Prepared: 22:35 on 9 February 2010
Mr. Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab): I wish to move the amendments that stand in my name on the amendment paper, but I also want to pick up the theme—
The Chairman: Order. This is not the moment to move amendments; we have to dispose of new clause 88 first. The right hon. Gentleman can, of course, speak to the new clauses and amendments in this group.
Mr. Field: After that happy start, I rise again to speak to new clause 88; in passing, I shall obviously want to speak to the amendments tabled in my name on the amendment paper.
I want to pick up the theme on which the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) ended and which the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) noted earlier. I hope that whoever is in the control box allowing what we say today to go out on the network has already pulled the plug in that it must be worrying for our constituents to watch us seriously debating a measure that we know will not affect legislation, the election result or whether we have a referendum.
In tabling my amendments, which I cannot yet move, Sir Alan, I hoped to turn this debate into a general discussion of parliamentary reform. One theme unites many of us on both sides of the House—the uncomfortable fact that a large number of us are returned to the House with only minority support. What we do about that is the beginning of the debate, not the end of it.
What worries me about the proposals that we are debating is that it is not difficult to imagine some of our colleagues initially being clear winners against three or four other candidates, but, through a process of elimination, losing their seats because the votes eventually go to the runner-up. There is a terrible illogicality in having a system in which a candidate can have a clear lead in the first-preference votes, but in which the second or third-preference votes become equal to the first-preference votes in further stages of the counting. Clearly, those other votes are not equal to the first-preference votes; if they had been, people would have voted differently in the first place.
Chris Huhne rose—
Mr. Hayes rose—
Mr. Field: I give way to the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes).
Mr. Hayes: The point that the right hon. Gentleman has made is disturbing enough when it involves the extra power that would be gained by those whom we deride on the Liberal Democrat Benches. It is chilling, however, when one considers that it would also give extra power to those whom we detest in small, extreme parties that I shall not honour by naming.
Mr. Field: I totally agree, but I do not want to go down that particular route; I want to try to move on the debate a little.
Should the plug in the control box not have been pulled and should our constituents be watching this debate, they will think how old-fashioned it is that the only way in which we are talking about election is in respect of the old parliamentary system. There has been a big debate in the country about how we select candidates. Some people have an objection to safe seats; the answer, surely, is to consider seriously—not necessarily embrace—paying some attention to the mechanisms by which we select candidates.
My own seat of Birkenhead is quite safe—it was at the last election, at least. The real fight is about who will be the Labour candidate. I would welcome our having an open primary, in which there was a real contest for the Labour candidature; everybody would know that the person who won that would also win the seat. The quid pro quo would probably be that we would move back to seeing uncontested returns in “safe seats” where open primaries were held.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr. Field: I give way to the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing).
Mrs. Laing: As I am sure the right hon. Gentleman is well aware, the Conservative party has held several open primaries to select candidates. They have been very successful and produced excellent candidates, who will be excellent MPs.
Mr. Field: We hope that they will be excellent candidates and MPs. Having been selected in that way, they will certainly have a different authority from that of the rest of us. That is why I wish that we had embraced that system. I wrote to the Labour party campaign, asking whether it was going to have an open primary. I was told that it would love to, but that it would cost £50,000. I asked whether it was possible to find that money, but I was told that the campaign was in the business not of raising money, but of issuing press releases. That did not take us much further.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr. Field: I give way to the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames).
Mr. Nicholas Soames (Mid-Sussex) (Con): I support what the right hon. Gentleman has said about open primaries. Does he agree that, particularly at a time when participation in politics and political life is at an all-time low, anything that brings more people into the political process is devoutly to be welcomed?
Mr. Field: It is. One of the constraints on our current debate has been our use of an old-fashioned set of spectacles, always looking at engagement as being only one-way, rather than looking at where the voters might be. The selection of candidates, as the hon. Gentleman has affirmed, is one key way of addressing that.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP): My right hon. Friend has already accepted the dangers of the costs of an open-primary system. Does he not also accept that, in logic, a primary system is essentially a process of electoral elimination, whereby weaker candidates fall away and those who support them end up helping to decide who finally wins? That very logic has been criticised in the alternative vote system. Surely the real issue is about how we get to a point at which every Member can truly say that they have a measure of mandate from a majority of their constituents. That gives us the alternative vote.
Mr. Field: I am grateful for that, but I shall not go down that route; the Chairman might suggest that I should be speaking to the main new clause and not that issue.
If what used to be called safe seats adopted a method of open primaries that were followed by uncontested results at the general election, the overall cost to the electoral system might not be that much greater. In other words, we would be using some of the money currently used in a general election to extend—[Interruption.] It is very good, is it not, that we now see where the Liberal Democrats stand on this issue? They are laughing at the idea of people trying to grapple with how we make it easier for our electorates to make their views sovereign in the process rather than ours.
7 pm
Graham Stringer: My right hon. Friend has obviously thought very deeply about we can address the disillusion with politics. However, is not this a particularly difficult time to go to the electorate and say that we want more money for the internal political process? Even in a seat like Birkenhead, if a Labour candidate is selected by an open primary, we cannot guarantee that there will not be a succeeding election and therefore an extra call on money from the public purse.
Mr. Field: I agree with that. However, given my earlier suggestion that we should use this debate not seriously to undertake a major constitutional measure but to open up how we make our system more representative, no cost would be involved at this stage.
Geraldine Smith (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab): I think that there are dangers with open primaries. Supporters of the Opposition parties may turn up and vote for the weakest candidate, or there may be a candidate with a particular interest—for example, a pro-life candidate—who floods the place with their supporters. This could end up being very undemocratic.
