Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
MR PETER
FACEY, DR
MARTIN STEVEN
AND DR
MICHAEL PINTO-DUSCHINSKY
22 JULY 2010
Chair: Welcome, Mr Facey, Dr Steven and
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky. It is very good of you to spend the time
to inform the Committee of these very important issues at which
we are looking. We are doing some rather speedy pre-legislative
scrutiny or evidence taking on two Bills, the Bill which affects
AV and the boundary situation and the Bill which impacts upon
fixed-term parliaments. We expect both of those Bills to be published
today and we would expect them to have a second reading in September,
so we have moved very quickly as a brand new committee to try
and get some ideas out there which will be informative for Members
of Parliament as they deliberate on these issues very soon and
also to inform the public debate too, so I am delighted that you
have all been able to join us today. We have got your biographies
and rather than have lengthy opening statements, I think it would
be really helpful if we could get straight into questions. We
have grouped the questions into a number of groups: firstly, electoral
systems, their merits and otherwise; secondly, the AV referendum;
thirdly, boundary changes and a smaller House of Commons; fourthly,
fixed-term parliaments; fifthly, the legislative timetable; and
finally the purpose of the overall package of reforms. The way
I will conduct this is I will call members to ask a question rather
than make a speech or a statement themselves to try and get your
views on the record. If you could answer as succinctly as you
can that would be helpful. We did have the Deputy Prime Minister
last week who was extremely eloquent, if I can put it that way!
It would be helpful to get through these issues and as the exchange
takes place I would like it to be conversational if at all possible.
The first group is about electoral systems and their merits or
otherwise and I will ask Sheila Gilmore if she would like to start
us off on that.
Q1 Sheila Gilmore: The
first question is perhaps particularly for Dr Steven and Mr Facey
and it would be to ask what your preferred voting system would
be.
Mr Facey: Our position as an organisation
has always been that neither Parliament nor us should choose the
electoral system; the best way of doing it would be for a citizens'
assembly to look at the issues and decide. We preferred the model
which was used in British Columbia and Ontario where citizens
actually deliberated. My own personal opinion has always been
that I would prefer systems which are proportional and increase
voter choice, and that would include a number of systems including
single transferable vote, AV-plus, AMS, et cetera, but I do not
think that simply my choice of electoral system should be put
to the electorate or for that matter politicians' choice but that
there should be a deliberative process which chooses the exact
electoral system which is put to a referendum.
Dr Steven: Historically the Electoral
Reform Society has backed the single transferable vote as the
system it considers to be ideal.
Q2 Sheila Gilmore: I think Unlock
Democracy has said they particularly want people to have a choice
of candidates. How would changing the electoral system achieve
that?
Mr Facey: A number of electoral
systems allow voters to actually have greater choice over candidates
whether that be STV, which allows people to actually choose between
candidates of the same party, particularly if there is more than
one candidate for that party standing, or open list systems. In
the case of the choices we have here, which if the legislation
goes through will be between the alternative vote and first past
the post, then voters will have a greater choice under alternative
vote because they will at least between the candidates standing
be able to vote according to their desire rather than simply voting
negatively or trying to guess which of the two candidates are
going to be the two front runners, which you have to do in first
past the post elections, particularly where you have four or five
parties standing in that election and you are not actually sure
what order they are in in that constituency.
Q3 Sheila Gilmore: Can I just pursue
this a little further, and anybody can come back on this. There
seems to be an assumption made by many people advocating any change
in the electoral system that it will make MPs more accountable
and therefore there will be more change taking place. In the Scottish
local government system of STV which was introduced last year
it is not the case that people are necessarily ranking different
candidates of the same party because parties tactically only run
the number of candidates they think it is reasonable run. I believe
that is also the situation in the Republic of Ireland and has
been for many years so, in fact, this desired achievement does
not happen and, secondly, is there not a risk that within some
of these systems you actually make the party candidate more likely
to feel they have a built-in ability to win, that you are always
going to get certain seats one Tory one Labour, in Scotland one
SNP and so on, and so actually the MP may feel safer in certain
respects.
