perhaps by the noble Lord Lord Norton of Louth, the distinguished chair of your Lordships’ constitutional committee, the wonders of our democratic election-based governance.

Now being by definition an intelligent being, the Martian is of course much taken by this. In particular he wants to know all about our recent general election. So he googles the Internet built into his brain, and comes across an analysis of the results from the admirable Electoral Reform Society.

This is what he learns.
- Of the total electorate, just three in five chose to vote. Of those, a little under 35.2% voted Labour, by far the lowest share of any winning party in the last century and this. So Labour won the votes of 21.6% of the electorate. It was rewarded with 55.1% of the seats in parliament.

- If the Conservatives had polled the same vote-share as Labour they would nevertheless have 116 fewer seats. Labour would still have had an overall majority of 26. To get as many seats as Labour they would have needed 7.5% more votes.

- Only around two-thirds of MPs got 50% or more of their constituency vote. No MP got the support of half their electorate.

- - Every million voters who voted Labour secured 37 MPs; every million Tories 22, every million Lib Dem 10.

- Almost one voter in five voted not for the party they preferred but tactically.

My Lords, I could go on and on. But my Lords, ask yourselves this question. Would the Martian be likely to conclude that none of this mattered: that the advantages of the system in delivering a one-party government outweighed these affronts to justice? Or would he more likely reel away, wondering that his distinguished and brilliant interlocutors could be so blind as to defend such a travesty?

In particular, my Lords, I should have thought that an electoral system with any claim to be democratic has to pass one minimal test. It need not be proportional – we will come back to that. But it must be unbiased. That is to say, the rules of the game have to be such that parties that do equally well in votes should do equally well in seats.

The British electoral system no longer meets that test. Indeed now it fits more readily into the various corruptions of democracy seen round the world, where gerrymandering is employed to keep those in power in power.

The judge in a recent case involving postal vote manipulation recently said our system would disgrace a banana republic. Well, my Lords, I say to you that that is not just true of postal votes. Our system now stands barely better than the systems your lordships regularly deplore in other nations without the law.

Does this matter? By being present today, your Lordships indicate that for you these matters at least need debate and I am grateful. But I think I can illustrate the concern I have by reporting the reaction of other Labour colleagues. What are you doing raising this issue, some have said to me? You are casting doubt on the government’s mandate.

By God I am my Lords! Elections are the supreme authority in any democratic system. They confer on the government the legitimacy to rule. If therefore they are corrupted, so is that legitimacy and so is that authority.

We have seen this, I believe, in the opening days and weeks of the new government. On some days it seems to recognise that the election result was something less than a triumph: the humble listening prime minister who limped back from Sedgefield illustrated this. On other days, we have seen an arrogance that defies belief, a wilful ignoring of the message delivered by the electorate on the basis that it can be ignored thanks to the government’s majority in the Commons.

So far as the people are concerned, as soon as this government starts doing things they don’t like, they will be able perfectly reasonably to retort: “but most of us didn’t vote for you. “

My Lords the legitimacy genie is out of the bottle. It cannot be stuffed back in by the political elite. Either our electoral system is re-examined or our democracy will rot.

I am sure these words come as music to the ears of the Lb Dems, and I cheerfully embrace their support. However, the two big parties still seem determined to defend the system, warts and all.

May I first say a word to the Conservative Party? I am told that those held hostage by terrorist groups have a way of falling in love with their captors. Something rather similar is happening to the Conservative Party.

My Lords, the bias in the present system makes it extremely hard for the Conservatives to win an overall majority. To do so they would need to poll at a bare minimum of 42-43% of the vote.

My Lords, from 1997 to 2005 the Conservative share of the vote rose at a rate of rather under 0.3% a year. On this basis, my Lords, I calculate that they might hope to achieve an overall majority at the election of 2061. In other words, never mind the next Conservative, leader, the next Conservative prime minister of a majority government has yet to be born.

But my main argument today is aimed at my own party, the Labour party. I understand of course that my noble friend the Lord Chancellor is not able to be with us today, though we are delighted to welcome in his stead the noble Baroness Baroness Ashton. However, the noble Lord did take to the airwaves this week to explain to the Today programme his views on this subject. He put forward three arguments with which I want briefly to take issue. First, he said that change would mean coalition government. Secondly, he said, it would encourage extremist parties. And thirdly, he said, there was no groundswell of opinion for change.

My Lords, at the heart of the first two charges lies a crude error. My noble friend was making the schoolboy howler of confusing electoral reform with proportional representation.

There are of course some electoral reformers who support PR, and good luck to them. But I am emphatically not one. I support the broad thrust of the Jenkins committee, of which I was a member. And it took a quite different approach.

It recognised that electoral systems have to balance a number of considerations, sometimes even contradictory considerations, for example the claims of proportionality and of strong government. What Jenkins concluded – and developments since strongly reinforce that conclusion – was that our system was out of kilter, and the balance needed to be restored.

As Jenkins clearly showed, coalition government is not necessarily weak government; the post-war history of Germany shows that. Nor is majority government strong government; think of John Major, and think, perhaps, how things are likely to pan out for this Labour government despite its majority.

Be that as it may, Jenkins would not mean permanent coalition. The AV+ system it recommends is more proportional than the present system, but by no means totally proportional. A government – Labour or Tory – which got somewhere around 42-44% of the vote would have every chance of an overall majority. Ironically this is no more than the Tories require to get an overall majority under the present system.

Nor would it encourage extremists. Pure PR systems do that: Israel’s for example. But under the Jenkins system of county top-ups, extremist parties would not win seats with less than 10% of the vote. The BNP for example would nowhere come near to securing a seat.

The final point the Lord Falconer made, my Lords, was that there was no groundswell of support for change.

My Lords, while my putative Martian was en route for London, it seems that the noble Lord the Lord Chancellor was en route for Mars. On every possible indicator of public opinion, my Lords, concern about the election system has dominated debate since the general election.

NOP’s opinion poll for the Independent showed 62% support for reform. 16,000 people ch have signed up to the Independent’s campaign. Phone-in programmes for example Any Questions and Any Answers have been dominated by the debate. 350 angry reformers – the largest public meeting I have ever seen in this house – filled committee room 14 for a meeting of Make Votes Count, the voting-reform organisation which I chair. And so on and so on. The only place this clamour fails to penetrate is the closed mind of the Lord Chancellor, and I fear that of the prime minister under whom he serves.

May I conclude with some question for my noble friends who is replying to this debate? Can she say a little more about the review of voting systems, promised by the government in its election manifesto and now under way? What are its terms of reference? Is it intended to receive representations and take evidence from outside parties, or is it a wholly private government review? What steps are being taken to test the Lord Chancellor’s proposition that there is no public demand for change? Will the government conduct its own polling? Will it use cicitzen’s juries as was done so successfully recently on this subject in British Columbia? When does she expect the review to be complete? What consultations does the government plan to undertake on its findings?

If I might conclude with one final question; or perhaps more honestly a challenge. Will the government now agree that, after the review, it will fulfil its 1997 election pledge to hold a referendum on the electoral system? – a referendum that would show once and for all whether the Lord Chancellor’s claim that the public is not eager for change is true or false.