Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

On the specific point that it is always a failing Government who go the five years and cling to power until the last before leaving, I recall that the 1987 to 1992 period resulted in the same party being returned.

[Austin Mitchell]

I am baffled—I mentioned Governments in a mess and a Government Member stands up to tell me that the mess was bigger than I thought it was. Is that the point he is making? My point is quite simple. There are deeply unpopular Governments—Governments in such a state as this Government have reduced themselves to in six short months—who hang on to power.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman refers to a Government reduced to the state that this Government are in. They are easy words, but will he clarify his comments?

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[Austin Mitchell]

It says up to five years, and the Government are seeking to make five years the compulsory length of a term, so far as they can entrench that in the constitution. Had the hon. Lady heard the preceding debate, she would have realised that, historically, most Governments have gone to the country before their five years were up.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

That is all very well and good, but the hon. Gentleman is overlooking the fact that, for the first time, Parliament, and not the Prime Minister, will have the power to dissolve Parliament.

[Austin Mitchell]

Parliament will have the power to dissolve Parliament on a two-thirds vote, I think, in this ludicrous legislation, so I am not quite sure what the hon. Gentleman is saying. I am saying that we should legislate for three-year Parliaments, which would be sensible, and I am asking where the five-year term has come from. How did it come into the heads of this Government? Did it spring fully armed from the head of the Prime Minister?

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[Andrew Percy]

I am just a lowly Back Bencher. I cannot answer that question, but the right hon. Lady has made her point and no doubt Ministers will respond to it when they come to the Dispatch Box.

It is important to remember that the subject of the Bill is not one that electrifies the public. We are all in agreement about that. In the Dog and Duck they do not talk about it. In my village the pub is well known—the Percy Arms—and the topic does not come up a great deal there. It is not something that people are talking about or that is tripping off people’s tongues, but that does not mean it is not important. It should be debated properly. Perhaps that is a partial response to the right hon. Lady’s point.

I have been staggered by some of the comments by Opposition Members—the feigned outrage about a five-year term. Many of them were in the previous Government over the last five years—[Interruption.] Sadly, the country knows what it was like as well. I want a four-year term because the experience of the last Government, and perhaps earlier Governments, shows that a five-year term is not necessarily in the best interests of the country. Governments generally expect to go to four years, although there is no requirement for them to do so. When they have run to five years, it is usually because they have known that they were about to be booted out by the electorate. We thus end up with a year of incredibly poor decision making, and this Government have to deal with the consequences of the appalling decisions taken in the last year of the Brown Government.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

On my hon. Friend’s point about Governments campaigning in the last year, one of the things that I find most disturbing is the premise that in a five-year Parliament, Members take no notice of their constituents until the last year. That may explain why the majority of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) fell to just 714.

[Andrew Percy]

I hope that politicians on all sides take notice of their electorate at all times. The problem with going to a three-year term is that they may take less notice of their constituents and a great deal more notice of the newspapers. Given that Governments tend to be most responsive to newspapers in the last year or six months before an election, the risk with a three-year term is that the Government would be beholden to the newspapers and chasing headlines for the entire term of office.

On the clash of elections, I have sympathy with those representing countries with devolved Assemblies. I would not want a Welsh Assembly election or a Scottish Parliament election on the same day as a general election, but it is a bit inconsistent for some on the Opposition Benches to suggest that a clash of elections is always bad news, because they deliberately arranged for that by holding European and local government elections on the same day, using two different voting systems. However, that is best avoided. I accept that the case for a general election is a little different and that a general election should be held separately from the elections in the devolved regions.

I have no academic or study to quote on the four-year term; I just feel in my gut that it is the right length of time for a Government. A four-year term is better because it would fit with local government elections and devolved assemblies. The Canadian Government changed from five to four years a couple of years ago, and we have heard about the three-year terms that exist in Australia and New Zealand. For me, four years would be a more appropriate term for us to be in office. There is an acceptance that after being in power for five years, we tend to be a little too detached from the electorate, and consequently end up making bad decisions. However, I cannot support the three-year term proposed by my near neighbour, next door but one, in Great Grimsby. That would throw us into a perpetual state of elections. It is often said about US congressional elections that American Congressmen are in a perpetual state of election, which is why they have so many earmarks and pork barrelling; they have no sooner got themselves to Washington DC than they have to run back to their electorates to try to gain election.

