Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I join colleagues from across the House in warmly welcoming my hon. Friend the Minister back to her place. It is a great pleasure to see her back here today.

I rise in very strong support of this Bill. It is a long overdue redress of our constitutional balance and the use of the royal prerogative. The Bill reasserts that Parliament is sovereign in our democracy over what are fundamentally political decisions.

Let me speak to clause 1. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which this Bill repeals, is a prime example of how short-term measures, necessary at the time, can have very hazardous long-term implications for our constitution. I understand why the coalition Government considered it necessary to bring in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) set out those reasons in what I thought was a very thoughtful speech earlier on. There were both political and economic considerations at the time. The reverberations of the financial crisis were still being felt, and the economic mess that was left behind by the outgoing Labour Government needed urgent and stable administration, but the election of 2010 did not deliver that. A clear outcome had not been achieved, so there was a need to show that the Government would provide stability for a full term. Whether the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was required to achieve that, or a simple Bill fixing the length of a single Parliament, is something that we could debate endlessly. However, we have to deal with what is, and the detrimental trade-offs have been shown to be patently obvious.

The Joint Committee of both Houses, established under section 7 to review the Act, found it flawed in several respects. There are still unanswered conundrums in key areas, which demonstrate why the Act should be repealed. For example, who governs after the 14-day period following the successful passage of a no-confidence vote? Is the Prime Minister still in charge? Should he or she resign immediately? Who takes over and how? What if an agreement is reached on the 15th day?

Secondly, how do other traditional confidence motions such as the Budget and the Queen’s Speech tie into the Act when statutory provisions mean that the Government could refuse to put a specific motion before the House? Thirdly, and most crucially, the gridlock, uncertainty and, eventually, utter paralysis that became the hallmarks of the bitter disputes of 2019 meant that we faced the absurd situation in which the Government could neither legislate nor go to the country. I can testify, as somebody who was a member of the general public and not a Member of this House at the time, to how that massively undermined the status of Government and Parliament in the eyes of the general public. Every single person I spoke to was tearing their hair out at what they saw as self-indulgent paralysis in this House.

My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster outlined the important elements contained in clauses 2 and 4 of the Bill. I will focus on clause 3, which is extraordinarily important because it safeguards due political process from interference. Events during the last Parliament showed that the judiciary can be used and abused by activists to wage political wars through the courts. One of the most dangerous aspects of the Miller and Cherry case was that not only did a group of largely unelected elites seek to thwart the democratic will of the British people—I hasten to add that the 2016 referendum result was finally vindicated when we eventually had an election in 2019—but the sovereign was drawn into a partisan dispute. It is paramount for our constitutional democracy that the sovereign must be, and must be seen to be, above party political battles.

The Bill will help to prevent such a situation from arising again by making the revived prerogative powers non-justiciable. That is wholly welcome. For those reasons, I will support the Bill, and I congratulate the Government on delivering another of their manifesto commitments.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I think the danger is precisely the opposite. The arrangements that the hon. Lady would like us to have are ones that put the monarch in a regular position of making a decision, and brings them closely into not only party politics, but sometimes into partisan politics within a political party. It is perfectly possible that a Prime Minister might have lost, or be about to lose, the confidence of their political party, but that political party might still want to govern and carry on under a different leader. In other words, there may be within the House an alternative Government who would be better for the nation.

My other problem is that there seems to be a very high theological understanding of the role of the Executive. I think the former Leader of the House set that going with his rather Stuart early-17th-century understanding of the constitution, which is that basically, as long as the Prime Minister has the confidence of the House of Commons, he or she should be allowed to do pretty much anything and, frankly, parliamentary democracy is a little bit of an irritant. It is worth always bearing in mind that the Executive today is the only body who can ensure that business and legislation are considered, and the only body who decide when Parliament sits, when it will go into recess, and how long it will go into recess for. If we had the same rules today as we had in 1939, nobody would have been able to table an amendment to the recess debate that led to the big row before the beginning of the second world war. Today we have an Executive who are more powerful than they have been at any stage since the early 17th century, and it is time, occasionally, that the House of Commons said, “You know what? We’re a parliamentary democracy. Let’s take just a tiny bit of power into our own hands.”

