Scotland and Wales Bill

Part of Schedule – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 25 January 1977.

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Photo of Sir Peter Emery Sir Peter Emery , Honiton 12:00, 25 January 1977

The situation is such that, if the votes of Conservative Members were taken—to say nothing of the votes of Conservatives throughout the country—the overwhelming view would be against proportional representation.

11.0 p.m.

If I may carry that a stage further, many of us are worried about this debate and the way in which the proportionaal representation argument has been put forward on this Bill. We see it as a foot in the door—and that has no relation to the Leader of the House. The view has been openly expressed by some hon. Members while advocating this policy for this Bill that they saw it is a first stage in bringing in the structure of proportional representation for the whole United Kingdom. The basis of my approach in opposing this amendment is that if we take it for Wales or Scotland, it would be the first move in the direction of increasing pressure to bring it in for the whole United Kingdom.

The second part of this is that the proposers of proportional representation have pointed out, quite fairly, that the present first past the post system has a number of inadequacies and in some ways may be judged unfair. I believe that to be true but I ask those who oppose the amendment what assurances I can have that what they wish to put in its place will not itself have inadequacies and be unfair. I know of no democratic system of election which has no inadequacies and which is not basically in some areas unfair.

The German illustration has been used many times in this debate, but nobody has yet pointed out that, irrespective of topping-up, the whole German system has no relationship of German MPs to constituencies, a relationship which is the whole basis of this House. If people want the German system and think it better than ours, they should go to look at what happens in Bonn and at some of the fights and party caucus troubles in the German experiments. It is better than Germany has ever had previously in any democratic Assembly but is a long way short of what we have been able to achieve in this House.

If one looks for other illustrations, people will point to the United States of America as the great demonstration of democracy working well, but the inadequacy of the American system is such that even when there was a 2 million votes lead in the popular vote, 55,000 votes the other way, spread between Ohio and Hawaii would have meant that Mr. Ford would be President today.

I know of no system in the world devoid of inadequacies and weaknesses. Until someone can show me that what he wants to put in the place of what we have been able to build up over many years must certainly be better than what we have, I am against the experiment.

I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Sir N. Fisher) earlier in the debate what he had to say about the fact that if the amendment had been adopted throughout the United Kingdom, we should have had nothing but coalition Governments ever since the First World War. I do not believe that our British structure of democracy favours coalition in this House. Any system which works for a structure of coalition Government would be weakening the structure of government as I want to see it. I find the move towards proportional representation a great weakness because of that argument.