Mr Facey: There are two things
there. One is the choice we are going to be faced with here is
between two single member systems, so whatever my preference may
be we have a choice between AV and first past the post. Under
AV, the reality is the number of seats which are going to be marginal
will increase because, in effect, a candidate will have to get
50% of the vote and it will push more seats into being competitive,
they will be better fought because parties have a chance of winning
them and therefore there will be more accountability to the voters
in that constituency. I accept that in Scotland under STV the
parties were extremely conservative and actually there was evidence
that some of the parties were too conservative because they lost
out on the possibility of winning. Whether at the next election
they will be as conservative I do not know. If you look in Ireland
it is the norm for bigger parties to put up one more candidate
than they think they can win. That is the norm in Ireland but
also in Tasmania and Australia, et cetera, where the system operates.
In Scotland we had a situation where the parties were overly conservative
about their candidate numbers and some of them realised that they
actually lost out as a result of that. Whether that will continue
in future elections I do not know. It is also true that we have
to bear in mind if you look at Scotland's local government before
the change there were huge numbers of seats which were uncontested.
If you compare it to England now there are large numbers of local
council seats in England which have no election because no party
stands. Under STV in Scotland every single seat was contested
so the voters actually decided, whereas in England in my part
of the country for one of our counties the result was known before
the election because there were not even enough candidates standing
to challenge it. I think that STV in Scotland is a very clear
example of something which increased accountability and increased
the influence of voters compared to first past the post.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: May I say
something about this. First, I would like to congratulate you,
Chairman, because it is a very important Committee especially
if we are going to second reading in September, which I think
is completely premature and is going to cause huge difficulties,
and I think is totally irresponsible myself, partly because of
details which we will come to but also because of the completely
false rhetoric such as we have heard now. The fact is that elections
are not only to elect MPs, they are to elect governments and they
are to dismiss governments, and under a system that is proposed
by some, it is a wholly elite system in which electors have very
little to do. The election is like an auction in which there is
a ring of dealers and then they have the other decision after
the auction is finished. You have the deal after the election
in which the people are excluded and that is the whole essence
of a proportional system, that you cannot get rid of certain governments
and, in particular, you cannot get rid of certain political parties
because of coalition arrangements. I think that the whole term
`proportional representation' is a misnomer because you can have
proportional representation of numbers of legislators, and our
system is not proportional on that, but you can also have proportional
representation on shares of government office, and the whole point
about the change to AV and that then leading to a proportional
legislative representation is that you will have a kind of `chips
with everything' form of coalition, in other words like spam and
chips and chicken and chips, you will have Clegg and Labour, Clegg
and Conservative, Clegg and something else. You can never get
rid of the third party and you may then want to ask why it is
that the third party wants this change.
Q4 Nick Boles: I want to come in
because this is an important point and you made the argument very
well that the point of elections is to change and to choose governments
not just MPs. Are you absolutely sure that you know what would
happen with AV because one hears so many conflicting reports that
actually in some circumstances, for instance in 1997, it could
have produced a more extreme result so therefore an even more
effective booting out of a government? Are you absolutely sure
that it would not produce what you want?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: The point
about AV is that very few places have it for legislative elections.
I was taken once to Fiji for a constitutional review there and
it was very interesting.
Q5 Nick Boles: But Australia seems
to kick the rascals out.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: Australia
has it, Papua New Guinea has it; not many places do have it. We
do not have enough experience of it and so I completely agree
with you that this is something very untried. You could have a
normal scenario and then an abnormal scenario. The normal scenario
that you have is that Conservatives lose seats, Liberal Democrats
gain seats, Labour is about the same, and therefore you have more
likelihood of hung parliaments and therefore you have a two-stage
process, AV first leading to full PR, and that I think is the
design. You can have another scenario which is the sort of coupon
election scenario, where in a coalition the Conservatives and
Lib Dems back each other and then you have Labour absolutely smashed.
It all depends really on the kinds of deals that are put to the
electors. That is why it is a system that again makes for deals
rather than elections.
Q6 Chair: Are you saying, Dr Pinto-Duschinsky,
that changing the electoral system is not the way to resolve the
fundamental problem of having the executive and the legislature
fused in one election?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I think the
way of solving a problem in a democracy and giving people power
is the ability to throw the rascals out.
