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Mr. Cash: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I hope that this is a point of order.
Mr. Cash: It is indeed a point of order. It is about the application of conventions in this House. The Home Secretary has just alleged that there was a Labour manifesto commitment on this issue. That is not the case--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. If the hon. Gentleman catches my eye, he may be able to rebut the Home Secretary's argument, but it is not for me to worry about what the Home Secretary says.
Mr. Straw: I shall give way to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), and then I shall get on.
Mr. Brady: I apologise if I spoil the Home Secretary's fun by returning the debate to its theme. Instead of discussing the House of Lords, perhaps he could consider the difference between the democratic legitimacy of someone elected as a candidate standing in an open election and that of someone who is elected simply because the leader of his party put him at the top of a list.
Mr. Straw: I shall come to that.
We would not be holding these debates were it not for the fact that the other place has sent the issue back to us for the fourth time. Our manifesto commitment was clear--to introduce a proportional system of representation for the European Parliament. As with any party's manifesto, we did not set out every last detail, on that or anything else. That is a verity for all parties.
The closed-list system is used by more voters than any other system in Europe. Moreover, as I shall remind Conservative Members at greater length in a moment, it is a system that their own party used in the 12 months before the general election. They might therefore have spotted that it was the system most likely to be used.
I know of no Conservative candidate--I shall be happy to give way if there is one--who, whether he or she won or lost a seat at the general election, raised the issue of what kind of list system we should use for the European elections. Everybody understood what we intended to do.
Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate)
rose--
Mr. Straw:
I shall not give way; I have already given way many times.
The other place asked us to think again, yet it has offered us no new arguments to support that request. I have studied carefully what was said there. Yesterday's debate was notable for an excellent speech by the former Labour Prime Minister, Lord Callaghan, who made the important point that no electoral system is perfect, but that the open-list system contains within it, as I have shown, the possibility--indeed, the likelihood--of perverse results. My noble Friend also exposed the Conservative party's tactics for what they are--nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with opportunism.
Another notable aspect of the debate in the other place was what was not said. No new arguments in support of open lists were advanced, and no attempt was made to justify the perverse results that they can produce, or to say how those would be explained to a bemused electorate.
I shall spell the problem out, because I do not believe that Conservative Members properly understand what would happen. In the other place, the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, Lord MacKay of Ardbrecknish, said that he accepted that, under the open-list system, someone might be elected despite having received fewer votes than someone else on another party list. I take that admission as an important sign that, at long last, the penny has dropped a little with at least some of the supporters of the fundamentally flawed so-called open system.
The noble Lord then spoiled his argument by saying that such an outcome, whereby someone could lose but win, and someone else could win but lose, happens all the time under first past the post--when, he added, one compares one constituency with another.
It is an obvious truth that that may happen when we compare one constituency with another. I cannot quite remember how many votes I got at the general election, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because there were so many, but it was a lot. Other people may have got more votes and lost--but that would have been in another constituency. Nobody in the House was elected having received fewer votes than somebody else in the same constituency. Yet that is the proposition being supported--
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury):
Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw:
No. I want the hon. Gentleman to listen, if he does not mind. If he pays attention, I may consider giving way to him later.
Conservative Members have not yet properly understood the point that I have just made. We are talking not about a comparison between votes cast in different electoral areas, but about votes cast in the same electoral area.
For example, one of the candidates for one of the parties--let us assume that that person is the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler)--may be so well known, in the west midlands, say, that he has got near the top of the list, or even right at the top. Everybody wants to vote for him, and few people want to vote for anyone else in the multi-member constituency. The right hon. Gentleman will get most of the votes, and the other Conservative candidates will get very few. In the other parties, the votes are more evenly distributed, and all the other candidates in the other parties get more votes than the second, third, fourth and fifth Conservative candidates. This point can be reversed.
Under the so-called open, or personal system--and because of the high vote that the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield got--the result would be that people who received more votes than the second, third and fourth Conservative candidates would not get elected, and the people who got fewer votes than them would get elected. I suggest to Opposition Members that that would be an extraordinary and perverse result. What I have said is accurate, and has been acknowledged by Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish. All he could say is that that happens under first past the post--when it does not.
Mr. Brazier:
In trying to make his case that one system of PR is even worse than another, could I ask the Home Secretary to recall in a few months the remark that he made a moment ago--that the great merit of the existing system is that you cannot be defeated by a candidate who gets fewer votes than you, which, of course, would disappear if alternative voting were introduced, as Lord Jenkins has recommended?
Mr. Straw:
It might disappear because of some other things that Lord Jenkins may propose, but not because of the alternative vote. Under that system in single-member constituencies, the only person who can conceivably be elected is the person who receives the most votes. [Interruption.] I know we are talking about second or third preferences, but it is still the person who pops up at the top. Of course I understand that. It is no good the Conservatives getting angry about it. I am not arguing for the alternative vote system, but, under the system advocated by the Conservatives, there would be the most extraordinary results from the so-called open list, which is scarcely an open list at all.
If there were five vacancies under a true open list in a multi-member constituency, the voters would be given five votes. They might be given five votes as crosses to allocate equally, or five votes to allocate in order of preference. Under the Conservative system--which, I suggest, is only dimly understood by Conservative Members--voters in the five-member constituency would be given not five votes, but one vote, so that they could vote for only one candidate of their choice. Having voted for one candidate of their choice, they would trigger the operation of a list.
We are, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has spelt out, trying to save the Conservative party from itself in this endeavour. The Conservative party is saying that people will have a choice, but they will have nothing of the kind--except the oddest kind of choice, in which five vacancies have to share one single vote.
In contrast to the extraordinarily complicated system that the Conservatives are proposing, with the serious and perverse result that the winners lose and the losers win--
a system which can best be described as last past the post--there is the closed-list system. The great merit of the closed-list system is that the voters know exactly what they will get. They vote for the list as a whole, and they choose which team they wish to support.
Mr. Martin Bell (Tatton):
Speaking as the only Cross Bencher in this place--although I am not allowed to speak from the Cross Benches--can I wonder whether the British, as a free people, should not be voting for individuals rather than a party slate?
Mr. Straw:
The hon. Gentleman is the exception in this House that proves the rule. He stood as an independent candidate without a party.
Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover):
The Labour party backed him. [Laughter.]
Mr. Straw:
My hon. Friend also makes my point, and I am deeply grateful to him--as ever. The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell) may have had Labour party backing, but he stood as an independent. The people of Tatton had a choice between a Conservative candidate, who happened to be named Hamilton, and an independent candidate--the hon. Gentleman.
All the rest of us, who carry party labels, came here as party candidates on closed lists of one. [Interruption.] It is no good Conservative Members complaining about that, because it is the truth, for the following reason.
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