Reconnecting Britain

Speech by Chris Huhne delivered to Speech at the AGM of the Electoral Reform Society, Mothers Union, Tufton Street on Sat 30th Jun 2007

By all accounts, Monday will be an important day for constitutional reformers. The Cabinet discussed the issue on Friday. Jack Straw, the new Minister of Justice charged with constitutional reform, is due to make an announcement to MPs on Monday. Ahead of that announcement, I want today to set out what I think are the criteria of a sensible package. How will we know whether it is the real McCoy or that we have been sold a pup?

Let us start with what everyone says they want, whether Labour, Liberal Democrat, nationalist or Conservative. There is a surprising consensus that the electorate no longer feels connected to the political process. Voters do not own the decisions taken in their name. Many people feel alienated from the system. Most people do not know how to change things, or whether change is even possible. This is a dangerous situation for any democrat. We must all aspire to a political system that rests on the legitimacy of consent if not enthusiasm.

Let me as a side point say that it is a particularly dangerous situation for anyone from the progressive or radical side of politics. If the electorate do not believe that the state can become an engine of change - or even set a firm direction - then the chances of persuading voters to opt for a radical programme is negligible. Radicalism inevitably rests on a belief in the state as agent of change.

Various things follow from the desire for reconnection. Perhaps the first is that the voter needs to be able to identify someone that they know who has real power to change things for the better in their community. All politics is local, as Speaker Tip O'Neill once said. And connectedness has to build up - as once it did - from a clear relationship between the elector and their representatives. This was a theme of the Royal Commission set up in Norway to look at the health of democracy, and it is surely right.

Why do I mention it at the annual general meeting of the Electoral Reform Society? Because the destruction of local government in this country was largely a product of our electoral system combined with a trend to more extreme politics particularly in the inner cities, as epitomised by Ken Livingstone's first tenure as London leader at county hall. Visiting county hall in those days was rather like picking your way through the worker's cooperative set up to service the first self-governing soviets of Petrograd. It was mad. Lambeth, Southwark, Islington. All suffered the same phenomenon.

But that was democracy, you might say. Except that many of them were elected with wholly artificial majorities - and wholly insignificant oppositions - because of the first past the post electoral system. So our present electoral system, by making it so much easier to pursue unaccountable policies in local government has acted as an invitation to central government diktat: the steady erosion of discretion over spending, the capping of rates and then council tax. Clearly, local authorities were so badly run by such extreme people so removed from local accountability that their powers had instead to be exercised by Whitehall.

The proper response, in my view, would be to introduce an electoral system for local government that allows people to boot out the irresponsible with far more alacrity than first past the post. We need contestability in local government. In this, Scotland has once again acted as the pioneer with its introduction this year of the single transferable vote for its local authorities. For the first time, much of the Red central belt of Scotland is contestable and contested. Competition works in politics just as in economics.

As at local level, so also at Westminster. To involve people more in the political process, voters broadly have to believe two things. First, they have to think that the people they are electing can make a difference. So the powers of the elected matter. No-one is going to trudge to the polling booth to elect the local rat-catcher. Secondly, they have to believe that their own support for one or other candidate will also make a difference. They must believe that their vote matters. So marginality is key. And the principal feature of first past the post is the lack of marginality in most parliamentary constituencies.

Almost any reform of the present electoral system will increase marginality, but none will do so as effectively as the single transferable vote. Not only does STV put more seats in contention between parties, but it also of course has the splendidly liberal property of giving the elector a choice of candidate in their own party. No wonder the professional politicians dislike it. No wonder the party apparatchiks hate it.

In the Irish Dail, more elected members lose their seats to members of their own party than to the opposition. You can be Fianna Fail for life, but still decide that old Paddy should go and nice young Michael should be given a chance. And how do you reconnect the voter? You give them more power to make their vote count.

As electoral reformers, we must also take on this nonsense about strong government. It is not a strong government that introduces 3,000 new criminal offences since 1997, with rarely a parliamentary session without at least five measures affecting criminal justice. It is shocking that so many clauses of key bills - notably on criminal justice - go through the commons without any scrutiny even in committee, such are the pressures of timetabling. This is using legislation as a press release. Such laws are inevitably ill-considered and often short-lived. We desperately need more grit in the system. We need to slow down. We need less legislation, but better legislation. Far from being weaker, our legislation would be stronger if it commanded more consensus in the commons.

Nobody accuses the United States of having weak government, and yet its constitution explicitly separates the executive and the legislature. That would be an option for Britain: we could elect directly the Prime Minister, whose office has quasi-presidential powers, and ensure that the legislature was elected separately. However, every other European Union country effectively reaches the same result by virtue of coalition governments: in a coalition, a minister still faces potential criticism from members of parliament who may support the government but are not of his or her own party. Hence a proportional system of election tends to make for stronger legislatures, and a stronger scrutiny of the executive. That is surely no bad thing. Too often strong government is simply bad government taking ill-considered decisions.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are waking up to this issue. They say that they recognise the need to strengthen parliament at the expense of the executive. But that cannot be done, as the Conservatives recently suggested, by merely changing rules of procedures within the house of commons. Select committees will not seriously embarrass ministers if their composition is determined by the whips of the governing party. It is simply contrary to human nature. People do not go out of their way to make life difficult for themselves. But a small change such as electing committees by backbenchers is not likely to work either: backbenchers of the governing party are unlikely to vote for heavyweight scrutiny that could help to undermine their own majority at the next election. The only way of having strong select committees is by ensuring that a majority of the committee is not of the same party as the minister, and that will only happen with a change in the electoral system.

If we genuinely want to introduce more power for backbenchers, and for non-government parties, we have to change the electoral system. I hope that Jack Straw has taken that key point on board in what he says on Monday. Over the years, there have been many attempts to persuade the thinking classes that either the Government (or more typically the Opposition) is in favour of much greater teeth for select committees and hence commons scrutiny. Such reforms will always fall short unless the fundamental composition of the commons is changed, and ministers are faced by a majority of MPs in whose party and personal interest it is to hold them to account.

The British parliamentary system is reaching a point of crisis. Of waning legitimacy. Of widespread disillusion. It cannot be fixed with sticking plaster any longer. No amount of extra select committees, or fiddling with the royal prerogative on war, or allowing MPs to elect select committee chairs or even the entire membership, will make much difference. There has to be a real shift so that the legislature represents the whole people in all our diversity of views, attitudes and interests. And the legislature has to have real - and unpredictable - power to hold the executive to account. Only then will the house of commons become what it always should have been: the forge in which lasting compromise can be hammered out and which symbolises for everyone the power vested in our state by our people.

Chris Huhne is the chairman of Make Votes Count, the cross party coalition for electoral reform.