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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I do not know which hon. Member is responsible for that electronic noise, but Madam Speaker takes a serious view of such happenings.
Mr. Straw: Unfortunately, some of the Whips are unable to communicate by words, so they have to rely on other means.
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): Some of them cannot read, either.
Mr. Straw: My hon. Friend should know, because she was once a Whip.
Mrs. Dunwoody: As my right hon. Friend has mentioned me, will he give way?
Mrs. Dunwoody: As a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad, I assure my right hon. Friend that my affection for him will remain undiminished, but why does he assume that less control will be exerted over a regional list than over a central list? Is he aware that, under the German system, candidates can be defeated by the electorate but still return on the list? If that is not anti-democratic, I do not know what is.
Mr. Straw: I believe that there is potential for more democratic control by parties regionally rather than locally. The argument runs that there is most democratic control by the party at local level, as the smallest unit, and the least at a national level. The regional level is in between. I am happy to explain that point in more detail to my hon. Friend later.
Mr. Gerald Howarth (Aldershot): The Home Secretary will know that the Conservative party has decided that its members in the regions will be able to select the candidates for nomination. I understand that the Labour party will choose its candidates for every region centrally in London.
Mr. Straw: The hon. Gentleman is ill informed about our system, as he is about his party's system. According to a speech made in the House recently, the Conservative party proposes to hold a mass meeting in each region of all Conservative party members to choose the candidates for the list, and rank them in order by some sort of open outcry system. Some serious objections were raised to that procedure by a Conservative Member because it would be difficult to get members from the south-east region, which ranges from Berkshire to Gravesham, in a single hall to conduct that process. Plenty of halls are small enough, but that is another point. I fancy that, if the Conservative party wants to put up a coherent list of candidates, it will have to take some lessons, from the Liberal Democrats and perhaps from the Labour party, about how to run parties by an internal democratic system.
6 pm
Opinions about the report differ and it is fair to say that it came to no firm conclusion either way. But it exposed electors' concern about the way in which the Belgian system could operate. One member of the public said:
Superficially, I understand the nature of that argument, but I believe that it rests on dangerous foundations. The foundation of the argument is that the British voter will behave in the same way as the Belgian voter. I know of no basis for such a proposition. We do not know what proportion of voters would choose to vote for a candidate down the list rather than for the party or the candidate at the head of the list. We do know that, on a wide range of possible voting patterns, voters may end up with a strong sense in some cases of almost being cheated. That will happen when they see a candidate with the fewest personal votes being elected and a candidate with the most personal votes not being elected.
Mr. Clappison:
May I press the Home Secretary on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth)? Will an individual member of the Labour party have an opportunity to determine the order of candidates that his party will be putting to the electorate?
Mr. Straw:
There will be ballots within our party, and party members will be able to express preferences about which candidates should go on to the list for further consideration.
Mr. Maclennan:
We must regard as the nub of his argument the proposition that the British voter would be disposed to be different from other voters. No one would accuse the right hon. Gentleman of being insular, but he seems to be embracing some sort of curious national stereotype. The only significant evidence that we have is that of actual elections--as well as the conclusions of the focus groups, which, looked at not anecdotally, as he has done, but in the round, showed a clear propensity of view favouring open lists.
Mr. Straw:
I was not making a chauvinist point, but I was, by implication, making a point about the nature of Belgian politics, which is very different from politics in many other countries in Europe, because the Belgian nature is split between the Flemings and the Walloons. That affects their politics in a way that outside, Northern Ireland, our politics, thankfully, is not affected.
Mr. Syms:
Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw:
I shall not give way, as I have given way many times and I want to conclude my remarks.
