Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Lord was not in the Chamber for the whole debate. He knows that I normally give way. Perhaps I can just—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The Minister is having difficulty finding his place. I am only trying to help him.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Lord is always trying to help. I cannot remember who it was in the last debate—it may have been my noble friend Lord Brooke—who said that one should always beware of the help that comes from certain quarters.

One treats with caution foreign comparisons because, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, there are different circumstances. However, noble Lords mentioned the fact that there are fixed terms of four years in the United States. I happened to note, reading a copy of the Economist from earlier this month, some comment that for the Republican Party people have not yet been clearly identified as taking part in the primaries. That is just two years and two months since the inauguration of President Obama. It is in order for a Government who receive a mandate to be able to fulfil their programme over a planned period and I believe that five years is more likely to assist that than four years.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

That was not very convincing.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, will get an opportunity in future to intervene. I am sure that he will make a speech on another set of amendments, to which I shall be more than happy to reply.

At the moment, we have a system that allows up to a maximum of five years. In fact, three of the past five Parliaments have gone for five years. To remove that possibility requires a more compelling argument than we have heard. To move for four years would leave the effective working life of a Parliament and a Government sufficiently curtailed that they would not be able to implement their manifesto provisions. Therefore, I ask the House to support the idea of a five-year fixed term and ask the noble and learned Lord in those circumstances to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, I will of course withdraw my amendment at the end of the debate because the purpose of debate at this stage was in order to probe and examine the arguments. The noble and learned Lord’s speech was well delivered but disappointing because it ultimately did not address the central argument being put against him: that the effect is to change our constitution, where there is a five-year maximum but the norm is around four years, to one where the norm becomes five years save in exceptional circumstances.

What everyone around the House was asking him was: why are you making this change if we have to make the judgment on what is in the best interests of good governance in this country? The Minister never answered that question at all but it is at the heart of the debate. This is not a party-political point. The reason that the noble and learned Lord cannot answer the question is that good old Mr Laws, in order to make it clear that the record should not be perverted in any way, has explained why it is five years. I do not know why the noble and learned Lord, who is an honourable man, is weaving and dodging on this. Just say, “They wouldn’t do a deal with us unless we agreed five years”. Do not try and make it something that it is not.

One of the other things that emerged so strongly from this very powerful debate was the sense that the more one talked about it, the more this House felt uneasy about being locked into this straitjacket that the Bill brings. I am in favour of fixed-term Parliaments, in the sense that I can see it to be appropriate that Parliament should in some way endorse what the Prime Minister has decided about an election. However, the Government are saying, “You have to choose between five years and four years”. I detected a real sense of unease around the House on this, but the Government are putting it that we have got to make this choice. Therefore, looking at the arguments, let us see which the best choice is. The noble and learned Lord himself said what the reason is that the Government are doing this.

Now, I cannot find my note. That would give my noble friend Lord Foulkes an opportunity to ask me a question, but I do not think that he wants to ask me any questions. I am sorry about that.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble and learned friend is aware that I have just spent the last year of a four-year term in the Scottish Parliament. We happen to have been legislating right up to the very last day of that Parliament. There has been none of the kind of lassitude, or the feeling that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, described as an end-of-term—what word I am I looking for?

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Fatigue.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

There has been none of that fatigue in that Parliament, which has been legislating right up to the wire, and no lame dog—

[Noble Lords]

Lame duck!

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Yes, I mean lame duck; I knew I would get it eventually. I can tell my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer that one of the architects of the four-year fixed-term Parliament in Scotland was the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

How grateful I am for all that. I know that the Minister will have listened to it all.

To go back to my point, the noble and learned Lord is making us choose between five and four years, but the arguments that his Government put forward are all on the accountability side. That is what makes the case being advanced so absurd. Again, in the evidence that the Deputy Prime Minister gave to the examination of the Bill, he said in justifying it that,

“it is an unambiguous judgment on our part that reducing the power of the executive, seeking to boost the power of the legislature, making the legislatures more accountable to people ... collectively introduces the mechanisms by which people can exercise greater control over politicians”

How could he have been trying to justify the Bill as giving more accountability in a process that left the electorate with less ability to get rid of Governments, because there would be fewer general elections? What is so odd about the Government’s position is that they rely upon accountability and then propose something that produces less of it.