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Mr. Raynsford: I regret having given way to the hon. Gentleman, as I have already said that this matter has been considered in the context of several previous Acts--in 1975, in 1978 and earlier this year. Those people who are far better qualified than I to consider these matters are satisfied that the clause does not oust the courts' jurisdiction in serious matters. That is the crucial consideration. We are providing a safeguard against frivolous litigation. We are basing it on the precedents that have been brought into law with all previous recent referendums. On that basis, I support the clause.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 6 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Mr. Simon Hughes:
I beg to move amendment No. 8, in page 3, line 15, at beginning insert
The Chairman:
With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 25, in page 3, line 17, leave out
No. 10, in page 3, line 30, at beginning insert
No. 26, in page 3, line 31, at end insert--
No. 11, in clause 9, page 4, line 29, at end insert
Mr. Hughes:
This is an important group of amendments because they refer to the electoral process for the Londonwide body. We are keen that the House does not dig itself into a position that produces a sterile and infertile debate, where we all end up with exactly the same view as we held at the beginning.
We have proposed, and are inviting the Committee to accept, that there should be set up to establish the electoral arrangements for London the same sort of body that was set up for Scotland. In Scotland, the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, initially the Scottish National party, the trade unions, the Churches and other bodies sat down and worked out an electoral system that would in their view obtain the best and widest support. It was not the electoral system in the minds of any of us when we began the process, but ultimately the Scottish Constitutional Convention agreed to it as part of the package. It was worth doing as it meant that there was a common platform in support of the referendum proposals and a Scottish Parliament. As the Committee knows, the result was a majority of about 4:1 in favour of the proposal that Scotland should have its own Parliament.
Wales had no electoral convention or commission and no constitutional convention or commission, and the House remembers the history of proceedings from there on. The proposal for an Assembly for Wales scraped through by the narrowest of majorities. The Government almost lost their proposal, to the dismay of those of us in the House who have long been advocates of a Welsh Parliament, a Welsh Senate or a Welsh Assembly. More important, the people of Wales almost lost the proposal.
We do not want the Londonwide body to stumble and fall on the basis that it does not enjoy a democratic mandate. The truth is that the Greater London council, the body's previous incarnation, had precisely that weakness. The Government of the day, of whatever colour, were able to look across the river to county hall and say, "The body over there does not enjoy a majority of public support from the electorate", and it did not. We are asking the House to agree that, whatever we think about the particular electoral system, there should be a way of arriving at it that obtains maximum agreement.
I have made it clear to Ministers and others that the principle of going through a Green Paper is welcome. At the beginning, it sets out 10 key criteria, the first nine of which are that it should be strategic, democratic, inclusive, effective, small, audible, clear about its role, efficient and influential. I agree with those nine criteria. The 10th is the great new Labour proposal that the new authority should be consensual. I do not think that everyone wants their politics to be consensual; indeed, I do not think that it is possible for our politics to be consensual. I certainly hope that they are not. I am happy
for the authority to be collaborative and co-operative, but to suggest that we all have to agree, or that politics in London in future should require a consensus, is nonsense. There will be differences of view. For example, there may be a difference of view over whether London Transport should be publicly or privately owned. There will not be consensus across the political divide on that issue, and I do not think that there should be. I want to ensure--it must be in the interest of the Committee and the House to ensure--that the Londonwide authority reflects the view of the majority of London's citizens as best represented through the democratic process.
I therefore hope that the Committee will agree that we should attempt to deliver an electoral system that meets some fairly clear criteria and also takes into account all the issues in London.
As I have said in every venue in which I have been asked about the matter, Ministers--very reasonably--have made no firm and final proposal. They said that they would consult about the election and franchise methods and about constituencies. I welcome that consultation, although neither my team nor I have yet been able to work out--we have not had time, in one afternoon--what all the consultation responses have said on the issues.
There is, however, widespread support--I am not saying majority support--for a representative form of election. Some hon. Members--including some Labour and Tory Members--are advocates of the traditional first-past-the-post system. For the purposes of this debate, I ask hon. Members to put out of their minds arguments over national Government and a national Parliament and to isolate arguments over local elections to local councils. We are not talking about either of those matters; we are talking about a type of regional government that we have not had before.
