Political Parties and Elections Bill

I apologise for having arrived late. One of the hazards of the date of Grand Committee sittings changing is that one has diary conflicts which prevent one being punctual. I had assumed that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would have something to say about Westminster. In the famous words of Willie John McBride, the Ulster forward in the British Lions team, I had intended to get my "retaliation in first". However, I shall read carefully what he said. If I feel it is necessary to rebut any of it, and he refers to it on Report, I shall do so then. I have no intention of prolonging the proceedings by guessing what he said about my former constituency. I shall say two generic things about my former constituency and one thing, which may be germane, arising out of my electoral experience there over 24 years. First, as a number of rude things have been said about Westminster, I say that when Charles James Fox fought Midhurst, he required seven votes to be elected; when he fought Malmesbury he required 13 votes to be elected; and when he arrived in Westminster he was confronted by an electorate of 6,000. So liberal was the franchise in Westminster, that after the Great Reform Bill, the electorate in Westminster fell because it had been more liberal than that which had been brought in in 1832. My second point relates to the kind of constituency. I do not want it to be regarded as wholly typical of every constituency in the country. It is regarded by the European Union as the richest area in the European Union, due to a false statistical calculation under which it divides GDP by residents instead of dividing GDP by the number of people who work in the area. As 750,000 people come to work in my former constituency, that somewhat distorts the calculations of how much wealth is being produced. Interestingly, and this is not surprising in an inner-city seat, the poverty statistics for my former seat are calculated by the percentage of households which meet the normal standard poverty indices. My former constituency was the 48th poorest constituency in the country and, therefore, it was a remarkable constituency to represent. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would be doing the Grand Committee a mild disservice if he implied that it was typical of all constituencies in the country. My third point relates to something which I heard the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, say. After the 1983 general election when, for the first time, the boundaries of my constituency went outside the boundaries of the old City of Westminster and took in parts of what had been St John’s Wood and St Marylebone, the constituency had the lowest turnout of any constituency in the country. I said to my agent, "I don’t mind if we move up only one place at the next general election, but it would be acutely embarrassing for me if we had the lowest turnout in the country two elections running". Over the next 14 years, we moved upwards to where our turnout was the 25th lowest. We overtook 24 constituencies during that period, which I thought was an adequate effort by our canvassers. Canvassing in an inner-city seat makes me deeply proud of the British postman. To find all the addresses in an inner-city constituency is a remarkable achievement. I march, in part, with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, in that the 24 seats which we overtook were all inner-city seats or they were in Northern Ireland. There was no exception to that at all. There is a problem which is concentrated in certain areas. That rise over 24 seats was also achieved against a steadily rising population. Again, one would have to look at all the figures to be sure that something significant was not to be derived from the fact that those seats constituted the categories to which the noble Lord referred, especially as inner-city seats are necessarily highly mobile. I want to say one last thing about Northern Ireland. The noble Lord made much of the movement in the figures, and of course I understand what has happened in the past seven years. In Northern Ireland before the 2002 legislation, there was fraud going on, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, said. If you go back to the 2002 electoral figures, before that new legislation, you may well have an inflated figure from which there was a subsequent fall. I am not absolutely confident that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made allowances for that in what he said.