I believe that this is a fair and balanced system that will produce a representative outcome. I hope that Opposition Members will weigh the words
I have to say to the hon. Member for Hertsmere that the simple closed list system using the d'Hondt divisor that he described an hour or so ago as a rotten and wretched system is precisely the system that he, as a member of the Government, supported when it was introduced with the broad consent of the House by his right hon. Friend the then Prime Minister. Were that system rotten and wretched, and the worst possible system, as the hon. Gentleman now proclaims, it would not have been used by him or by his right hon. Friend for any election for any sort of institution. But it was used for the elections to the Northern Ireland peace forum, which was an important part of the peace process, because what was sought was a system which was proportional and produced a representative outcome.
In our judgment, that is what is needed for elections to the European Parliament--a system that is proportional and simple, and that produces a representative outcome. That system was good enough for the previous Prime Minister; we also believe that it has every merit for the European elections. I ask the House to oppose the new clause.
Mr. Cash:
I wish to register my deep objection to any sort of proportional representation. Listening to the Secretary of State ducking and weaving in and out of the policies that have been prescribed for him by No. 10 is astonishing. He knows perfectly well that he prefers the first-past-the-post system, but he has been given his instructions and is carrying them out to the letter.
I strongly recommend that the Home Secretary reads Burke's "A Letter to a Noble Lord" in which the cleric, the Abbe Sieyes, is described as having come up with a range of different constitutions. I heard the Home Secretary refer to patterns, the bottom and the top, and helping everything to look better. I recommend that he reads the description of the constitutional contortions of the Abbe Sieyes. He will then discover that many lessons were learned many years ago about the way to run a proper democracy. The direction in which the Government are taking the British people is directly contrary to the principles and traditions on which free votes have been held for generations and should continue to be held.
Mr. Gerald Howarth:
I apologise to the Home Secretary and to my hon. Friends on the Front Bench for not being present at the beginning of the debate. I was dealing with a constituency matter, but I took advantage of the television cameras--against which I voted when the House decided on their introduction--and was able to observe the debate.
I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me, because the measure is one of a series of measures that will introduce huge constitutional changes to our country, sweep away Britain's constitutional landscape and create a wholly new and alien one in the same way as did the hurricane that swept through the south of England in 1987.
I recognise that Labour Members feel that they have a mandate for the changes, but they are not being debated out there among the British people, because newspapers,
even the broadsheet newspapers, are not interested. They are interested only when Mr. Murdoch feels that his reporters' ability to pry into the lives of public citizens is threatened and that part of the Government's legislative programme might create, through the back door, a privacy law that would impair his ability to play his newspapers in the way that he wants. We are debating only one of the measures, but it is part of a pattern, which is why I support new clause 4. It is essential that the system should be reviewed within 12 months of its coming into operation.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) made a strong case for a Member of Parliament or a member of the European Parliament having direct association with those who returned him to this place or to the European Parliament. The Home Secretary--[Interruption.] I hope that the Home Secretary will be kind enough to listen to me for a minute. He made a good point in response to the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow: he entirely agreed with him regarding elections to this place. The only point of departure was that he felt that the European Parliament does not sustain a Government.
"Candidate F could still poll more than the top candidate, and still not get in."
Another member of the public said:
"I don't think it's fair. The person at the top might have less votes. The person at the bottom might have a lot more votes but if they haven't got the quota they haven't got any chance".
Another person said:
"That's not a fair system".
As I have explained, one of the points that I considered was how often the result would fail to reflect voters' personal preferences for candidates. Those who support
the Belgian system argue that that happens very rarely and that, in three successive elections in Belgium, the Belgian voter has sought to overturn the party's list on only three occasions out of 75. The argument is that, in practice, the result of the Belgian system will be little different from that of the closed list system, but the Belgian system looks better.
"I believe that this is a fair and balanced system that will produce a representative outcome"
with great care, because they were not my words or those of any Labour or Liberal Democrat Member, but those of the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) when he was Prime Minister and he was advancing the
case for this system for use in the Northern Ireland peace forum elections. They are recorded in Hansard, 21 March 1996, volume 274, column 498.
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