Parliamentary Report
Some English regions can- not sustain this balance easily, for example the northeast region has only one Conserv- ative constituency. Select com- mittee Members can be drawn from any region, but specific provision was made for the Grand Committee to include up to five Members from out- side the region.
“This is causing the greatest
offence and suggests great dis- respect to the people in many of the regions,” said Mr Hugh-
es.The amendments were not passed.
Another challenge was to the omission of London from the motions, officially a region of England and the only region without a select committee. Mr Andrew Dismore (Labour), a Member with a constituency in Greater Lon- don, said: “London is the biggest region. It is different from the rest of the country; it has the Mayor and the Greater London Authority. There remains a role for central gov- ernment to
play.There will be no difficulty with political bal- ance in a London committee, because London is one of the few regions that have plenty of Members from all the parties.” Although this amendment was not passed, the Leader of the House did promise that “following on from this resolu- tion,we should turn our atten- tion to London and get on with making arrangements for deepening the scrutiny of pan- London organizations, such as the strategic health authority. Following consultation,we will bring forward proposals to the House early in the new year”. The new regional committees will be set up from January 2009, although given the remaining resistance to the proposed make-up of member- ship, committee nominations may not pass easily through the House.
SEEKING A MORE REPRESEN- TATIVE HOUSE OF COMMONS In November, the House of
Commons set up a Speaker’s conference to examine rea- sons for the under-representa- tion of women, ethnic minori- ty groups and disabled people in the House. The government’s decision to establish a Speaker’s con- ference – an all-party confer- ence on electoral reform under the independent lead- ership of the Speaker – creat- ed the first such conference since 1977. The conference was set up even though the Electoral Commission was established by statute in 2001 to give independent advice to the government on electoral matters.
Ms Harman, suggested that the conference was seen as the way forward as “govern- ment action is not enough, and that is why we need a Speaker’s conference. We need a whole-House approach.” The conferences have their place in the history of elec- toral reform. There were five Speaker’s conferences in the 20th century – the first sitting from 1916 to 1917, which Ms
Rt Hon. Gordon Brown
nic minorities and disabled people in the House of Com- mons and their representation in the U.K. population at large; and may agree to consider other associated matters”. Although previous Speakers’ conferences have lasted for several years, the government said it intends that this one will report before the end of this Parliament, which will be May 2010 at the latest. In what was not the last ref-
erence to the President-elect of the USA, the Leader of the House said: “How could any- one doubt the importance of diversity of representation after the election of Barack Obama? Even before he has set foot in the White House as President, he has reaffirmed and re-legitimized democracy in America. He said ‘yes we can’.We should say ‘yes,West- minster can too’.”
Ms Harman pointed out that on her own election into the House in 1982, 97 per cent of Members of Parliament were male. She mentioned that the first black Members were elect- ed in 1987, and that there are still no female Asian MPs. Although sexual orientation is not explicitly included in the conference’s terms of refer- ence, the Leader made it clear that she expected this to be one of the “associated matters” considered, and expressed the wish that the conference include at least one homosexu- al Member.
Harman reminded the House “secured cross-party agree- ment that women should have the right to vote”. Another conference, which met from 1965 to 1968, ushered in the introduction of the minimum voting age of 18. The new Speaker’s confer- ence is to “consider and make recommendations for rectify- ing the disparity between the representation of women, eth-
Mr Shailesh Vara, Shadow Deputy Leader of the House, speaking for the Conservative Party, welcomed the confer- ence but queried its terms of reference, pointing out that the Prime Minister had originally proposed a much wider range of issues for consideration. He said Rt Hon. Gordon Brown had stated in 2007: “I am pro- posing to the Speaker that he calls a conference to consider against the backdrop of a decline in turnout, a number of other important issues such as registration, weekend voting,
the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons, and that he should also examine in par- allel with the Youth Citizenship Commission whether we should lower the voting age to 16.” Previous conferences have also considered issues such as vot- ing ages, days and turnout. Mr Hughes referred to the amendment tabled by Dr Tony Wright (Labour), Chairman of the Public Admin- istration Committee, which had called for the terms of ref- erence to be broadened to “under-representation of cer- tain groups of citizens in the House of Commons”. This amendment had not been selected by the Speaker, but Mr Hughes said that it raised the issue of including age and sexual orientation in the con- ference’s inquiry. Mr Wright himself, speaking later in the debate, raised the issue of class in two contexts. He talked of the working class origins of the Labour Party and said:“When we talk about under-representation, we have to talk about over-representa- tion too.We know that former public schoolboys are vastly over-represented in the House of Commons. I think that they are the majority ele- ment on the Conservative Benches. Is that primarily a statement about gender or class? The truth is that it is a statement about both, so both have to be included.” He went on to add:“If we are seeing the creation of what one might call a political class – a class of people whose only trade in life has been politics – we are creating a political class that is exclusive, and whose members live in a kind of bub- ble and are disconnected from the rest of society. There are major trends in that direction.” The House passed the motion for the Speaker’s conference without a vote, and it was expected to be set up before the end of the year.
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