Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I take issue with the repetition of the phrase “tried and tested” by the Minister and others to defend prerogative power. The British people, the Minister declared, lived with the previous system for centuries. For several of those centuries, this country was at best semi-democratic. In the 17th century, as the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, reminded us, Chief Justice Coke stoutly defended the rule of law against the royal prerogative. Parliament’s resistance to the royal prerogative led to civil war and the execution of the king, followed 40 years later by the expulsion of his second successor and the invitation to his Dutch son-in-law to become king instead. Our 18th century political system was highly corrupt, with bribery and patronage underpinning government. I hope that that is not a tried and tested system to which anyone would like to return us.

Reform in the 19th century made for higher standards and greater democracy, almost always against the entrenched resistance of the Tory party. Throughout the past 400 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, remarked, the whole history of Parliament has been the transfer of powers from the monarch to Parliament. I challenge the Minister to list for the House the occasions on which Parliament has legislated to restore prerogative powers.

Two new reports from committees of this House have expressed deep concerns relevant to this debate. The Delegated Powers Committee last Thursday published a report called Democracy Denied? The Urgent Need to Rebalance Power Between Parliament and the Executive. It said that parliamentary democracy is

“founded on the principles of … parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the accountability of the executive to Parliament … The shift of power from Parliament to the executive must stop.”

The report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, in parallel, is entitled Government by Diktat: a Call to Return Power to Parliament. It declares:

“A critical moment has now been reached when that balance”—


between Parliament and the Executive—

“must be re-set: not restored to how things were immediately before these exceptional recent events”—

by which it means Brexit and Covid—

“but re-set afresh”.

Both of these committees remind us that limited government—or liberal democracy—depends on checks and balances among three constitutional actors: Parliament, elected and representing the people; the judiciary, safeguarding the rule of law; and government, wielding executive power.

In the exceptional circumstances of 2017 to 2019, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson claimed to represent the will of the people against Parliament: direct democracy, with the leader speaking for the masses against the elites. The noble Lord, Lord True, has faithfully repeated their claim, adding on several occasions that the December 2019 election showed decisively that the Government do speak for the people—if necessary, against Parliament—having won 43.5% of the popular vote.

Lord Hailsham many years ago warned that the UK’s constitutional arrangements allowed for an effective “electoral dictatorship” between elections, with executive power escaping parliamentary scrutiny and judicial oversight. What we have glimpsed in the past four years is the shadow of authoritarian populism breaking through the conventions of our unwritten constitution. Michael Gove argued in the Commons Second Reading debate on this Bill that Parliament in 2019 was

“frustrating the will of the people”—[Official Report, Commons, 6/7/2021; col. 789.]

which he believed a new Prime Minister—who had scarcely appeared before Parliament since taking office—nevertheless authentically represented. The will of the people is the cry of populist demagogues, not of constitutional democrats.

I re-read last week the 2019 report by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for the Constitution Society: Good Chaps No More? It denounces the willingness of our current Prime Minister to break the rules and misrepresent evidence in his first months in office. He says:

“A key characteristic of the British constitution is the degree to which the good governance of the United Kingdom has relied on the self-restraint of those who carry it out … If general standards of good behaviour among senior UK politicians can no longer be taken for granted, then neither can the sustenance of key constitutional principles.”


Sadly, good behaviour by senior politicians cannot be taken for granted, so I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, that codification is therefore needed. As the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has just put it, we now need a reset, not a restoration of the previous status quo.

The noble Lord, Lord True, has defended the Government’s abandonment of their manifesto promise of a broader approach to reform through a constitutional commission. He told the House the other week that he also opposed piecemeal reform. So now he is supporting a piecemeal reactionary Bill—a Bill that restores prerogative power and weakens the judiciary. I look forward to hearing how he manages to defend that.

The Select Committee on the Constitution reminded us that

“prerogative powers are an exception to the sovereignty of Parliament.”

Successive reports from committees of both Houses over the last 20 years have noted that the direction of travel has been to reduce the extent of prerogative powers, and to extend parliamentary oversight. This Bill would reverse that direction.

We will therefore attempt to amend this Bill. We will support the replacement of Clause 3 by a requirement for an affirmative vote in the Commons before the Prime Minister requests a Dissolution. We will also seek to include a parallel requirement for this before Prorogation. Moving the Second Reading in the Commons, Michael Gove made it entirely clear that Clause 3 had been included because of the Supreme Court’s decision on Prorogation in 2019. Lord Sumption indicated in his evidence to the Joint Committee that the Prime Minister

“was effectively attempting to rule without Parliament”

for as long as possible. That surely brings the issue of Prorogation within the scope of this Bill.

We will wish to gain assurances from the Government —and here I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton—that a draft revised version of the Cabinet Manual will be published before this Bill becomes an Act, and will be presented to the appropriate committees of both Houses for review, as has been strongly recommended by her Select Committee. The Cabinet Manual provides a directory of our constitutional conventions—if you like, a shadow constitutional document.

We will also wish for assurances on a revised version of the Dissolution Principles, which should also appropriately cover the process of government formation. The draft principles and conventions on confidence, Dissolution and Government formation on pages 61 to 65 of the Joint Committee report are far better and fuller than the one-page sketch that the Government provided.

The Joint Committee draft also wisely deals with the issue of Government formation in the event that an election does not produce a single-party majority. Opinion polls over the past six to nine months have consistently shown between 25% and 30% of voters supporting parties other than the Conservatives or Labour. This suggests that the result of the next election might well be again a Parliament without a single-party majority. Any form of future proofing, as others have said, would therefore need to take this into account. I recognise that the Conservatives will attempt in the Elections Bill to bias our electoral system further to their advantage, but it is still possible, despite their huge advantages in funding and office, that they will not retain power.

We have just witnessed a well-managed change of government in Germany, during which the outgoing Government stayed in office for eight weeks after the election, while three parties carefully negotiated a detailed agreement as the basis for a stable coalition. We may need to develop a similar approach here and should anticipate the likelihood of its occurrence.

Since we are discussing some fundamental issues of democracy, I will add a further question for the Minister. In 10 days’ time, the President of our most important democratic ally, the United States, is convening a virtual summit of democracies to discuss the challenges and dangers that they now face, to which several noble Lords have referred. The UK sees itself as one of the world’s oldest democracies, yet the Government have so far said nothing about this summit: whether they plan to take part, which Minister will lead, and what we might contribute. Will the Minister provide this House, before 9 December, with a Statement on what part, if any, the Government plan to play in President Biden’s summit of democracies? We should never take democracy for granted: it needs to be defended.