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Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay): Astonished.
Mr. Straw: The hon. Lady ought to be astonished by the astonishing result of the system that she proposes to vote for later this evening.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): The Home Secretary does not know why my hon. Friend is astonished.
Mr. Straw: I know exactly why the hon. Lady is astonished. Therefore, the second most popular candidate on party A's list will win a seat, even though he or she polled fewer votes than all the candidates on party B's list who are then not elected.
Mr. Llew Smith (Blaenau Gwent): Does my right hon. Friend anticipate that we are likely to gain anything new from the review that we do not know already? Under the closed system, we will centralise power, and a few party hacks will determine who becomes a Member of the European Parliament. For us in the Labour party, that makes a bad situation even worse, as we all know that the people at the top of the list for the European elections have been decided not by one person, one vote, but once again by a panel of about a dozen people.
Mr. Straw: I do not accept what my hon. Friend says about the system of selection that we have used for establishing the lists. Conceptually, there is no difference between the closed-list system for multi-vacancy constituencies in the European elections and the system
under which my hon. Friend and all Labour Members were selected. We are on party lists of one in our constituencies.
Sir Norman Fowler (Sutton Coldfield) indicated dissent.
Mr. Straw: The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) is shaking his head, but he is wrong. There is no reason at all why, if we chose to do so, we could not have single-member constituencies, but open lists in which each party put forward two or three candidates and left it to the elector to choose. That would be the logical position for the Conservative party, but it is not what happens. If people want to vote Labour in Blackburn, they have only one choice. They have to put a cross against my name. Like it or not, in Blackburn Labour is Straw. In Blaenau Gwent, Labour is Llew Smith. They are closed lists. We have all accepted it for Westminster, and there is no difference of principle in respect of the European Parliament.
Sir Norman Fowler: The Home Secretary is inviting the House and the country simply to vote for a party. He is not giving people the opportunity to vote for a candidate. As recent experience has shown--with Labour candidates such as Gordon Walker--if the public do not like a particular candidate, even though he has the Labour label, they reject him. That is the point.
Mr. Straw: I do not call what happened in one constituency in 1964 recent experience, even given the longevity of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield.
Sir Norman Fowler: What about Tatton?
Mr. Straw: "What about Tatton?" he says, sotto voce, as well he might. That makes my point. There was a party list of one person. The right hon. Gentleman may not have noticed that the Conservative candidate for Tatton was rejected not just because he was Neil Hamilton, but because he was the Conservative candidate.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): That clearly proves the point, because the other parties in Tatton withdrew to avoid the dilemma of people who wanted to vote for their party, but did not want to vote for their chosen candidate. Is not the defect in the Lords amendment, which the Conservatives are supporting, that it would not allow people to vote for a party if they chose to do so, as so many do? The Belgian system, which the Conservatives failed to support, would have allowed that option.
7.30 pm
Mr. Straw: The right hon. Gentleman is right. I noticed that the language of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield suggested that voters should have an opportunity to vote either for a candidate or for a party. He said that they should have that choice. The open-list system does not give that choice, but requires voters to choose between anything up to 11 candidates on a list.
Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock Chase): My right hon. Friend rightly points out that all systems have anomalies. Under first past the post, it is possible for a losing candidate to get more votes than another candidate who wins. I welcome my right hon. Friend's review, because reviews are splendid things, but I do not understand how it is possible to review a principle. It is possible to review a procedure to see whether it is working well, but it is not possible to review a principle. Either one believes in voter choice or one believes in--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. That was far too long. The hon. Gentleman might be able to catch my eye later.
Mr. Straw: With great respect to my hon. Friend, it is perfectly possible to review the operation of the closed-list system, as I hope Parliament will accept, and to review it in the widest possible terms, as I responded to the hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne). I do not follow my hon. Friend's other point. The one truth about first past the post is that, in any constituency, the candidate who wins the most votes wins the seat. He may not have won a majority of the votes, but he has to have won more votes than any other candidate. It is a very simple system.
Mr. Jonathan Sayeed (Mid-Bedfordshire) rose--
Mr. Straw: If I am able to make progress, I hope to give way to the hon. Gentleman later.
I was explaining that the open-list system could have the perverse result that a candidate could be elected with fewer votes than one who is not elected. That apparent inconsistency between the wishes of the electorate and the result would be difficult to explain to voters. It could also cause problems to a candidate elected with considerably fewer votes than a rival from another party. Would any of us like to be in that situation, going to the European Parliament having received 10,000 or 20,000 fewer votes than someone who was not elected? That winning candidate may have difficulty establishing themselves as a credible representative of the electorate.
There are other important drawbacks to the so-called open system. Already, very few people know who their Member of the European Parliament is or have any contact with them.
Mr. David Ruffley (Bury St. Edmunds)
rose--
Mr. Straw:
Please allow me to make progress. I always do my best to give way to hon. Members from both sides, but if I give way all the time, it eats into the time available to other hon. Members to speak.
I am not criticising the current MEPs, many of whom, from all parties, work very hard. However, there are only 84 MEPs for the whole of Great Britain, and the European Parliament's functions are not such as to permit the traditional constituency representation role performed by Members of Parliament and some leading councillors.
With the new, large electoral regions, that will continue to be the case. Many--indeed, most--electors will have no knowledge of any of the candidates standing in their region. The names of the candidates on the Conservative party regional list may well mean
nothing to a Conservative supporter. Under an open-list system, he would be obliged to make a choice from among those candidates. He could not simply cast his vote for the Conservative party, as he would probably prefer.
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield):
Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that it would be a good thing for people to pay some attention to who they are voting for?
Mr. Straw:
We know from nearly 20 years' experience of European Parliament elections that, given the nature of the institution, the size of even the existing constituencies and the nature of the functions, only a handful of MEPs have more than a small chance of gaining sufficient publicity to be as well known as each of us in our constituency and beyond.
I have the internal Conservative party leaflet about the London region Conservative European Parliament team. The party sets out clearly on the front that it disagrees with the proportional representation system and is just trying to operate it if it goes ahead. The only candidates on the list who are reasonably known are two former Members of Parliament--John Bowis and Ian Twinn--who were well known in their constituencies. However, the idea that they could become well known across Greater London is unrealistic--and they are not even at the top of the Conservative party list.
Not knowing any of the candidates, a voter is forced to make an arbitrary decision. It is highly likely that they will choose the simple option, and vote for the first candidate on the list. However, there is evidence that, if the first candidate is a woman--as is the case on the Conservative list in London--or the candidate's name identifies them as coming from one of the ethnic minorities, the elector will head for a male candidate or one with a traditional British-sounding name elsewhere on the list.
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