Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I hope that Amendments 5 and 9A will be of some interest to the House. They would introduce a flexibility to hold a general election at any time in the fifth year of the Parliament. Amendment 5 deals with this particular Parliament and Amendment 9A deals with subsequent Parliaments. They still provide for Parliament to be fixed, but with flexibility between four and five years. They recognise that there are important objections to the term of Parliament being fixed for a full five years. The objections, which have been explored in our debates earlier in the day, are that accountability is diminished, that elections would take place less frequently, that the accountability of Members of Parliament to electors is therefore reduced and that the accountability of the Government to electors is reduced. Furthermore, if you insist on fixing the term of Parliament for a full five years, you are liable to find that you require an exhausted Government to totter on into a fifth year and probably expire at the end of it.

My amendments also recognise the widespread view within our political culture that, assuming that a Parliament is still viable, for the Prime Minister to call an election before five years are up is opportunistic, exploitative and an abuse. On the other hand, it is widely accepted that to call an election after four years have passed is acceptable. We saw that in the Parliaments of 1979-83, 1983-87, 1997-2001 and 2001-05. I do not think that anybody complained when either Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair called an election after four years on those occasions. It was regarded as entirely within the reasonable understanding of our constitution.

These amendments would allow a continuation of the four-year norm—it has been typical that Parliaments have lasted for around four years in the post-war period— while respecting the principle of the five-year maximum which was legislated for in 1911. When Mr Asquith proposed that legislation in 1911, he envisaged that while there would be a maximum of five years the probability would be that elections would tend to take place some time around the end of the fourth year, or not long thereafter. That was prophetic and has proved indeed to be the case. These two amendments would simply institutionalise what has become convention and practice and, on the whole, has been found to be satisfactory by the people of this country. I beg to move.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I shall be extremely brief but I told myself that if anybody else brought Mr Asquith into the debate yet again I would take advantage of his reappearance to make a single point. In the Earl of Oxford and Asquith’s memoirs, he describes the debate within the Liberal Cabinet in the period leading up to the First World War in relation to the Marconi scandal in which the then Attorney-General was somewhat embarrassed by his behaviour. I think that it was on the issue of shares. I am astonished that the Prime Minister put this into his memoirs, but the outcome of the Cabinet discussion was that they were at no real parliamentary risk because it was absolutely clear that the Conservatives would be too stupid to take advantage of it. There was one dissenting voice, which was Winston, who had of course once been a Tory.

The Opposition say, again and again, that the purpose of the Bill is to provide glue in the coalition relationship. In responding to that, remembering what had happened in Asquith’s Cabinet, I asked myself, “Is it really because they want to be helpful to the coalition that they go on repeating this?”. I recall in the process C S Lewis’s happy remark that if you hear about someone going around doing good to others, you can always tell the others by their hunted look. It occurred to me that there was some degree of overlap between the argument that we need a Parliament shorter than a five-year one and the Opposition’s view, set out during the passage of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, that it would be helpful if the country had the opportunity of expressing its opinion at the earliest possible opportunity, when it so happened that there might have been some degree of parliamentary advantage to the Opposition in that happening. I hope, diffidently, that as the Bill progresses we will not have suggestions made in either direction that we are all engaged in this for short-term parliamentary advantage or that we are all concentrating totally on the good of the nation and the constitution.