Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan). I pretty well agreed with everything that he said in his excellent speech, but I wonder whether he might have been giving a slightly different speech today if the Labour party had won 10 more seats and there had been a Lib-Lab Government. However, we will never know—the past is another country. We are where we are, and we have to look at the situation that we have. I am tempted just to adopt the arguments given by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), who made a first-rate speech, but there is a danger that we might complicate matters. There are clearly a lot of political calculations going on, and I do not really know why this is such a macho issue for the Government, or why everything is being rolled out to win the vote tonight, as the Government undoubtedly will. I am not sure why the Deputy Prime Minister is so keen for the referendum to be on the same day as other elections. I suspect that there was a political calculation in the beginning. We can dismiss the argument that the reason why the Deputy Prime Minister wants to have the referendum on the same day is that he wants to save money. We can accept that that is a canard, as it was not his primary motivation. After all, the cost of a general election is some £80 million, and there is no doubt that if an AV system were introduced, that cost would rise steeply, as enormous costs would be tied up in the whole process of redistribution and cutting the number of seats. It simply does not wash that the primary motivation for having the referendum on the same day is the cost. There must have been some political reason, and I presume that that reason was that the Deputy Prime Minister thought that he would have more chance of winning the AV referendum if it were held on the same day. For me, however, that is not the primary issue. Some people might think that I support my hon. Friends, the nationalist amendment or what was said by the right hon. Member for Tooting because I have calculated that if the referendum were held on a different day, I would be more likely to win—or, in other words, that people like me would be more likely to defeat AV—but that is not the issue. The issue concerns what is right. The issue is not whether people support or oppose AV, but that on a matter of major constitutional change, the argument must be out in the open. For better or worse, this country has had a first-past-the-post system for many generations, and it has ensured that we are the only country in Europe that has never been a police state or had a police state imposed on us. It has ensured that this has generally been a freedom-loving and democratic nation, yet we are changing all that. The issue is so important that, irrespective of whether people are for or against AV or proportional representation, the arguments must be properly aired.