Mr. Field rose—
The Chairman: Order. The right hon. Gentleman has a reputation for bringing new angles to our debates, but I think that this one might be stretching outside this group of amendments and new clauses, which, heaven knows, raises wide enough issues.
Mr. Field: I hope, Sir Alan, that you will nevertheless allow me to conclude this part of my speech. During the open primary in Totnes, the Liberal Democrats set out to try to get the person they considered to be the weakest candidate elected, and thanks to their campaign the weakest candidate came bottom of the poll. We must not underestimate the common sense of our voters.
Bob Spink: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Field: No, I am going to make a small amount of progress, because you, Sir Alan, were kind enough to say that I could mention, at least in passing, the amendments that I have tabled.
The amendments try to address the central weakness of the proposal that Government wish us to carry tonight—that a system of voting whereby second, third and fourth preference votes in constituencies where there is no majority winner then become, in a progressive movement, first preference votes. I do not believe that one can support that system.
Martin Linton: I know that my right hon. Friend has 65 per cent. of the first preference votes in Birkenhead, and I compliment him on that. Does he recognise that there are already millions of voters in hundreds of constituencies who know that their first preference does not have a chance and therefore vote for their second preference? We already live in a system where millions of people use the alternative vote, but they have to guess who the top two are going to be. Does he recognise that in the majority of constituencies the situation that he has described does not obtain, and that we need a solution to tactical voting, which is the alternative vote system?
Mr. Field: If that is my hon. Friend’s thinking, I hope that I will persuade him of the merits of my amendment. I do not want anyone to think that I am not concerned about the fact that votes are not equal between constituencies. If we go back in history, one of the demands—it was not just a radical plea of the Chartists, but one that was picked up on the other side—was to have single votes and equal votes. It is clearly very different if we look at the numbers by which Labour Members and Conservative Members are elected. Unfairest of all is how many votes the Liberal Democrats have to receive to get a single Member of Parliament.
In my amendment, I propose the French system, whereby people have a vote whereby they are free to nominate any number of candidates that they wish, and they have a first preference vote. In constituencies where the candidate gets 50 per cent. plus one, they are declared elected. In all the other constituencies where a majority of the voters who turn out have not elected a member, during the following week the top two candidates are put back on to the ballot paper. In those circumstances, there is no need to guess, because everybody has first preference votes again. It is true, of course, that that system might be more expensive, but given what we spend money on now, might not the electorate prefer it? Interestingly, it is consistently the case in France that turnout on the second day of polling is significantly higher than on the first day.
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab): I am following my right hon. Friend’s remarks with care. I wonder whether he has studied some of the analysis by the Electoral Reform Society. When it conducted a survey of different sorts of preferential voting systems a couple of years ago and looked at the French experience, particularly in the presidential election, it found that there was precisely the kind of tactical voting that my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) has mentioned. In particular, supporters of Chirac lent their votes to Le Pen to ensure that the run-off was between Le Pen and Chirac. That was a rather strange situation that did not really represent what was going on elsewhere. There is evidence of similar things happening in the presidential elections in Cyprus. Why does my right hon. Friend think that that would not happen here?
Mr. Field: I am not putting this proposal forward as the silver bullet to solve all the problems. I welcome the fact that the Government, even late in the day, are opening up the whole debate on parliamentary reform. It is crucial that we constantly strive to improve the form of representation that we have in this country. I do not think for one moment that it would guarantee that we did not get such results, although such voting is dominant mainly in elections of the French Parliament, not the French President. Given those circumstances, I hope that we will look seriously not only at the one option that is being put forward today but at a series of alternatives in the form of a debate rather than moving to a resolution this evening.
Bob Spink rose—
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op) rose—
Mr. Field: As the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) has been jumping up a lot, I will give way to him and then to my hon. Friend.
Bob Spink: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. If he presses his amendment with the three alternatives to the vote, I will vote with him. On the AV system, does he accept that voters will not easily switch their allegiance between the main political parties, so the real political advantage will go to independents? Does he think that that might be a good thing, and that people might want to have more independents in this House in order to break the grip of the Whips from the main political parties?
Mr. Field: It is always good to have a disinterested contribution made here.
Mr. Drew: Much as I have difficulty with this proposal, because it is based on the French system, does my right hon. Friend agree that we would need to take the whole package? French national politicians also have local representative roles, and I have always felt that one of the weaknesses of the UK system is that we have to throw away our local power base to get elected as an MP. That is a weakness, is it not?
Mr. Field: I will not go too far down that path, except to say that I have been in the House for 30 years, and it is interesting how the role of an MP has changed. Although we may not formally have the role that my hon. Friend has mentioned, my role as Back-Bench Member of Parliament representing a moderately safe seat—as my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) was kind enough to point out—has changed out of all recognition in those 30 years. We do not have formal clout, and we are not elected to positions, but I am involved at a local level to a degree that would have been unimaginable when I first came into the House.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North) (Lab): That is true of all of us.
Mr. Field: Indeed, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for saying so.
I want to bring my remarks to conclusion, if I may. I welcome the Government’s opening up this debate. It is not for us to put our sticky fingers into the soul of the Justice Secretary to try to work out what his motives are; we are all accountable for our own motives. In any event, good will come from our having a debate about how we can make this place more representative.
I do not believe for a moment that this is a serious legislative contribution, because even if we complete it in time a deal will be done between the parties in the other place so that it does not see the light of day, and certainly so that it does not come back to us before the election. What we ought to take from today’s debate is the extraordinary enthusiasm for the matter. In which other debates do we get such a number of Members in the Chamber, even at Committee stage? We are interested in this issue, and I say to the Justice Secretary that today is the start of it, but sadly not the conclusion.