S4M-15709 Scottish Elections (Dates) Bill: Stage 3

The Presiding Officer (Tricia Marwick): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-15709, in the name of Joe FitzPatrick, on the Scottish Elections (Dates) Bill.

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15:49

Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

The bill—all 200 words of it—was looked at intensively by the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee and we reported, in a mere 1,000 words, our conclusions in its support.

It is part of the continuum of reform, over a long period, of our process of representative democracy, which started perhaps with the great reform act of 1832, which took the vote away from women who, if they had been head of the household and met the property qualification, had had the vote until that point.

The Representation of the People Act 1867, which quadrupled the size of the electorate, caused its own problems. In 1872, we had to introduce secret ballots, the first of which took place at Pontefract on 15 August of that year. The minister should be aware that, at that time, if appointed to office as a minister, one had to resign one’s seat and fight a by-election before being permitted to take up ministerial office. That led, in the 1880s in Scotland, to the situation in which a member had been elected to the Westminster Parliament in a by-election, was appointed a minister, and immediately had to resign and fight another by-election. They were only eight days apart. We think that we have too many elections; perhaps, then, there were even more.

When Winston Churchill lost his seat in Dundee in 1922, there was a first-and-second-past-the-post system, in which we had a single vote but elected two members. In 1945, in the university seats, for which we elected three members using a single transferable vote system, the third member, a Conservative, the third member was successfully elected on the seventh round of redistribution of votes, having also lost their deposit—an outcome that I wish for many of my Conservative friends in the forthcoming election.

It is said that, in political debate, the debate is not always over when everything has been said but merely when everyone has finally said it. I think that everything that can be said about this bill has probably now been said.

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