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Mr. Robert McCartney (North Down): I join hon. Members in welcoming the Secretary of State's statement. He made much of the necessity for transparency and for making pensioners aware of their rights. However, were the Government behaving transparently when they abolished tax credits and, through the imposition of a stealth tax, provided much of the money that can be used for the purpose set out in the Secretary of State's welcome statement?
Mr. Darling: Those measures were debated in the Chamber at great length. If the hon. and learned Gentleman was not present, that is his responsibility and not mine. The Government's proposals have meant that the corporate tax regime is appropriate to the modern age. We have reduced corporation tax, which benefits the insurance companies that provide pensions. All our tax changes have contributed to the stable economic conditions that now prevail. As I said, those conditions have enabled us to sort out a colossally difficult problem within the prudent plans set out by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Point of Order
4.17 pm
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I seek your guidance on the way in which the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill is to be dealt with today? There are 666 Government amendments. Their groupings follow the practice that was adopted in the House of Lords. That process was condemned during discussion of the Bill in the other place, as there was a complete muddle in chronological sequence and in the items under discussion. Not only must items further down the list be voted on together with previous ones--that is often customary--but there is no chronological sequence for consideration. In those circumstances, is it in order for our approach to be changed and for us to vote on the groupings as they appear on the selection list?
Mr. Speaker: The hon. Gentleman gave me notice of that point of order. The grouping of Lords amendments is a matter for the Member in charge of the Bill. We must proceed through the amendments in numerical order as they stand in the Bill, unless the House has ordered otherwise. It has not done so in this case.
Rewarding Democracy Commission
4.20 pm
Mr. Jimmy Hood (Clydesdale): I beg to move,
- That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish a Commission, to be called the Rewarding Democracy Commission, to inquire into the reasons why those entitled to vote in elections either fail to register as an elector or decline to vote when registered and to produce recommendations for rewarding those who vote in parliamentary and other elections.
We have welcomed three new hon. Members into our midst this week. They were elected through by-elections in Preston, West Bromwich and Anniesland in Glasgow. The turnout was 28 per cent. in Preston and West Bromwich, and 38 per cent. in Anniesland. None of us can be comfortable with such a continued decline in voter turnout. My Bill invites us all to do something, and to do something now.
We may ask what is the cause of the decline, and who is to blame. I do not intend to walk away from my responsibility, and I hope that our Parliament does not intend to walk away from its responsibility, to try to put things right. We live in a blame culture. I do not think it is good enough for us to continue to practise the politics of "It's not me, it's someone else". It has come to this, and we as parliamentarians must do something about it. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
I am not persuaded by Members who argue that the answer can be found in tinkering with the voting system. Such a proposition has been significantly weakened by the evidence of the most recent European elections, and indeed the Scottish parliamentary elections. Both were held under different proportional representation systems, which resulted in a devastating 24 per cent. turnout in European elections, and a turnout of only 57 per cent. in the Scottish parliamentary elections. That is far from what we should expect.
I am pleased to say that Charter 88 contacted me this week to say that it supports the Bill and the establishment of a commission to look into the problem. I welcome its support.
The 1997 general election featured the lowest turnout since 1935. Thanks to figures provided by the House of Commons Library, I can tell hon. Members that the turnout in the 1987 election, which brought me to the House, was 75.3 per cent. At the last election, it was down to 71.4 per cent. The average turnout for by-elections during the 1987 Parliament was 57 per cent. The average for the 16 by-elections that have taken place during the current Parliament is 42 per cent., or less.
It is not necessarily a United Kingdom problem, however. The turnout statistics for other European Union member states also flag up the danger of people becoming disengaged from our democracy. Austria had a 49 per cent.
turnout for the 1999 European elections. Worries have been expressed about what is happening in Austria. In France and Germany--where we hear of so-called Europhiles--the turnouts were 47 per cent. and 45 per cent. respectively. Nevertheless, our 24 per cent. turnout should be setting off alarm bells.Other Parliaments have legislated to compel people to vote. In the Commonwealth, Australia has compulsory voting, enforced by an A$200 fine for non-voters. Similar laws operate in Latin America--in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Venezuela. In the European Union, Belgium, Luxembourg and Greece have compulsory voting. Belgium imposes a fine of up to BF5,000, and there is a similar fine in Luxembourg. Legislation in Greece confers the right to imprison people for not voting.
I reject compulsory voting, as my Bill shows. I believe that the United Kingdom Parliament should consider using the carrot, not the stick. I want the commission that is set up under my Bill to look at rewarding voters by incentivising voting procedures. The stick of compulsion is too authoritarian, too dictatorial and alien to our parliamentary democracy. My Bill proposes rewarding participating citizenship by making modest remunerations to people who vote in our parliamentary elections. The level of payment should be enough both to reward participation and to discourage non-voting.
