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Mr. Paul Stinchcombe (Wellingborough) (Lab): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate and affording me the opportunity to make just a few observations on the crisis into which our democracy is now falling.
Turnout in the 1992 general election was 77.7 per cent. Nine years later, in 2001, it had fallen to just 59.4 per cent. That amounts to a loss of 7 million voters in less than a decade—7 million people who had voluntarily chosen to disfranchise themselves, including many millions of women who gave up their vote less than 80 years after Emily Wilding Davison gave up her life to help secure that vote for them. Of course, turnout in other elections is already far lower. The British disengagement with politics is now so extensive that "Monty Python" has become a reality TV show. Joke candidates have been elected as mayors, only the joke is not so funny any more, because when turnout tumbles, along with the football mascots, we get the fascists as well.
We in this place have to ask ourselves how that has happened, and how we have turned a democracy that was once cherished into one that is so widely derided, disrespected and distrusted. We have to ask ourselves what on earth we are going to do about it as we face the awful prospect of a Government being elected when fewer than half their people have spoken.
It is my belief that, in many ways, democracy is analogous to a marriage between the people and Parliament, with elections the ritual that joins them. The trouble is that that marriage is now failing. It failed first from neglect, and now it is failing from abuse, and it is often Parliament that is the more abused party. After all, we are a Parliament full of parliamentarians who, as the papers always tell the people, are only in it for themselves, live high off parliamentary freebies and vote like lemmings for fear of the parliamentary Whip.
The neglect in that marriage first manifested itself in lack of interest, as people sat on their sofas rather than walked to the ballot box. Then came the abuse, which is, in some respects, manifested by the all-postal voting system. As we endeavoured to drive up turnout, what we actually did was give people who did not really want to vote at all even more opportunities to beat us. We generated a huge protest vote—a protest against the Government, the war and Europe, and a protest against the Government's position on Europe and against the Opposition's position on it; a plague, indeed, on all of our House.
In part, I think that that is the fault of the press, aspects of which operate as a national conspiracy to keep everybody in a sustained sense of outrage. It is a sad reality that parties then use spin doctors to administer the antidote to the bias in the press, and in turn that allows the press to paint the spin doctors as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
In part, the situation is the fault of both Government and Opposition Members. Opposition MPs understandably fall in behind the marching bands
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of the right-wing press, which whip up cynicism and apathy throughout the land. Government Back Benchers are subordinated to the Executive, but that is not our fault. The media always paint a questioning political party as a divided political party, and MPs know that divided political parties rarely win.
The largest factor is the fundamental failings of our unwritten constitution, to which we cleave as though it were the grand protector of liberty and rights. We celebrate the unwritten constitution's antiquated quaintness, when in truth the unwritten constitution is deeply dysfunctional. The causes of constitutional dysfunction go to the root of our institutions and to the heart of our constitution.
We have never even begun to resolve the tension between the dual claims to supremacy—parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. Institutionally, that tension manifests itself in the uncomfortable position of the Lord Chancellor, who sits in the Cabinet, the legislature and the country's highest court. Doctrinally, it manifests itself in the fine arguments of judicial review, in which courts tiptoe around policy decisions, interpreting statutes but never challenging them. Indeed, the courts intervene only when decisions are perverse.
We have a confusion of powers, which we claim are separate, and the arguments that we use to justify that constitutional confusion are deeply unpersuasive and no longer carry the confidence of the people. The people instinctively know that our assertion of parliamentary sovereignty is not in truth enough to legitimise all the decisions that we make. That is not only because MPs are sometimes whipped into voting for the Cabinet and against their consciences, or because people know that that even majorities can be wrong, but because the people know that most of their votes do not count for very much.
Individual votes at elections do not choose the Prime Minister, and they rarely choose MPs. In 1997, my vote for the Labour candidate in Beaconsfield yielded me exactly the same amount of representation as I would have obtained by tearing up my ballot paper up and setting fire to it. None of us has a vote for a member of the second chamber, and, apart from Lesotho, we are the only nation in the world with legislators who are present through an accident of birth. As long ago as 1791, Thomas Paine wrote in "The Rights of Man" that the idea of hereditary legislators is as absurd as the idea of hereditary mathematicians. The people know that when the courts refuse to intervene on their behalf out of respect for parliamentary sovereignty, the decision is not made in Parliament. Such decisions are made either by the Executive or by an executive—a housing officer, someone on an immigration desk or a planning inspector.
