Anne McGuire
Main Page: Anne McGuire (Labour - Stirling)Department Debates - View all Anne McGuire's debates with the Cabinet Office
(13 years, 8 months ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
I do not agree that this is an innovation made on the hoof, as it has been discussed for decades. I am disappointed that my hon. Friend does not recognise that taking a power away from the Executive after years in which they have been too dominant in relation to the legislature is a step in the right direction, providing more powers to Parliament that do not exist at present. It is also fully in keeping with democratic practice in many other democracies.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
I am astonished by the Deputy Prime Minister’s comment that he would build flexibility into the legislation so that if something such as foot and mouth occurs, changes can be made. Is that not giving back to the Prime Minister the prerogative to call an election, although the right hon. Gentleman is attempting to take that prerogative away from him? Surely it was a political decision not to hold the election in May 2001, not a constitutional one.
The Deputy Prime Minister
With respect, the right hon. Lady is reading too much into something that is a perfectly practical, common-sense solution to what happens if, in exceptional circumstances, as we saw in 2001, the election simply cannot be held on a proposed date.
The Deputy Prime Minister
Well, the right hon. Lady shakes her head, but she would not have liked elections to be held in the middle of the foot and mouth crisis. We need to respond to such things. The decision would be made by affirmative order, so the House of Lords, too, would have a say, preventing the politicisation of that decision.
The Deputy Prime Minister
I would like to make some progress.
In the event of an early Dissolution, under whatever circumstances, the decision will be confirmed by the issuing of a Speaker’s certificate, meaning that there will be no ambiguity about whether the House had voted for a Dissolution with the requisite majority or whether a vote of no confidence in the Government should trigger a Dissolution. It will also mean that procedures of the House will determine whether the triggers are satisfied, rather than that being in the hands of either the Executive or the courts.
As I said earlier, I know that the Clerk of the House of Commons has expressed concerns about these arrangements in a memorandum to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. The memorandum suggests that the courts may be able to intervene in parliamentary business. The suggestion is that we would therefore be better off implementing the changes through Standing Orders rather than primary legislation. I would like to reassure the House that the Government have looked into the issue in considerable detail. We are satisfied that the provisions in the Bill will not allow the courts to question the House’s internal affairs.
The Minister for political and constitutional reform, the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), has placed in the Libraries of the House a paper setting out our views. Briefly, we are satisfied that the courts will continue to regard matters certified by the Speaker as relating to proceedings in Parliament and therefore falling under the protection of article 9 of the Bill of Rights. The memorandum refers to the legal challenge in 2005 to the Hunting Act 2004 as authority that courts will interfere in parliamentary proceedings. However, that case was concerned with the validity of the Parliament Act, not the internal proceedings of Parliament.
Mr Straw
With great respect, I anticipate that he would have been able to do so. I am not seeking to justify in detail what is in the Bill, but let us take that as a possibility. That was an unusual circumstance; Attlee and his colleagues, the senior ones of whom had been in office for more than 11 years and all the way through the Churchill coalition Government, were completely exhausted. Some were dying; others had already passed away. Attlee was right to say that there should be a Dissolution. Under the terms of the Bill, he would have put that to the House. I cannot see that the Conservative party would have opposed it; it would have been astonishing if it had, since it thought that it was going to win. In that situation, the likelihood would be that the resolution of the House would have easily exceeded the two-thirds threshold. As a matter of historical record, that has to be the case.
Mrs McGuire
My right hon. Friend is quite right in saying that we accept the principle of fixed-term Parliaments, but I do not want to lose his earlier comment that he would review that situation on Third Reading if some of this dog’s dinner of a Bill were not tidied up between then and now. Will he reiterate the commitment that we will reconsider our position on Third Reading if we do not get some satisfactory changes?
Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)
First, I congratulate the members of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, many of whom are here tonight, on performing a brilliant job of which I hope the House is very proud. They had a mere two or three days in which to produce for the House a first-class report; I hope that colleagues will take the chance to look at it. If it does not cover all the answers, it none the less raises most of the key questions, which can be resolved through the passage of this Bill. I thank all those Members who worked so hard on pulling the document together. I took the liberty of e-mailing it to every Member of the House within one minute of its publication on Friday morning, in the hope that those who were not out campaigning and knocking on doors at the weekend would have a chance at least to look at it and inform themselves ahead of the debate. We did the best we could, but it is still not good enough in respect of the procedures of the House. We should expect our Select Committees to have a careful, long, detailed look at the legislation that is proposed by the Government and that the House is expected to pass. We can do that by having proper pre-legislative scrutiny.
The Bill flies in the face of effective pre-legislative scrutiny. We will do our best for the two days of Committee on the Floor of the House, but I hope very much that in future the Government will ensure that we all get adequate time to do what we are here for—to make better law. The Government-drafted law, good as it is, will always benefit from a careful, steady appraisal and from the answering of questions. That is what the parliamentary process is designed for.
Mrs McGuire
Pre-legislative scrutiny is a valuable tool for the House across a range of legislation, and constitutional change has significant ramifications for a whole other range of legislation that the House has passed over many hundreds of years. Does my hon. Friend agree that pre-legislative scrutiny should almost have been a pre-requisite before the Bill came to the House?
Mr Allen
As I would expect, my right hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. As we have heard today, many people support the principle of what the Government are saying. Why lose friends by rushing the process? Why not get better law by going steadily? I am sure that colleagues know that democratic change has been dear to my heart for many years. Above all, why not build a consensus in the House for the change once it has been gone through carefully and after everyone in the House feels that they have been able to be involved—rather than everyone in the House feeling that they have been cheated and that the process has been abusive to them as Members of Parliament? I shall return to that issue a little later.
This is a Second Reading debate, so we are talking about the big principles. The big principle is whether we should have a fixed-term Parliament. I speak personally and strongly in saying that such a Parliament is certainly needed; many of us have campaigned for one for many years. I think that it will become a steady, fixed aspect of what we do in this country. To quote the report,
“our expectation is that future Parliaments would run for their full fixed term, and that this will become an unremarkable aspect of our modern democracy.”
That is how most western democracies operate, and they take it in their stride. That is just how things are. They have a set, fixed system and do not get terribly excited for two or three years about whether there will be a general election. They know perfectly well when their legislature and Executive are going to be elected. The process is not all covered in mysticism, judicial archaeology and obscure Standing Orders; it is there for people to see, with every elector owning their democracy.
It was said that nobody writes to hon. Members about fixed-term Parliaments. People do not; but they do speak to all of us on the doorsteps about how they feel about politics. They feel that politics is not working and does not deliver for them. Our role is to take that general sentiment—albeit not expressed in favour of this or that clause in a particular Bill—that we must restore politics to people. That is one of the key principles underlying the idea of a fixed-term Parliament.
I have got form on this issue. My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) talked about the 1992 Labour party decision. I was fortunate enough to have drafted that document. That was nearly 20 years ago and there has been a lot of discussion since, but the House is finally getting the chance to decide on whether the people of our country should know when the next general election is going to be. That is a really important step forward.
Mr Allen
Perfection may be the enemy of the good in this case. As parliamentarians, we are feeding on the crumbs from the table, and I guess that this is as good as we can do. The choice is not between the Bill and a big-bang written constitution that solves all the problems in one go; the Bill is what is on offer, and as supplicants in the process, we can only try to make it a better part of this piecemeal change. Unfortunately, we do not have the option of something much more fundamental; and indeed, I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman would really want that. However, perhaps he does, so I will follow his speech with interest.
