Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill (Money) (No. 3)

One could start by saying that there is a distinction between offering the public a choice and offering them a proper choice. I agree with the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) that one should trust the public. Our complaint about the proposal is that it is a fraud, because it does not offer a choice that is in any way informed by a study, a concern, or a search for an alternative, but simply a choice between first past the post and AV. AV has never been adduced as a sensible alternative to first past the post in any independent inquiry that has been held, so there must be another reason for offering this particular choice. I do not always disagree with the hon. Gentleman's views, as he well knows, but it is not trusting the people to present them with a fake choice. This choice is being offered simply because it is convenient to the Government, not because it is something that the public want or can exercise. There is no widespread demand for a change in the electoral system: there is widespread demand for a change in the way that this Parliament works, which is a wholly different matter. I might have had some sympathy with the Government if I did not know that they are not prepared to allow the House a proper consideration of the Wright committee's report. If they were in the course of coming to the House to make real decisions about giving Back Benchers the opportunity to control the Executive in the way that we once did and could again, they would be able also to suggest that the electoral system might be improved. However, as they have consistently diminished the power of the House over 12 or 13 years, they cannot be taken seriously if, in their dying days, they suggest that we should have a different system of election. This Government are the reason for much of the disillusionment in the nation. Under the word ““modernisation””, they conned a new generation of Members of Parliament into giving away the very mechanisms that enabled the House to keep the Executive under control, at least to some extent. That started with the guillotine—the demand that we should at all times ensure that every Bill was controlled by the Government. That has been serious, because it has meant that no Bill has been properly debated in this House since. Without the unelected second House, there would not have been proper consideration of a whole Bill in any circumstance. In addition to that, the Government have insisted that we should have a system that not only has a guillotine but that increasingly uses secondary legislation as a mechanism of avoiding discussion in the House. If we changed that, which the Wright Committee has suggested ways of doing, we would be much more in touch with what the public want than we are in any discussion about electoral reform. However, let us for a moment suggest that we might need electoral reform. I oppose referendums in any circumstance except this one. A referendum is an unsuitable way of making any decision in a parliamentary democracy. I have voted against it, and I believe my party is foolish to have taken it up. It seems to me to be a mechanism that is both foreign in invention and foreign to our system, but it has always been said that if we want to change the electoral system itself, there has to be a mechanism by which we return to the public. I therefore do not object to the referendum as a concept in this case, but I do object to conning the public. What do I say to them? I say, ““You are going to have a choice not between proportional representation of one sort or another and first past the post, but between the disproportional first past the post and the more disproportional AV.”” That is not a choice; it is a ridiculous offering that could be given only by a Government who are cynical in the extreme. I am very sorry about the two poor, pathetic Ministers who have to defend the Government, because both of them are decent and know perfectly well that in a real world they would never be making this argument. The Minister of State, the right hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills), will do his best, of course—that is his job and he will feel that he has to. However, he knows perfectly well that it would be honest to get up and say, ““We are going to give an offering between one system and another,”” but that it is not proper to put forward something that has only one object—to benefit the Government, or the party that the Government hope to entice into coalition if they are in a position to do so. That is what this is about, and we know it. The Minister may smile happily, and he is a genuine and decent man, but if he thinks he can find more than five independent people outside here who have not sussed that out, he will be lucky. Nobody in the country believes that this suggestion has been made for other than mere cynical political reasons. That is the fact. No amount of spin, talking among themselves or discussion will lead anybody outside to believe that this measure is anything other than another cynical move by a very cynical Government.