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[Chris Bryant]

I will come on to why I think five years is an inappropriate length of time. However, I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s comments. I will admit lots of things in this speech, but I will not admit what he has just told me to admit.

My argument is essentially that four years is a better term for a fixed Parliament than five years. A five-year legislative provision for a maximum length of a Parliament has served us not too badly and may well be okay, not least because it has meant in practical terms that Parliaments have tended to be more like four years, precisely as Asquith intended in 1911. But a fixed five-year term is overlong, and the main reason why we have that is that the Government want to continue until May 2015, which is an inappropriate use of constitutional reform.

The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole said that he was absolutely certain that there could not have been any underhand skulduggery. I think he was using irony, if not sarcasm, and irony does not always translate perfectly into Hansard. His Dog and Duck test is right. The vast majority of voters are not obsessed with the length of a Parliament, but they do know when a Parliament has had its day, and for the most part, by the time we get to four years in this country, certainly since the second world war, most electorates have started to say, “You know what, it’s time we had a general election.”

[Alec Shelbrooke]

First, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that there is no reason right now why this Parliament will not go to May 2015—it is perhaps just wishful thinking on the Opposition Benches—and, secondly, will he confirm whether his party supports fixed-term Parliaments?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, I was just about to come on to the point that I wholeheartedly agree with fixed-term Parliaments. It was wrong for Conservative, Labour and, for that matter in the past, Liberal, Whig and any other kind of Government to be able either to cut and run, as the Deputy Leader of the House said in a sedentary comment earlier, or to choose to hang on until something comes along. It is better to have a fixed term.

Interestingly, in 1950, Stafford Cripps—your predecessor, Ms Primarolo, by I do not know how many—argued forcefully to Clement Attlee that there should be a general election before a Budget, because, if the election were held after, it would look as if the Government were trying to bribe the electorate, which would be wholly inappropriate.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Those were the days.

[Chris Bryant]

Those were the days, eh? When high-mindedness ruled.

The point is surely that it should not be within the power of the Government to determine the rules. It is like the situation in which everybody is running a 100 metre race, but the starting gun is held by the person in charge, and sometimes he decides to shoot some of the runners instead of just starting the race.

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[Chris Bryant]

That is right, but that is a point in relation to clause 2 and at the moment we are dealing with clause 1. [Interruption.] At the moment we are talking about clause 1. In fact, the Bill is not really a fixed-term Parliaments Bill, because it does not determine how many days it should sit within those five years; it is a fixed-term elections Bill: it determines when elections shall be. There are things that we need to change in relation to Prorogation and so on, and we shall come on to that at another point in the debate, but, for the most part in this country, after four years and often before, the mandate on which the Government were elected becomes pretty thin, and they start doing things—sometimes pretty unpopular things—that were not clearly outlined in their manifesto. The party or parties might have made all sorts of commitments before they went into government, but events come along or the Government suddenly discover things that mean they have to break those manifesto promises or commitments, and the longer that a Government go on after four years, if they do so, the more likely they are to undermine respect for Parliament.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman, in his outrage, is almost saying that we are attempting to increase the length of a Parliament, but we could go to May 2015 as things stand in statute today. That does not involve extending the length of this Parliament. His other point is that Parliaments can run out of steam over five years, but that has been the problem of previous Governments, because they have governed in the short term, rather than for the long term and for the good of the country.

[Chris Bryant]

That is where there is a need for a balancing act, and that is why I do not support a three-year Parliament, which my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) advocates, or a five-year Parliament. I support a four-year Parliament, which in most constitutions throughout the world seems to be the period at which people have arrived. The Government would have at least three good Sessions in which they could advance their legislative cause, and if they wanted to do difficult things in the first and second years but retain their ability to recover their position in time for an election after four years, they would be able to do so.