The other thing about predictability and continuity is that they give Governments the chance to decide their programme and work through their Bills much more effectively. This helter-skelter “throw it into the mix” way of passing legislation debilitates Governments of all parties. Let there be proper evidence-based policy making—probably for the first time in our lifetime—so that the Government can put things to the House of Commons that are almost fully formed, rather than throwing them in and saying, “We’ll hope to amend them as they go through this House and the second Chamber.” Instead of saying, “Let’s botch a few things and get hundreds of amendments down to try and get the Bill into shape,” how about having proper, considered, evidence-based policy making from the Government, which would then be immensely strengthened by proper scrutiny by the House? Who loses in that process?
Some might say, “It’s going to delay things,” but we did this. Indeed, a classic example from when Labour was in power was criminal justice Bills. We popped them out virtually once a year because we had not got it right the first time, but we also had to get something before the House and show that we were fighting crime. I think we can all do better than that. If we used the process that is readily available to us to consider legislation carefully, the Government would amaze themselves at the Bills they could produce for the House and the House would amaze itself at the contribution it could make by having proper scrutiny of how legislation develops.
We have proposed, on an all-party basis, that there should be 12 weeks of pre-legislative scrutiny. To his great credit, the Leader of the House has written to the Liaison Committee saying that Bills should normally have a 12-week evidence-taking pre-legislative scrutiny period. If we can get the so-called new politics to deliver on that, so that every Bill goes through that process, we will produce much better law. However, if we just ram things through the House of Commons, it will be business as usual and legislation will be flawed. Those who throw in the bogey of the courts coming and lurking in the corridors of the House of Commons will find their wish fulfilled, because there may indeed be flaws in the legislation. I hope we will iron out all those wrinkles this week and in the days on the Floor of the House, but if we are not careful and if we do not have the right level of scrutiny, we may get what we wish for.
Mrs McGuire
Given the adversarial nature of our legislative process, does my hon. Friend agree that some of the issues to which he has alluded will be difficult to iron out in the passage of this legislation and that pre-legislative scrutiny would have led not only to a far better conclusion, but to one that would have gathered a consensus across the House?
Mr Allen
It is not always possible to achieve a consensus, but technical issues—whether the courts might be involved; whether the proposal might be implemented better through Standing Orders or in statute; the number of days needed after a Government have lost the confidence of the House—are the sorts of things that can be decided to everybody’s satisfaction. That does not mean that everyone will be satisfied for or against a fixed-term Parliament, but that is the purpose of a Second Reading, and that is the purpose of the final reading in this House: to say yes or no to the key principles. What we in this House are failing to deliver is technically competent, thoroughly analysed and examined pieces of legislation. That is why we have Select Committees, Public Bill Committees and the Committee stage on the Floor of the House for democratic Bills. However, we as a House are robbing ourselves of the opportunity to do that work by asking our Select Committee to come up with a report, good as it is, in two or three days.
Mr Williams
That might well be the consequence. I would personally much welcome the Welsh First Minister, rather than a Minister in this place, having the capacity to alter the election date, because that is what devolution is all about.
Mrs McGuire
May I say gently to the hon. Gentleman that that stands in contradiction to the reply he gave to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), when he said that he did not want us to be in perpetual electoral mode. Frankly, from what the Deputy Prime Minister said today, we are talking about only a few weeks’ difference—not months or even years—between one election and the other.
Mr Williams
The right hon. Lady makes a fair point. That is why I differ slightly from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) about whether the gap should be months or years. At the moment, there is a capacity to alter the dates for a month either side of the current arrangements, whereas I would welcome an arrangement whereby the Welsh First Minister could effect a difference of months.
Pete Wishart
I am grateful for that intervention. The shadow Justice Secretary made that point earlier. We have learned some fascinating pieces of electoral history today. The point is well made; when it comes to talking about the history of this nation—never mind international examples—four years seems to be just about the right length of time for a Parliament to get its legislative programme through.
