Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Tristram Hunt

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

I am grateful that we have been allowed to discuss the Bill. Today’s debate has been awash with the abuse of peers at the other end of the Palace who have simply being doing their job of scrutinising Government legislation. We should not omit the vital role of the newly ennobled Lord Fellowes in that act of scrutiny, whose contribution was, we are told, to give an hour-long talk in an upstairs room entitled “A life on stage and screen”. Such are the indignities of packing the second Chamber.

I wish to focus on the length of the fixed-term Parliament. We have seen, in the actions of the Government in relation to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, that what drives them is not the good of the nation but the good of the coalition—or the Tory-led Government, as we like to call them. They are always at pains to ensure that the yin and yang of the coalition are in perfect harmony, so, rather than giving people the chance to put away the notion of the alternative vote on 5 May, they are demanding to keep the two parts of the Bill together to keep the coalition happy. And so it is with this Bill. It proposes a Parliament of five years, not four years, because that is what the coalition, not the nation, needs.

Professor Robert Blackburn, of King’s college, London, put it well when he said:

“It is likely that the Coalition’s concern with concretising its political alliance and having the longest period possible in which to implement its tax increases and cuts in public expenditure and then recover sufficient popularity in time for its next meeting with the electorate, has affected its judgement in this matter. In my view, the period between general elections should clearly be four years”.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I do not understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument. If the coalition’s motive had simply been to postpone an election for five years in order to have more time to sort the country out, that could have been achieved by prime ministerial decision. What the Bill does is to ensure that the next Government, and the one after that and the one after that, will be subject to these provisions. Perhaps, some day, the hon. Gentleman’s party will recover enough to form such a Government.

[Tristram Hunt]

Coalition Members really do not understand the difference between the norm and the maximum. We have had this problem with them over many weeks now. The issue is whether we want to move from the norm to the maximum. Across the academic and political communities, we can see—if we look at the work of Robert Hazell, for example—that four years are preferred to five. The view of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee—on which I am happy to serve with the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart)—was that most opinion suggests that it would be better for general elections to be held every four years, rather than every five.