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European Parliament Elections Bill

As my hon. Friend will know, this country agreed to change the electoral system at European level from first past the post, and having done so, it would be fairly disingenuous for the Government to go back on it at this stage. Although we may move to another system, we could not now go back to first past the post. I will make a few more comments about that in a moment.

It may help hon. Members if I set out some information about the history of the voting system used in UK elections for the European Parliament. As they will know, direct elections for the European Parliament first took place in 1979. From 1979 until 1994, such elections in Great Britain were held under first past the post. I am very keen to support that system, and I certainly supported it at the referendum in 2011. Great Britain was divided up into a number of single Member constituencies. At each election voters would have one vote, and the candidate in each constituency who received the most votes was returned as the MEP for that constituency.

Since the first elections in 1979, the single transferable vote has been used in European elections in Northern Ireland. That reflects the long-standing practice of using proportional representation and specifically STV in Northern Ireland for elections other than to the House of Commons. My hon. Friend’s Bill proposes no change to the type of voting system used in Northern Ireland at European elections.

The Labour party manifesto for the UK general election in 1997, as the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) said, gave a commitment to introduce proportional representation for European parliamentary elections. Upon taking office, the new Labour Government announced that they intended to introduce a regional list system for the European parliamentary elections. The European Parliamentary Elections Bill was introduced in Parliament by the then Government in October 1997.

That Bill proposed a system where a voter in each region would have one vote which could be cast for either a party or an independent candidate. Hon. Members may be aware that debate in Parliament centred on the type of list system to be used, with a number of attempts

made to introduce a form of open list system, where voters would be able to vote for individual party candidates. The then Government’s preference was for a closed list system. Their concern about the open list system, as suggested by the then Opposition, was that there might be individual candidates who were not elected, while others from another party with fewer individual votes were elected because their party was more successful overall. In other words, voters’ preferences for individual candidates may not necessarily be translated into electoral success. This might call into question the legitimacy of some elected representatives.