Q7 Chair: Is that an argument for
directly electing the executive as most nations do?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I think that
a directly elected president or prime minister is an interesting
idea and it does work in numbers of country. I think the problem
that comes with that is that you can have an executive and a legislature
that are of different parties and they have to have a compromise
and so you do not have as definite an expulsion. In Britain when
we expel we expel in an immediate and spectacular way. I have
seen it happen in my own lifetime when I was taken with David
Butler to interview Harold Wilson in office and then a few weeks
later he had no home and we saw him at Dick Crossman's home because
he never reckoned he could leave office. That is what I think
democracy is all about. If governments and Members of Parliament
feel that they can somehow wriggle out of the anger of the electorate,
then democracy is weakened.
Q8 Stephen Williams: If I could direct
my questions principally at Dr Pinto-Duschinsky. Would it be fair
to say that your defence of first past the post is largely for
negative reasons, as to how you can throw the rascals out, "removal
van" democracy as you say in your paper, rather like Tony
Benn often says that the best advantage of the current system
is that you put a cross on a piece of paper and throw out a government.
Is that the main reason for supporting first past the post?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I would admit
that the first past the post system has been quite unfair to minor
parties. In other words, in terms of representation in the legislature
obviously it is disproportionate and it disadvantages minor parties
or third or even fairly major parties but not the major parties
if they are spread around the country. However, I think the larger
problem is if you never could throw out a Government as a result
of the election. I believe that the removal van aspect, what you
say is the negative quality, is the central argument but I do
not call it a negative quality because that is democracy. That
is the people doing what they do not do in many systems of the
world and it is a way of holding the executive to account better
than anything else.
Q9 Stephen Williams: But for the
record, Chairman, governments in Australia have lost elections.
I remember John Howard being Prime Minister and then he was not.
We have had Labour governments in Australia, Liberal (but Conservative
really) governments in Australia, governments in Germany change
their composition quite often, so it is not just first past the
post that leads to the removal van turning up for the Prime Minister
or the Chancellor.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I think you
have to look at the likelihood of this happening in different
scenarios and whether a third party is likely to hold the balance
of power. Often you do find—and I did this work 11 or 12
years ago, supported I may say by the Rowntree Trust to whom I
am very grateful—that the expulsion of governments happens
about four times as often under the first-past-the-post system
as it would under proportional systems, so although there are
many ways you can look at it, there is a greater likelihood that
you can have removal van democracy under first past the post than
under other systems, but for the record I do accept what you say.
Stephen Williams: Would you characterise
yourself as a duopolist or a pluralist?
Q10 Chair: You can have some time
to think about it.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I actually
would define myself as a democrat. What I care about most is a
system where people can make a difference in elections. What I
really fear is having a succession of elections where you have
votes and then there are deals afterwards that have very little
to do with what the electors want. We have had a bit of a taste
of this in the last few months and whereas I think it was a desirable
change in the short term, if we always had that I think that our
democracy would be gravely undermined.
Q11 Tristram Hunt: I just want to
throw some of those critiques back to you, Peter or Martin, particularly
this notion that if you take a minister such as Steve Webb who
is the current Pensions Minister, who is currently tacking right
but under a different Coalition might tack left, we vote out one
government, we vote in a new government and he could well be in
the same job in the same place without any sense of the checking
of the executive under an AV system.
Mr Facey: Let us clarify something:
AV is not a proportional electoral system. First past the post
is a plurality electoral system; AV is a majoritarian electoral
system. It has more in common with first past the post than it
does with proportional systems. Let us also clarify that the connection
between coalition government and an electoral system is not as
strong as my colleague Michael seems to imply. Canada has just
had minority governments, hung parliaments in effect now, for
the last three elections under first past the post. India uses
first past the post and has coalition government as the norm.
Australia has a majoritarian system, the alternative vote, and
does not have coalition government; it has majority governments.
