Speech — House of Lords, 2015-06-01
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Rennard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, one of the big problems was that noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, clearly did not understand that AV was not a proportional representation system at all; it was far from proportional representation. If politicians in other parties had had the courage to let voters choose between proportional representation and first past the post, there might well have been a very different outcome. Certainly, it was an option in the Labour Party’s 1997 manifesto, when Tony Blair secured a majority of 179 on the basis of that manifesto having a referendum on proportional representation. That should have happened This Government should now realise that achieving a majority in the Commons based on the support of less than 37% of the voters does not give them the right to rule as though the views of the 63% who did not support them are unimportant. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, in an excellent maiden speech, about what he called fairness for England, but we heard nothing about fairness for voters. We also heard much from the Conservatives in the last Parliament about what they called "fair constituency boundaries". The consequence of the successful amendment to the then Electoral Registration and Administration Bill which I tabled in the autumn of 2012, together with the noble Lords, Lord Hart of Chilton, Lord Wigley and Lord Kerr, was to prevent new boundaries that would have given an even greater unfair advantage to the Conservative Party coming into force in the recent election However, I doubt that many of the newly elected MPs realise that the legislation passed in 2011 means that they may never be able to fight those same constituencies again. Unless there is another Bill to prevent it, the size of the Commons will be reduced from 650 to 600 in time for the next election. The coming boundary review will be very disruptive because of the very narrow margin of only 5% allowed for any variation in the number of electors from the average set as a target. Some MPs may also be shocked to learn that these reviews will also take place every five years under the existing legislation, so that MPs might never fight the same constituency with the same boundaries on two occasions. Nor will those MPs know the boundaries of the constituencies that they may want to fight until well into the second half of each Parliament. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place did an excellent job of showing how the boundary reviews could proceed on a much more sensible basis. The new Government’s response has been to abolish the committee In some of the first debates in which I participated in this place, I led for the Liberal Democrats on the then Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill in 2000. I warned then about the escalating arms race in party spending. On 3 April 2000, I said: "In each of the 1974 elections the Conservative Party was calculated to have spent less than £100,000 on its national campaigns. By 1979, with the services for the first time of the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, in charge of advertising, the Conservative Party is estimated to have spent £2 million … By 1983 the sum was £4 million; by 1987 it was £9 million; by 1992 it was £11 million; and by 1997 it was a staggering £28 million".—[Official Report, 3/4/00; col. 1160.] The failure of the last Labour Government to heed those warnings about party funding has now resulted in a far greater problem in which our democracy may quite possibly be considered to be "for sale". The legislation that we approved in 2000 has clearly failed to control the arms race in party funding. In the year before the 2005 general election, the reported donations to the main parties amounted to £44 million. By 2010, the figure was £72 million, and this year it was over £100 million. That is a doubling in 10 years The proposal in the gracious Speech to limit trade union members making contributions without their express consent is long overdue. However, it must be part of a package that introduces a sensible cap on all donations, and allows all political parties to campaign without being in hock to the interests of the richest donors. Without that comprehensive package, British democracy may actually be sold off. We have an electoral system that is very far from one based on "fair votes", and a party funding system which means that campaigns simply cannot be called a fair fight It is a cruel irony that the result of the most recent election is that those who have not been properly represented in the Commons will have to have their democratic voice heard here, in a Chamber without democratic mandate. In this House we have a duty to moderate the absolute power that this Government may try to exercise, and to ensure that constitutional legislation in the coming years has the interests of the voters—not any one political party—at its heart.