Charlie Dewhirst

I absolutely accept that there are many different voting systems that one could employ. Those with a mix between a party list and a constituency list create a two-tier system. What if one of the individuals on the party list were to defect? How would that be resolved? It would create a system even more challenging than the one we already have, which has a direct link between local people and their representative in the House of Commons. One of my concerns is that making the continuation of that representation conditional on membership of a political party might start to weaken that link, which is a strength of the first-past-the-post system, but there is also the question of how it would be dealt with under the varied systems that we have across the range of PR options. Making representation conditional in that way would reduce Members to delegates of their party rather than individuals chosen to represent all their constituents, regardless of who they voted for—a point that is hugely important to us all. As we have discussed, the threat of a by-election could be used to silence Members who feel compelled by their conscience to go against their party. As I just underlined, that is where the challenge about how to legally define an independent comes in. I am very sympathetic to the point that those who go independent should not face a by-election, but those who move from one established party to another should. The danger is that introducing mandatory by-elections would encourage Members to favour loyalty to the party over serving the interests of their constituents, particularly if they believed that those two things were in conflict. Of course, defection is only one means by which a Member can change their party allegiance. While the petition speaks only of defection to another party, there are other methods: resignation, the withdrawal of the Whip, parties’ restructuring and so on are all means by which a Member may choose no longer to represent the party for which they were originally elected. I am sure that no Member believes that every Liberal Democrat should have been forced to stand in a by-election when the Liberals and the Social Democrats merged. This is not the first time that the House has considered the issue of Members changing political allegiance. Previous Governments and Parliaments have wrestled with how to reconcile the independence of Members with the expectations of modern party politics, and in each instance they concluded that the independence of Parliament and its Members should not be constrained through major constitutional change.