There is something called the Coalition but that is effectively
one party. It is the same as the Labour Party and the Co-operative
Party effectively being one. There is no evidence for this idea
that alternative vote is going to usher in this scenario that
Michael points out. If you want to look at whether the removal
van element of democracy works, if you are a fan of that, just
watch the Australian election which is going to take place in
about six weeks' time and look at whether or not that works. The
reality is if you talk to your Australian colleagues I am not
sure you are going to find people who live in this kind of world
which is not competitive where politics is not operated in that
kind of cut and thrust. John Howard is not some example of a weak
centrist Prime Minister. He was a Conservative Prime Minister
who had a very strong vision. We cannot start having a debate
here about whether or not the alternative vote or first past the
post is the best and then start saying, "Look at Germany,
look at Ireland, look at Bolivia." The reality is that is
not the choice we have. You may want to recommend to the Government
that we have a different choice in the referendum. I would be
interested to hear if you do that but if we are going to have
a referendum on the alternative vote and first past the post let
us have a debate about that and not a debate about things which
have got absolutely nothing to do with it.
Q12 Chair: Can I ask Dr Steven to
come in and give his view.
Dr Steven: There are a number
of different points that have been covered and we have to keep
them separate to the best of our ability because there have now
been three or four different strands to this discussion. If I
can deal with Tristram's point first, theoretically, yes, but
the political reality, the practicalities of somebody like Steve
Webb either changing the party to stay in government or, if you
like, the Lib Dems having a permanent seat in the British government,
I do not think there is any empirical evidence of that in the
British context, if you know what I mean. There is that theoretical
prospect but then the reality is there is no evidence of that
happening comparatively. I can talk about other points too. In
terms of throwing the rascals out, we have to be clear, if you
look at British elections in the twentieth century there are four
elections where basically the result was extremely tight and where
three times out of four the result was wrong: Ramsey MacDonald
in 1929, Winston Churchill in 1951 and Harold Wilson in 1974.
In 1964 the result was also very tight and the first-past-the-post
system produced the right result and Wilson won. There is only
one example, 1970, of a clear-cut wholesale removal van process
whereby a party with a working majority was replaced by another
party with a working majority. Every other parliament has ended
with a minority government where the majorities have faded away
and the party that has then come in has replaced that. If we are
looking at the evidence—and I am not here as a campaigner,
I am not here to make a case one way or the other, I am really
here to try and give a view—there is no empirical evidence
in the British context of first past the post consistently allowing
the British electorate to throw the rascals out in the way that
I think Dr Pinto-Duschinsky means, if I can respectfully say so.
Q13 Tristram Hunt: We are about to
face some very damaging cuts in public services under the Budget
and there is some suggestion that this change to the voting rule
does not make a huge amount of difference. We are going to adjust
and change the British system of voting to follow Fiji, Papua
New Guinea and Australia. What would you say to the criticism
that this is going to be a massive waste of £60 million to
follow a model which is not followed by the rest of the world,
it is rather a minority following, when if you look at the broader
history of Britain we have had an incredible degree of political
stability which has served us well and there is no other point
to do this other than to fulfil a Coalition political stitch-up,
say?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: May I comment?
Q14 Chair: Perhaps I can ask Mr Facey
first.
Mr Facey: Nicely put but I do
not accept that argument. Let us be clear, in some ways if you
want to look at the longest running discussion on the British
constitution it has been the electoral system. You only have to
look at institutions like the Electoral Reform Society, they go
back to the 1860s, and the debate about the British electoral
system is the longest in British political history. It has come
up again and again in periods of our history in terms of discussions.
Also the reality is the existing electoral system has only existed
since 1950. The myth which is around that it is this long-lasting
one is not actually true. It was only in 1950 that we got rid
of seats which had two or more MPs. It is only then when we had
one electoral system because we used to have the single transferable
vote for university seats. I think in a democracy, particularly
at a time when there are major issues to be decided, how healthy
our democracy is is an important debate. As already indicated,
I would have preferred a more open process. I wish that politicians
were not so control freakish about it and we were not having the
situation where the choice was between a majoritarian and a plurality
system, but that is the choice and I still think it is a worthwhile
choice. If you as a committee would like to be extremely brave
and recommend that you open up the whole process and let citizens
in a grand jury decide what the options are, I would applaud you
for it. I may be doubting you but I somehow doubt you are likely
to do that. Therefore if the choice is between the alternative
vote and first past the post, I think that is a useful choice
to put to the British electorate because at least it will mean
that you sitting here will have the majority of your electorate
and those of us who are voters will no longer have to have people
on our door steps telling us, "You must vote for us because
if you vote for the person you like this person you hate will
get in." I am fed up of having that debate. I would rather
have a positive debate about why voting Conservative or Labour
or for that particular candidate is a good thing. I think that
would be a positive change.