One of the other things that happens in government itself is that, after four years, a lot of people become pretty tired. That was certainly true in the previous Parliament, in John Major’s Government and in Baroness Thatcher’s Government, and, because of that concatenation of tired people, many more ex-Ministers no longer have an investment in the future and do not intend to stand at the next general election, so in practice attendance in the House is much lower during the last year of a five-year Parliament than in the preceding years.

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[Chris Bryant]

Indeed. My right hon. Friend makes a very good point; she is right. I think that that Parliament ran for four years and seven months.

The second reason I think that five years is too long and four years would be better is that five years is longer, in practice, than applies virtually everywhere else, certainly within the European Union. Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Spain all have, for their lower Houses, fixed or maximum Parliament lengths of four years.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

What about France?

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[Chris Bryant]

I will come on to them, and indeed they add to my argument, but I just wish to finish with France, for the further satisfaction and delight of the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). As I am sure he is aware, there have been 18 general elections to the Assemblée Nationale since 1945, which in large measure is because the President has the power to suspend the Parliament early if he wants to, and has frequently done so since 1945. The only restriction is that he cannot do that if he has already done so in the past year. In effect, therefore, there is not a fixed five-year term but a maximum five-year term, and elections have been held in October, November, March and June. In fact, the number of full five-year terms has been low. Again, that makes my point that a fixed five-year term for the British Parliament will mean that we have the longest Parliaments and the least frequent general elections of any country in the European Union.

As the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said, it is not just the situation in the European Union that should matter. Five years is longer than in any of the other Westminster democracies as well. As he and others have said, New Zealand and Australia have three-year terms. They are not actually fixed terms in either case, they are maximum three-year terms, and I know that plenty of people there would like to be able to change to a four-year term because they think that three years is too short a time. In practice, three years ends up being a fixed term, because who would want to have elections more frequently than that? He is also right about Canada, where there is a four-year term.

However, there are some exceptions. I thought that the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell would leap up and ask, “What about India?” The Lok Sabha, whose Members are elected in a similar way to ours in the sense that there are single-member constituencies, is elected for a maximum of five years. However, leaving aside the suspension of elections during the state of emergency from 1975 to 1977, there have been Parliaments of one, two, three or four years on several occasions since 1952. In practice, because it is quite easy to hold early general elections in India, it does not feel as though there is a fixed term of five years. Again, we will be going longer than most.

In South Africa, the National Assembly has supposedly been elected for five years ever since independence, but every term between 1966 and 1989 lasted four years or less—some might say “fewer”, but it depends on how one looks at it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I say again to the hon. Gentleman that this Parliament will still have the power to have an election before the end of the fixed term.

[Chris Bryant]

Unless the hon. Gentleman is going to support us on amendments to clause 2—I look forward to his arguments, because we will have to ensure that he is consistent—he must accept that the Bill provides tough measures to ensure that the calling of an early general election will be pretty difficult, if not virtually impossible, given the parliamentary system.

To continue with Parliaments in the Westminster-style democracies, Papua New Guinea has consistently had fixed-term elections every five years since 1972, but it has more than 20 political parties, and only one party in the Papua New Guinean Parliament has more than eight members out of the 109. Again, that is a very different situation.

I therefore point out to Members that since the 1970s the only two places that have stuck to five year Parliaments, which are what the Bill is intended to give us on a permanent basis, are Papua New Guinea and Luxembourg. I just do not think that they provide an appropriate model. Even in the Dáil, which obviously has a five-year term and has done since 1923, the average term has been three years and three months. I argue that the Government are trying to extend the practical length of Parliaments, which is inappropriate.

The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr referred to Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh elections. His amendment 11 refers to the elections in 2015. I do not know whether the Government want to have a lot of elections on the same day, or whether they want to try to separate elections out consistently. In the USA, as several hon. Members have said, there is a deliberate constitutional construction to ensure that a lot of elections happen at the same time on the same day, on a two-yearly cycle. That is not the model that we have tended to adopt in the UK, although we have ended up with local elections, and now the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections, happening on the first Thursday in May.