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I will be brief as I gather I have only a few minutes to speak. The Lords amendment would require the House of Commons to give prior approval to a dissolution of Parliament, and that would be done by simple majority rather than the two-thirds majority required by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. On the face of it, that would be an improvement to the existing position, but it is still something of a half-way house that causes confusion. In the event that a Government lose their ability to command a majority in the House of Commons, it does not automatically follow that the House would vote to approve an election.

For example, it may suit Opposition parties to keep a lame-duck Government in place, so that they can inflict parliamentary defeat after parliamentary defeat, as a means of further undermining confidence in the Government. But in whose interests would that be? Certainly not the interests of the country. As hon. Members have said, we very much saw that in the “zombie” Parliament of 2017-19, when Parliament initially refused to allow an election to take place. The country became ungovernable, and contempt for Parliament rose dramatically—I speak as somebody who was outside Parliament at that time, and who shared in that contempt. I submit that that is not in anyone’s best interests.

We recently heard some confused interventions on this matter from the other place. For example, a Liberal Democrat peer asked:

“But why should a Prime Minister who cannot get a majority of the House of Commons for an election be entitled to a Dissolution?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 February 2022; Vol. 818, c. 1590.]

I am still not sure whether that was a rhetorical question or whether the Lord in question was trying to figure it out for himself. Either way, it is non-sequitur reasoning because in the example he gave, a Government would not seek to dissolve Parliament unless they found it impossible to gain simple majorities in the first place. In my opinion, a rather better, and frankly rather more honest question would be: why would Parliament want to avoid an election, unless it feared that the result would go against its own wishes? That is the real question that those who support the Lords amendment must ask themselves.

There is concern in certain quarters that going to the electorate to seek a new mandate would allow an opportunistic Government to call an election at a convenient time to increase their majority. It is true that the power to call an election gives an advantage to a sitting Government, but that ability is a double-edged sword and can seriously backfire against a Prime Minister seeking to exploit a perceived opportunity. Post-war history is replete with examples of an incumbent Government misreading the political situation, and calling an election that fails to deliver the result they wished for. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1970 and Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in February 1974 are obvious examples of that. Similarly, a failure to call an election can damage an incumbent Government. The obvious recent example would be from 2007 when Gordon Brown publicly flirted with calling an election, only to back off at the last moment and cause irreparable damage to his public image as a result. The power to call an election—or not—does not automatically confer an insuperable advantage on the incumbent Government. The Lords amendment is therefore completely unnecessary, and I will continue to support the Bill as it stands.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Members across the House want the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, but in its defence, it was a creature of its time and it delivered stable government for five years. Let us not reinvent history regarding why it was introduced in the first place. It disappoints me that so much of this debate has been seen through the prism of 2019. That was a unique political position where we were divided by an issue that crossed party and electoral politics. We risk making very bad law on the basis of what happened in that history.

Call me old-fashioned, but I am a romantic when it comes to our constitution. We have an unwritten constitution, and the less of it that is written, the more likely it is to flex to meet those challenges. On that basis I am opposed to the Lords amendment. However, equally, while the Government’s stated ambition is to go back to the status quo ante, the existence of the ouster clause goes beyond that, and the amendment is an alternative to that ouster clause—it is another way of ousting the courts from deliberation on our proceedings—so the ouster clause’s existence makes a strong argument for it as an option.

I regret that we are having this debate. As Conservatives, we ought to stick to the more romantic view of our constitution and be able to expect Prime Ministers to behave well and honourably in their deliberation with monarchs so that monarchs are never put in that difficult position. However, we have the Lascelles principles, which articulate the occasions where the monarch can be empowered to involve themselves in politics, and that should be enough. I recognise that the argument is lost—it was probably lost in 2011 when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was passed, and it certainly was when we came to the sad events of 2019—but I hope that we can go back to normal.