Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Plant of Highfield Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Plant of Highfield]

My Lords, I add my voice to all those who welcomed the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and congratulate him on his maiden speech. I am very pleased that he has become a Member of this House. We go back a very long way. We were at school together. I was well under his radar. He was head boy and I was a recalcitrant first-year pupil. But after he left he endowed an essay prize that I happened to win one year. I still have the Oxford Book of Latin Verse, which was the PT Cormack essay prize. I should own up that I also have his copy of Livy’s histories, which after 49 years I suppose I should remember to return to him someday.

One of the constant refrains of recent political commentary over the past two or three years—and the reasons are fairly obvious—is that we have to accept that Parliament and Government need to be made more accountable to the people. My objection to the Bill as currently drafted is that it weakens that accountability. It is fairly easy to see why.

I want to make the case by focusing on a change of Administration during a fixed-term Parliament under the terms set out in the Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, the constitutional convention is that a Prime Minister, for example, can succeed another Prime Minister but only if he or she is capable of leading an Administration with the confidence of the House of Commons. It is the Members of Parliament who elect or choose the Prime Minister, not the population at large. Given that the Prime Minister has to have the confidence of Parliament, he or she can succeed an incumbent Prime Minister in a perfectly legitimate way.

That has been the normal process of British politics since the Second World War—so Churchill succeeded Chamberlain, Eden succeeded Churchill, Macmillan succeeded Eden, Lord Home succeeded Macmillan, Callaghan succeeded Wilson, Brown succeeded Blair, and Major succeeded the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher. In only one of those cases—namely when Eden succeeded Churchill—was there an early general election to confirm the mandate of the new Prime Minister. In all these cases without an early election, excepting that particular case, it seemed perfectly fair, reasonable and legitimate that the new Prime Minister came into office because that was in accordance with the constitutional convention.

In the case of Gordon Brown succeeding Tony Blair, the assumption came seriously into question in the media, in the polls, in quite a lot of political commentary in the newspapers and among politicians themselves. It was argued that somehow this succession lacked legitimacy, although it was exactly comparable to previous changes I have mentioned. I suspect the reason is not just political opportunism—although that no doubt played a fairly important part—but because over the past 20 years or so there has been something of a change in public opinion and the electorate are not so ready to accept that Government can and should emerge just through intra-parliamentary debate and deal-making. People want to have a bit more of a say in the outcome. After all, there are many more opportunities for non-political voting in a straightforward sense through interactive television, newspaper polls virtually every day of the week on some public issue and so on. Yet, many people now feel rather distant from Parliament when someone can become Prime Minister without them having voted for him. I fully accept and understand the account of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, of the constitutional position. However, I think that position may be leaving behind a bit the way in which society more generally is evolving.

If there is some truth in the idea that people are demanding more of a political say, then I think this Bill—particularly if the AV vote turns out to be positive —is going to cause us great problems, because it is going to insulate the processes of intra-parliamentary politics more and more from public opinion. If we have AV, we are going to have more coalitions; and a coalition can change part of the way through a fixed-term Parliament and possibly without the same priorities as its predecessor. I doubt whether the electorate would regard this as acceptable. It is fashionable at the moment to decry the idea of the mandate—one can see that it is very difficult at the moment for the Government to claim a mandate in the sense that people have not voted for the coalition agreement. I fully understand the difficulty. Nevertheless, if one coalition were to succeed another and you had a second coalition agreement that no one had ever voted for, it is straining credulity to believe that this would be regarded as legitimate. Whatever degree of confidence the House of Commons has in a new coalition—reflecting what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, said—I do not think the idea that you can have one coalition succeeding another will wash with the British people. It makes Parliament appear to be too insulated from public opinion. There is a great deal more that could be said, but the time is getting late and so I will not say it.

I will finish on a point made by someone who has always had a great interest in constitutional reform and has been a member of the Liberal Democrats, Professor David Marquand, who once described Westminster politics as club politics. I always thought that was a very exaggerated account of Westminster politics. If you got into the position of having a series of coalitions arising during a fixed-term Parliament, without a straightforward appeal to the electorate, that would be club politics of the worst possible kind. At the very least, this Bill needs to be amended to remove the 14-day clause on the vote of confidence because that allows the possibility of a constant renewal of a coalition to occur, which I just do not think that the British people will accept.