I accept that there is no precedent for such a government. Neither the Greater London council nor the Inner London education authority nor the London county council provides an exact precedent. We can therefore start with a clean slate. I ask hon. Members to keep an open mind about the outcome, as I will. I am not one of those people who were born muttering, "single transferable vote". I was not brought up believing that that was a political mantra and a precondition of any of the world's political systems, because it is simply not true. We have to try to find some principles. In all seriousness and optimism, I invite the Committee to reflect on what those principles might be and to agree them.
I ask the Committee to accept, first, that one of those principles should be that the voting system should be fair and give equal weight to all votes, not allowing people in London to feel that their vote does not count as much as the vote of someone else in their part of London.
Secondly--I ask colleagues to reflect on how to implement it--there should be voter choice. In my constituency, Bengali voters, for example, should be able to choose a Bengali candidate. All political parties should allow voters--such as those in the Afro-Caribbean community--to say, "I want someone to represent me who has the same ethnic background."
Voters should be able to choose a candidate on the basis of experience and age. Someone might say, "I want to put at the top of my list a trade unionist". If they are a first-time voter or 18-year-old, they might say, "I want to put a young person at the top of my list." After the general
election, the House welcomed some new young hon. Members. I unreservedly welcome them. Two Labour Members are about 25, and that is extremely welcome. I hope that hon. Members realise the benefit of a broad age range in the House.
The Labour party--although it has had to do some slightly funny things to make it happen--has done a better job than the Liberal Democrats or the Conservative party in increasing considerably the number of women Members. I hugely welcome that development, and the House is already better for it. I am convinced that we will be much better off if we have more women in Parliament. Women should know that they will have the opportunity to vote for women, or men for women, if that is what they want. They should have a choice.
As I stand here, I am very conscious of the fact that the political process delivers to Parliament for the elector one type of Labour candidate, one type of Conservative candidate or one type of Liberal Democrat. Electors in my constituency, who might be my supporters but who are African or Bangladeshi, do not have the opportunity to vote for a Liberal Democrat who is African or Bangladeshi, if it so happens that the person who wins in the first-past-the-post selection system in the party is a white Anglo-Saxon. That is an important issue.
The third matter on which I ask the Committee to reflect is a difficult one, and I do not pretend otherwise. We should try to use real electoral boundaries that are natural and sensible. I shall not detain the Committee too long, but I want to outline the salient points. The Government propose that the authority should have something like 20 to 30 members. At first sight, that might suggest one member per borough. The weakness of that is that anyone elected would be, in effect, his or her borough's spokesperson. That would be a bad thing because the authority is not that kind of body, which is why we, like the Government, voted against the Conservative proposal that the assembly should comprise a group of London borough leaders. I represent the old boroughs of Southwark and Bermondsey so I come here by definition partly to be the Member of Parliament for those boroughs and to fight their corner--my electorate would expect nothing less. The same is true of all electorates. Thus, to end up with 32 or 33 seats, each representing a local authority area, would be wrong.
Another possible set of boundaries are the European Parliament constituency boundaries. I share what I think is the Government's view, which is that we do not want long and complicated hearings or the redrawing of London maps to break up existing communities but that some of the European boundaries hardly form natural communities. I urge colleagues to consider that we would do well not to take off the shelf, as it were, boundaries that were created for another purpose and which would not serve these proposals well. The obvious example of that is that some of those boundaries extend beyond Greater London. They were not meant to form the basis for a set of Londonwide representatives, so they would be inappropriate in this case.
A third possibility would be to take London as a whole and deal with it as one constituency. However, that has some huge weaknesses because it would involve a list system. I accept that if one has been a Liberal for 25 years and has not understood these things, one must have been somewhere else, but there are two ways to proceed. One is to have a party list system, in which case Walworth
road or Millbank tower, Cowley street or Smith square decides who gets on the list--or the members decide--and the voters have no choice. The second way is to have a list influenced by the voters--they choose who goes on the list and in what order. Obviously, my party would prefer the latter option if there were to be a list system.
'Subject to section (London Electoral Convention) below,'.
'and any direction given under it'.
'which the London Electoral Convention recommends and'.
'(3) The Commission's report shall be based on the assumption that the elections will be conducted on the "first past the post" system.'.
'and with the agreement of the London Electoral Convention'.
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