Chair: I am going to speed up just a
little bit and ask colleagues on this side of the table to ask
questions to try and elicit information from the witnesses as
well as giving your own opinions about where we stand on all these
issues.
Q15 Mrs Laing: You will recall, as
some of us do, that Roy Jenkins, then Lord Jenkins of Hillhead,
carried a very long drawn out, in-depth investigations into voting
systems and presented a report in 1998. I recall being there when
he presented it and he threw out AV saying effectively it was
the worst of all systems. May I ask each of our witnesses: was
he right?
Dr Steven: I do not think he was
right. He proposed effectively an AV-plus system, you may recall,
which was rooted in AV.
Q16 Mrs Laing: —which was totally
different from AV. It just happens to have the same letters at
the beginning.
Dr Steven: I think probably there
were more similarities between AV and AV-plus than you say. There
are different ways of answering your question in relation to what
is the worst electoral system and whether the British context
is relevant. I could talk a lot about the worst system and the
best system, but I do not think I agree in principle with that.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I never thought
that the Jenkins Independent Commission was very independent for
various reasons I could go into. The experts advising were very
carefully chosen. I think the whole issue of electoral reform
is one of interest to an equivalent of train spotters and a real
minority group that can give the train numbers because they have
studied that kind of thing is not really of any interest to the
general public and so I completely agree with Dr Hunt on this.
The trouble is that we are only having this referendum because
of the chances of electoral arithmetic and the way in which the
Coalition deal was done. It is of no public interest at all, either
in terms of interest or in terms of benefit, and I think that
the danger is that what Professor Ian McLean has called the anoraky
nerdy people can actually effect a change in the British system
that will be totally undesirable and without the public really
realising what has happened.
Q17 Chair: I will ask Mr Facey to
reply also to that question with a caveat from myself: was it
the inexperience of people dealing with coalitions which led to
Mr Clegg perhaps selling himself and his bargaining short position
and not going for something which was certainly more proportional
than AV?
Mr Facey: Let me answer the question
in terms of whether or not AV was the worst electoral system.
I think even Lord Jenkins would agree with me that first past
the post was a worse electoral system than AV. What he was talking
about and what his Commission's job was was to propose an alternative
to first past the post, so in that case, if you are asking me
to choose between AV and first past the post I think first past
the post is a lot worse than AV. If you are asking me to say are
there better systems than AV my record is well-known on the subject
and I am not going to sit here and say that there are not, but
that is not the choice which we are being given. I have already
said I wish that choice had been more open. The reality is if
Labour had won the last election we would still be having a referendum
on the alternative vote because that is what was is the Labour
manifesto, so it is not just the vagaries of electoral arithmetic
here, it is that this outcome was not that predictable in terms
of it. Whether or not the Liberal Democrats could have played
their hand better and got a more proportional outcome is a really
difficult one to answer. In some ways I will leave it up to historians
to judge in terms of it. I think the reality is that Members of
Parliament are extremely wedded to single member seats. I wish
you were not. I wish you did believe more in competition and you
believed that there was a more competitive style of politics but
MPs are extremely wedded to their individual constituency, and
therefore a referendum between two single member constituencies
is not actually that unsurprising and it is not surprising that
politicians when it came to it chose the two alternatives which
were effectively both single member systems, which is why I do
believe that it should have been the voters on a citizens' jury
who decided on what the alternative was rather than politicians
who have a self-interest in it.
Q18 Chair: I am going to wrap this
piece up because we are using virtually all our spare time on
this by asking two quick questions.