Under my proposals, citizens who vote in the elections for their Parliaments will be rewarded. Any citizens who choose not to exercise their right penalise themselves, not others. My Bill will help to achieve real stakeholder democracy. Let us embrace that challenge. Time is not on our side. I commend the Bill to the House.
4.26 pm
Mr. John Gummer (Suffolk, Coastal): I exempt the hon. Member for Clydesdale (Mr. Hood) from personal responsibility for the reduction in voting since he came into the House. It clearly is not entirely his fault. All of us should take some responsibility, but I must congratulate him on becoming an absolute dyed-in- the-wool Thatcherite. Evidently, the only answer to any of those questions is the market. The only thing that one has to do is to pay people to vote.
That seems a surprising proposition. The last time that we had that in the United Kingdom was during the unreformed days of the 18th century, when people who voted were liberally rewarded. They normally had to say which way they had voted, of course, before they got the funds. Now it is proposed that the mere mechanism of voting should bring the reward.
I am concerned about the Bill, not least because of the proposition that we should have a commission to investigate the whole issue. The hon. Gentleman said that we should do something about it and then suggested that we should get someone else to do something about it--appoint a commission.
The commission holds a great attraction. Think of the things that it could do. It could go to Australia and to South America to investigate Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina--it could go everywhere. It could investigate the places that have compulsory voting and then the places that do not. It could then discover whether it was better to be in Brazil than to be in Paraguay, whether Uruguay had something on Argentina, or whether Peru had something on Ecuador.
Then the commission could come back and report. Having reported, it could say: why not look elsewhere? Why concentrate only on voting? What about other help that is given by Government? Should it not have a fact-finding tour of China to discover how effective giving radios for sterilisation has been? After all, that too is--if I may put it like this--a carrot.
The hon. Gentleman proposes an entirely novel concept: democracy is not its own reward, but needs some special premium. It is the little man at the bottom of the cornflakes packet. People are encouraged by their children to buy a packet of breakfast cereal that they do not want to get some cheap and unnecessary toy that they do not need. The proposition is the same. Evidently, people who do not think that they want democracy are to be encouraged to use it by something that is trivial and unimportant.
I find that an unacceptable way of treating democracy. Democracy is the opportunity for all of us to make decisions about our future. Therefore, I have some cynicism about the reason why the Bill has been introduced.
I believe that the hon. Gentleman is seeking to introduce the Bill, first, because people are beginning to see that Parliament itself has been sidelined by the Government. I have no doubt at all why there have been such low turnouts for all parties. People recognise that the Prime Minister himself does not think that it is worth turning up in this place. He has the worst parliamentary record of any Prime Minister in history. His record is worse than that of any previous Labour Prime Minister, any previous Conservative Prime Minister and--remarkably, in so far as one can go back that far--any previous Liberal Prime Minister. It pains me to have to find something in which Liberal Democrat Members are not as bad as Labour Members.
The hon. Gentleman has introduced the Bill, secondly, because he knows very well that Labour activists will not get out their vote. He knows that, whatever happens in the next general election, as we have seen across the country, Labour activists do not want to bother. Whereas the number of Conservative activists is increasing, Labour activism is decreasing--[Interruption.]
It is all very well for the hon. Member for Paisley, North (Mrs. Adams) to laugh in her characteristic manner, but the fact is that, in my constituency, the Labour party has found it difficult to get activists out for any of the local government by-elections in the past two years. Moreover, Labour's difficulty is true universally. She laughs with the embarrassment of one who knows that she is wrong.
Thirdly, the Bill is being introduced simply because some people wish to avoid the fact that low turnouts are a good warning for politicians. We need to be in a position in which the public can tell us--all of us--that we are not doing what they believe politicians should do, and that, in this House, we are not providing the opportunities that they expect us to provide.
The fact is that a serious issue has been raised with a frivolous solution. I hope very much that I shall be able to divide the House against the Bill, and that those who vote against it will be saying, "We want this House to return to being the centre of the nation's political life. We want it to return to conducting proper scrutiny of the issues, and we do not want any more of these short hours
and comfortable arrangements for those who thought that they could come along here and work part time, without continuing in the evenings at all. We want to work harder and better on behalf of our constituents. Then they will come out and vote, and they will not need any trinkets to induce them to do so."Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 23 (Motions for leave to bring in Bills and nomination of Select Committees at commencement of public business:--
The House divided: Ayes 79, Noes 143.
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