If we move to five years, the next general election will be on the same date as the elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What on earth were the people who came up with the Bill thinking about? Surely they looked at the date of May 2015 and thought, “Wait a minute. Something happens that day.” Surely they should have thought that the thing that will happen that day is the elections throughout the rest of the UK. Either they did not know or they did not care. Which was it? Did they not care that having those elections on the same day would result in absolute and total confusion? Does the Minister know that there are different constituencies for the Scottish and Westminster Parliaments? Two different sets of returning officers and polling staff would be required. God knows what the counts would be like, but it would be an absolute recipe for total disaster.
Any Scottish election campaign inevitably would be drowned out by the London metrocentric media. There would be leaders’ debates without any representatives of the Scottish Government involved. The campaign would be skewed towards the big parties. We would have no chance whatever of getting our point across. All domestic issues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would be totally and utterly overlooked. It is not right, it is not fair and it is not the way to proceed with our democracy in the UK.
It is not just about elections; it is about democracy and ensuring that people can make an informed choice when they come to put their cross on the ballot paper, whether for this House, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly or local elections.
I listened with real interest and care to what the Deputy Prime Minister said about trying to address the problem. I accept that he is sincere and I look forward to hearing further plans for how that will be done, but we cannot do it now. The returning officers in the other Parliaments and Assemblies have the power to alter the timing and dates of an election by one month. One month would make no difference whatever. Can we imagine how ridiculous it would be? We would just have gone through an election and would be celebrating victories—we hope—and then we would be off to the next one without having time to draw breath. That is nonsense and must be looked at properly.
The Government will have to devolve powers to the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. That would mean reopening the relevant legislation, as that would be the only way to do it. These powers should be transferred to the Scottish Parliament so that it can determine its election date.
I heard the Secretary of State for Scotland talk about a six-month gap between the Scottish and Westminster parliamentary elections. I do not know whether the coalition Government are starting to put that together as a solution, but six months is not good enough either. That would mean almost a whole year of elections. We would just conclude one campaign and then we would start another.
Pete Wishart
I am sorry, I cannot. I have only three minutes left and I have a few more things to say.
We need a clear space, and six months is not sufficient to ensure properly contested election campaigns. Why must the devolved Assemblies and Parliaments move their dates? We have had our election dates set in stone since 1999. The next election will be the fourth we will contest. The Government knew that these elections would take place in May 2015. Surely it is this House that should move its date; it could go six months earlier or later. It just is not fair or right. I look forward to the Government’s proposals but they must be substantial because what has been proposed so far is not good enough.
I am pleased that the Government got rid of the silly notion of a 55% threshold for the Dissolution of Parliament. I heard some utter nonsense about the programme for dissolving the Scottish Parliament in defence of the 55% proposal. I am pleased that the Government did, more or less, adopt the Scottish system for Dissolution almost in full, and that is right.
I want to conclude with a few words from Ron Gould, the man who was drafted in by the Electoral Commission and the Scotland Office to look at the disaster that was the last Scottish parliamentary elections. We remember it not only because of the fantastic SNP victory, but because of the 140,000 spoilt ballot papers that resulted from the previous Government’s combining of local authority elections with Scottish parliamentary elections, using three different electoral systems. We cannot allow that to happen again. The paramount concern of the House must be the electorate; they must have free and fair elections and must not be confused as to how they make their choice.
Aretha sang about respect. I hope that the Minister is listening, that he can start to get the respect agenda back on the rails and that he will listen to the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so that we do not have three elections on the same day.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). The style, tone and content of his speeches are always worth listening to, even though we may not always agree with his analysis. Like many Labour Members, I have not always been in favour of fixed-term Parliaments, but over a long period in politics I have come to understand the reason for them. I always found the excitement of the prime ministerial prerogative enticing and, over the years, we have always been able to persuade ourselves that the argument for it was the overwhelming one. I also remember James Callaghan going to the TUC and singing his famous ditty, “Waiting at the church”. At the time, I recognised that his political party was on a state of alert, but the rug was pulled from beneath us in October 1978.