Mr Facey: By the way, I accept
I am an anorak. I would also point out that Michael is an even
bigger anorak with a longer history on it, but anoraks are useful
when it is raining.
Chair: Simon and Peter, I will take both
your questions together.
Simon Hart: May I go back to Tristram
Hunt's point about the public appetite for this because if we
take the 2010 election where there was a higher turn-out than
the previous one, incumbents did better than everybody expected
despite the climate that was surrounding politics, and you in
your own paper talked about a wave of public opinion in favour
of electoral change, it being popular with the public, if we are
truly reflecting public need here, where is the evidence? The
only party which did not have something about this in their manifesto
was the Conservatives who ended up getting more votes than anybody
else as it happened. Where is the evidence that supports your
assertion that there is some great public movement and thirst
out there? Surely that is what we should be reflecting? What the
individual MPs want is irrelevant.
Q19 Sir Peter Soulsby: My question
is specifically to Dr Pinto-Duschinksy: when you were describing
earlier on your fears for the future you talked about AV leading
to full proportional representation. That is the way in which
you characterised it on a couple of occasions. That is not of
course what we have got in front of us. What we have in front
of us is a proposal (it may be many people's aspiration but it
is a proposal) for AV as an end state. Do you have the same fears
about the change to AV if it were to be an end state rather than
as you have described where it is a step towards proportionality?
It can be argued that many of the fears that you have expressed
are a long way from the likely outcome and in fact it will make
very little difference.
Mr Facey: At the last election
only two parties had a manifesto pledge of supporting the current
electoral system: the Conservative Party and the British National
Party. All other parties in Great Britain, including UKIP, the
Greens, the nationalists which have seats in this Parliament or
in other parliaments, stood on supporting a change to the electoral
system to some degree. If you want to add up the numbers of votes
for parties which voted for reform and against I can say there
is evidence there. Am I going to say that this is the most burning
issue in the minds of the people in my local pub in a village
in Cambridgeshire? I would not so claim. However, I do believe
that there is an appetite for giving people more power and more
control. As I said, I wish that process had been more open. We
advocated a process whereby a citizens' jury would decide whether
or not there should be a referendum on whether there should be
change or not. That is not the option here. I think the fact we
are having a debate about how you get to this place is a good
thing for our democracy and it is something which is positive.
We will see in the referendum whether or not there is a public
appetite for it. We will be able to judge afterwards whether that
is the case. We will see if you are right or I am.
Dr Steven: I would turn your question
around slightly and say that there is real evidence of a fall
in trust in politicians which actually predates the expenses scandal.
The electoral turn-out generally has been in decline. Party membership
has been spectacularly in decline. There are other indicators
of quality of democracy in Britain which suggest that the average
British voter's perception of the political classes is maybe not
as good as it once was and the notion of public service is being
replaced by career or self-interest and professional politicians.
There is survey evidence that there is this sort of groundswell
of public opinion about that out there. You can only judge the
effectiveness or the success of an electoral system by its own
virtues. We can speculate until midnight about what AV might do
or might not do but the one thing it certainly will do is involve
more people. It will make it more difficult, if you like, for
a single political candidate to get elected to office on the basis
of a minority of votes, if you know what I mean—I am not
putting that very clearly—so in terms of that specific point
it passes, if you like.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I do not
think we should be naive, and I am sure we are not. Labour did
not have AV as a burning issue for itself until the very end when
Labour felt that it would lose and therefore was reaching out
for a possible coalition and therefore it was a deathbed policy
and so to say that it was in the manifesto and therefore Labour
is wedded to it is unrealistic. Similarly, I think it is unrealistic
and naive to think that Mr Clegg loves AV. He wants it as part
of a two-step process towards PR in the hope that it increases
the chances of a second hung parliament, which it would do, and
at that stage he would demand full PR. That is clearly what the
scenario is and so I think to say that the issue in front of us
is AV so let us ignore the real politics of it would be a great
mistake, and, indeed, one of the things that I am frightened about,
say, with the Electoral Commission, whose chair after all is a
former member of one of Peter's organisations and so is not exactly
neutral, is that they would want to present it in terms of AV
without looking at where we are heading.
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