The people are not persuaded by the rule of law, because if the red-top media are cynical about us, what do they say about judges? They say that judges are old; they say that judges are old Etonians, who are completely out of touch with ordinary people and ordinary lives; and, of course, they say that judges are absurdly soft on crime and criminals. That point contains an element of truth, because the people know that judges do not represent them and are not representative of them.
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If people ever paused to think about the judicial invention of the man on the Clapham omnibus, they would soon notice, first, that that person is a man; secondly, that that person is a white man; thirdly, that that person is a bencher at Lincoln's Inn; and finally that that person has never been on the Clapham omnibus in their life. We therefore end up with a deep distrust of all our institutions. The perception that Parliament is not sovereign but supine means that people do not vote, and when the fools and the fascists get elected as a result, the people do not trust the judges to protect them.
What did we do about those problems? We introduced compulsory postal voting, which seems inadequate. Compulsory postal voting is also dangerous, and we must learn the lessons. We had an all-postal vote in the east midlands. That meant that my constituents had to entrust their votes to one of the worst postal services in the country, which had not recovered from a fire in one of its depots. In my constituency, 404 votes arrived late, and another 430 papers were completed incorrectly. More than 830 voters raised their voices, but their voices were not heard. That concerns me, because when I was first elected, my majority was 187, which is one fifth of the votes that were not counted. What was the cause of at least some of those spoiled votes? It was the Liberal amendment in the Lords that required people to have their ballot papers countersigned. What an affront to the privacy of the electoral process! For a generation of women, one of the first features of their liberation was that their husbands never knew how they voted. I wonder how many women felt compelled only a few weeks ago either to show their ballot papers to their husbands or not to vote for fear of showing them to their husbands.
Is not the requirement for a witness the biggest invitation to fraudsters to try to manipulate the vote? What does the returning officer do when he receives 100 votes countersigned by the same person and covered in Tippex? Of course, we need to increase turnout, but compulsory postal voting is too blunt an instrument safely to do the job.
What should we do? At least at the general election, we must ensure that people have a choice about whether they vote by post or by walking to the polling station.
Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South) (UUP): In Northern Ireland, the Electoral Commission has managed to get people off the electoral roll. In the European poll, not only did the figure go down in percentage terms but the total number of people on registers decreased. The Electoral Commission will have to get its act together, because it is robbing people of the right to vote.
Mr. Stinchcombe: Indeed, lessons will be learned throughout the United Kingdom from the turnout in the areas where the various pilots for different systems took place.
We should expand rather than remove opportunities to vote in person at the ballot box. We should give people more time—a week or a weekend—to vote. We should move towards making all votes count, not by introducing proportional representation for the House of Commons or getting rid of the constituency link but
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by reforming the House of Lords so that it is indirectly elected by the secondary mandate at the same time as we elect Members of Parliament. Thus we would not pile yet more elections on an election-weary electorate but add weight to the votes that they have already cast.
My final suggestion may be the constitutional upheaval that Conservative Members fear. If the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) is right and only countries have constitutions, why do not we write one for ourselves, together with a Bill of Rights? Both should be drafted by us, for us and according to our values, not written abroad and incorporated by parliamentary transplant. In that way, we can entrust Parliament with developing policies that would progressively realise those rights. We can ask a more legitimate second Chamber to scrutinise the work, and give a watching brief to a more representative, independently appointed constitutional court, empowered to enforce the Bill of Rights and the UK constitution through the respectful dialogue between constitutional courts and elected Parliaments, as happens in other constitutional democracies.
In South Africa, democracy and human rights genuinely matter. People were executed as they fought for a vote denied them by the colour of their skin, and the apartheid regime was enacted by a sovereign Parliament and upheld by the courts and the rule of law. Parliament there is now populated by many who were imprisoned on Robben island for daring to fight for the right to vote. In South Africa, constitutional democracy is cherished as the protection against such events ever happening again, whether through white supremacists or a one-party democracy. If South Africans perceive the need to enshrine their values in a constitutional democracy, not fearful of undermining the sovereignty of Parliament or the rule of law, perhaps we should be learn a lesson from that.
The legitimacy not only of our electoral system but of our democracy and our constitution is being called into question by millions who neither vote nor trust the courts. Rather than relying on compulsory postal ballots to rescue us, we need to examine more radical measures, which would truly bring a new legitimacy to our failing democracy and our flawed electoral system.
3.53 pm
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