The argument against fixed-term Parliaments has always been about political advantage but, as we have heard, there has never been a political disadvantage in having fixed terms for local authorities. As the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Northern Ireland Executive also operate within a fixed-term context. Given that experience, some of the arguments against the political prerogative of the Prime Minister can be overwhelming. It is not whether or not there is a prerogative to call an election that gets a Government re-elected; it is about the performance and credibility of the political parties during any election, be it at the end of a fixed term or not.
So having undergone this Pauline conversion on the principle, I cannot begin to describe my disappointment at this Bill. The Deputy Prime Minister told us, in one of those extravagant flourishes of which he is so fond, that the electoral reforms that he was presenting to us—over the past two weeks, as it turns out—would be the greatest reforms since 1832, never mind the other suffrage legislation in the 19th century, the introduction of votes for women in the 20th century, the reforms removing the financial powers from the House of Lords, or indeed the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies by the last Labour Government. This was to be his Great Reform Bill. Yet what we have before us is a Bill that is being rushed through with no opportunity to consider it properly or to deal with its implications.
Professor Robert Hazell of University college London’s constitution unit said in his written evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee that the Bill had been
“prepared on an extraordinarily rushed timetable. It was introduced with no prior consultation, no Green or White Paper. Nor has time been allowed for pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill.”
According to both the Clerk of the House and the Chairman of the Select Committee this Bill was ripe for pre-legislative scrutiny, and such scrutiny could have sorted out some of the issues raised today.
We must ask ourselves why the Bill has been rushed through, as there is ample time for pre-legislative scrutiny. The coalition has already said that it intends to stay with us for five years. Unless its confidence is disguising an uncertainty as to whether it will survive for that long, the Prime Minister has laid out the ground rules for this Parliament: we are here for the duration.
Why was there no Green or White Paper? Why are some Liberal Democrats, who wanted to subject everything to pre-legislative scrutiny when in opposition, not pushing harder for this Bill to receive such scrutiny? Surely a minimum of 12 weeks would not scupper the Bill, undermine the principles or erode support. Surely the Government have more confidence in their proposals than that.
The establishment of a Scottish Parliament was linked to a debate in this House, a White Paper and a referendum, and a consensus on the proposals was built up. We heard last week that we will have a referendum on the alternative vote. Why are we to have a referendum on AV but not one on fixed Parliaments? Surely the two votes could have been linked. Also, why is reform of the House of Lords being taken slowly yet this reform is being rushed through?
As other Members have said, constitutional Bills are not straightforward. I was astonished to hear the Deputy Prime Minister saying that this is a short Bill. It may be a short Bill, but, as others have pointed out, it is long on implications. We do not know whether this will be the case, but we could find ourselves with a conflict between the courts and the House of Commons. We needed to have a discussion about that.
We heard from the Deputy Prime Minister today that there might be options to delay, but the only example he gave was the delay of the local government elections in 2001 because of foot and mouth disease. What will the criteria be for assessing whether the Prime Minister should exercise the right to delay? Also, although it has been said that we will have ample opportunity to discuss the Bill and change it over two days of debate in this House, that is no substitute for a proper discussion of, and investigation into, the ramifications of this constitutional Bill.
As the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire said—he will be astonished that I have now mentioned him twice in my contribution—the issue of the clash with the elections for the devolved Parliament and Assemblies should not be underestimated. That is nothing to do with the intelligence of the electorate; it is to do with the democratic integrity of those Assemblies and that Parliament. They have their own democratic remit and integrity, and we should not undermine that by overlaying our elections on top of theirs.
Frankly, this is a dog’s dinner of a Bill. I have seen some dog’s dinners in government, but this one takes the biscuit. [Laughter.] The dog biscuit. It would have been a far better Bill if the Deputy Prime Minister had listened to the advice of wiser heads than his own. Frankly, the Deputy Prime Minister is no Lord Grey; he is no Whig reformer. He needs to go back to the drawing board, and he needs to ensure that the Bill that comes before this House on Third Reading is far better than the one in front of us today.