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7.30 pm
Mr. Bercow: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) displays his lack of understanding by seeking to equate a local government
ward, in which two or three named representatives are elected to cover perhaps 8,000 or 10,000 voters, with a new European electoral region with up to 11 MEPs representing up to 5 million people? There is no comparison.
Mr. Coaker: The principle is the same.
Mr. Curry: There is no point in telling the electorate, "I am sorry. I cannot do this. What really matters is the principle." The voters are interested in one's ability to deliver. That is what Members of Parliament exist for. That is even more true in the European Parliament, which is a consultative body with a powerful legislative role. There is a more consensual principle in the European Parliament--we can argue about whether that is a good idea--where the two principal groups tend to vote together to get a majority more frequently than here. With the political dividing lines being less strong than here, the role of the individual is more important.
Mr. Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield): If the principle is what counts, would a facility to vote for individual candidates remove the right hon. Gentleman's objections to the electoral regions?
Mr. Curry: If I were stuck with a bad system and wanted to make the best of it, I would infinitely prefer to be able to cast a vote for a named candidate. When we come to that point, I hope that the Home Secretary, whose heart is not in the Bill--any more than his body is at the moment--will agree that it would be sensible to move towards such a system. You will get irritated with both of us, Mr. Martin, if we persist on that, so I shall move on.
It has been suggested that the proposals are sensible because the Government offices for the regions and the regional development agencies cover those areas. However, they do so by different processes. The Government offices were put in the regions because they had been based in London with a series of disparate outposts in the regions before. They were consolidated there to create a greater coherence so that bodies that needed to deal with them had a one-stop shop and could go to one person to deal with a range of problems. That system has been successful, but the argument cannot be extrapolated to the European Parliament.
We are now to have regional development agencies conterminous with the Government regions. The Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning has said that there will have to be a sub-structure in the regions so that Devon and Cornwall, for example, feel that they have their say. We finished the Committee stage of the Regional Development Agencies Bill today, so I am fairly au fait with the issue. The Minister has implicitly acknowledged that we cannot put people under a great millennium-type tent and assume that everyone will find their corner in it. There is no argument for duplicating the situation for MEPs.
We shall eventually have regional assemblies, although that agenda has been heavily postponed. The Deputy Prime Minister was keen on them to start with, but he has retreated on the idea now. They are promised for a future Parliament. All the local councils busily packed their bags and waited, rather like commuters standing on the station only to be told that the train has been cancelled.
Who will represent whom? Will the MEPs carve the area up by geography? Will they carve it up by function, with one taking industrial issues, another taking agricultural issues and others--there are bound to be plenty from the education establishment--taking responsibility for education and training matters? The electorate will not have been consulted on any of that.
Mr. Drew:
I am pleased that the right hon. Gentleman has gone on to education. He has already mentioned business. Does he accept that it is not just the Government who work on a regional level? There are regional branches of the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress. Higher education establishments are looking for a regional role. It is a myth to pretend that only the Government have a regional emphasis. The proposals will link in directly with those organisations.
Mr. Curry:
The hon. Gentleman has missed the fact that being a Member of Parliament or a Member of the European Parliament is like being a doctor, a vet or a parson--we are never off duty. We have to be accessible. People come to us and ask us to do something for them. Accessibility and identity are crucial to being able to deliver what constituents want. A group of MEPs without a local base, possibly competing with each other and ordered by the party rather than the voters--unless the mechanism is changed--will not have the accessibility that I believe is necessary. There is also a danger of inefficient lobbying, with a multiplicity of MEPs falling over themselves and creating the impression--or reflecting the reality--of incoherence.
The examples of other member states do not give us a great clue. I remember dining with my Irish colleagues in the European Parliament. I did not get the impression that there was a surplus of charity when we discussed colleagues with whom they shared a constituency. They found it a bothersome business. Given the chance to get away from the situation, they would have done so. The great problem in Belgium was the linguistic divide, which was a touchstone for many issues.
No one would want the French national list system commended to him. Each faction of each party is reflected on the list. Those who are above No. 17 are home and dry and those who are below No. 23 have no chance. They can all go off to the Bahamas during the election campaign. Only the handful in the middle fight the election. The system is open to massive abuse and is regularly so abused because all the great and the good of the parties stand at the head of their list, get into the European Parliament and then resign a couple of weeks later so that someone else can take their place. Offering oneself for election with the specific intention of standing down for someone else is an abuse of the electorate. That is not the democracy that we have practised in the United Kingdom.
I do not take the view that all forms of proportionality are, by some biblical truth, wrong. We should consider different forms of representation. However, let us be honest. We have two Governments: one here and another--although we do not call them a Government--in Brussels. There is dual sovereignty. Access for the ordinary elector to that other Government, from whom many of the decisions that affect our lives flow, should be as ready as access to the national Government.
The institutions are not necessarily formidable. I have described the European Commission as like a big county council, but more open. The European Parliament is increasingly used by those who want to lobby. The various other European institutions are also surprisingly open. It is a mistake to think of the institutions as an alien power which is entirely closed.
The risk is that we shall make access more difficult, make the institutions more impenetrable, remove the electors from their representatives and remove the representatives from a means of effectively representing those who have elected them. That is why the proposed system is wrong. I support the amendment as a modest attempt to make it a little better.
Mr. Beith:
At least the word "proportionality" passed the lips of the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry). It barely passed the lips of the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), whose heart is not in his amendments. He talked about the Home Secretary's heart not being in the Bill, but the hon. Gentleman really wants to go back to the present system, with a closed list of one and no proportionality.
One knows what the outcome of the election will be in a large number of constituencies--in which parties can place their people--because the system relies on the scale of the party vote. Many of the constituencies are in areas where, such is the distribution of votes, the outcome could be pretty well known from the start. Who gets the nomination gets the seat. It is a closed list of one. The electorate cannot interfere with that without voting against the party.
The hon. Member for Ryedale is seeking to go halfway back to such a system by halving the size of constituencies. The consequence would be to reduce drastically the potential for a proportional result. The hon. Gentleman has gone on and on about poor voters who cannot decide which of the selection of Members of the European Parliament from different parties to go to. Electors are being given a choice. To the hon. Gentleman, the poor elector being unable to decide that matter is far worse than the elector discovering that the votes that he and many tens of thousands of other people cast counted for nothing because nobody was elected as a result of those votes.
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