Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith]

I will let other parties answer for their own actions. I certainly do not seek to speak for them. I think it would be a misinterpretation to say that the Act was purely for the purpose of holding the coalition together. I think that was a huge reason for support in certain parts of the then Government, but actually it was an idea that had been batted around in politics long before then. Indeed, I believe it had been a matter for various private Members’ Bills before the coalition Government came into office. It was certainly not an idea that was just thought up to hold the coalition together.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

I look forward to sparring with the hon. Lady on another constitutional Bill. Just to come back to the point she made about trying to set the date of the last election, she may recall that, 24 hours before the one-line Bill was passed, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act failed again to cause the election. The one-line Bill was put through and the irony was that it was by a two-thirds vote of the House. That undermines the FTPA because it shows it was just being used to play games.

[Cat Smith]

It is a pleasure to see the right hon. Gentleman in his place and I, too, look forward to sparring with him again on constitutional matters. I do not disagree with that. I am certainly not stood here to mount a defence of the FTPA. I was outlining some ways in which I felt the Act did work, but I am also highlighting huge flaws in the Act. Indeed, there is a reason why, in the Labour manifesto of December 2019, we said we would repeal it. The point he raises about the Prime Minister being able to control the date of the election is a huge reason why the Act is flawed. However, I am arguing that the principle of having fixed terms in itself is not necessarily a bad principle; it is a very pro-democracy principle.

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[Cat Smith]

If I may, I will make a little progress. I am conscious of time.

I want to say a few words about comparisons, because it is always important to compare this House and how we do things with other countries and other parts of the United Kingdom. It is about the principle of who has the power to decide when an election takes place, or whether it should be fixed.

The Opposition believe that the democratic position to take, as a starting principle, is that these things should be fixed. Indeed, that is already the case for the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Parliament, as well as for our local councils in England and English elected Mayors. We know, and the voters know, when those institutions and individuals will be up for re-election, when they can re-elect them to do their job or reject them if they disagree.

The only question mark lies over this House and when this House goes to the people and the country. We are out of step even within our United Kingdom. In most parliamentary democracies, Dissolution is controlled by the legislature, with varying degrees of involvement from the Executive. I would argue that is good for democracy and, of course, for planning legislation and passing the Government’s manifesto, which the people would have voted for. It helps civil servants to work and plan with politicians, and it helps our electoral administrators, who have frankly been put under an awful lot of pressure in recent years. It helps us as political campaigners to know when a long campaign spend will start, because if we know when an election is called, we know when the spending limits can start kicking in. It is also good, most importantly, for voters to know when they can either re-elect or reject a politician.

The UK has a strong tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, and I believe that Parliament should be central to any decision to dissolve.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I just want to probe the hon. Lady’s point about when to hold elections. Is she saying that there could be a period of time when the Opposition would not want to fight an election?

[Cat Smith]

Of course, in most circumstances an Opposition will want to have an election. If the right hon. Gentleman is referring to the 2019 situation, that was not about not wanting to have an election; it was about not wanting a situation in which the Government could take the country out of the European Union with no deal. That was the sticking point, and that was the issue with the date. In most situations, an Opposition would always want an election. Indeed, I can say quite confidently that I would do a darn sight better job than the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), but he knows that.

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[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I want to expand on his closing remarks, because I think we need to strip back to why we are doing this, and I will start by talking about faith in democracy.

The reality is that in the last six months of 2019, and certainly in the autumn of 2019, the public did not have faith in this place. That is a simple fact—we had only to look at our inboxes and at the comments being made. We were not doing anything, we were not getting anywhere and we had a Speaker who, quite frankly, acted disgracefully on many an occasion, going way beyond the remit within which he should have operated. All that that did, from the public’s point of view, was make them say, “You are pointless. We have given you an instruction in a referendum and in a general election, but two years after the 2017 general election, you have still achieved nothing.”

The reason we did not achieve anything was that we were gridlocked. The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) made a comment today that was used so many times in that period: she said that people were looking for us to come to this place and solve the issues. I heard that phrase used throughout the argument, but what it actually meant was “People are looking for you to agree with me, to do what I say and to ignore what you want to say.” It was a 50-50 Parliament, really: it kept hitting gridlock and we did not get anywhere.

As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), for whom I have a great deal of respect—I am looking forward to debates with her in Committee—the games that were played at the time did no favours to this place. The fact that 24 hours before we finally dissolved the last Parliament we had failed to dissolve it under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, but then a one-line Bill got the two-thirds majority and got the Government to choose the date of the election, added to the sense of “What are you all playing at?”

[Chris Bryant]

I am sorry to do this, but I just want to push back against the words “game playing”. There were very passionately held views on both sides of the argument on every single constitutional matter that was going on. I do not think that anybody was playing a game. Everybody was in deadly earnest—we just disagreed.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s intervention about the choice of language, and I will change it. His observation is well made and he makes it earnestly.

What I will therefore say is that what happened almost showed that we should have dissolved the last Parliament much earlier. It was going nowhere. We created a situation in which passions were high about the constitutional issues, but we just never made any progress—yet for all the calls from people outside saying “Resign!”, we could not. The ultimate act of resignation is for a Government to call a general election: they do not know whether they will be re-appointed. The Government literally could not resign.

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Gentleman touches on points that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) raised at the very end of his speech. I was part of the process of discussion and eventually we did get an election in 2019, because the Government were prepared to talk to other parties and bring them along. That runs to the heart of the whole difficulty throughout the Parliament of 2017 to 2019: the Government decided on their position, whatever it happened to be on that day. It was never the same position all the time, but it was their way or the highway. Surely the point is, as the hon. Member for Rhondda and others have said throughout this debate, that it is for Parliament as a whole, and not just the Government on their own, to make these decisions.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Parliament failed, and it failed day in and day out, week in and week out. It does not matter, to go back over these arguments, whether people should have shifted to my position or gone to another position. The now Leader of the Opposition spent hours and hours in No. 10 Downing Street, and every time we thought a deal had been made, he scuppered it and moved the goalposts.

Parliament did not work. It is all very well to say that we should have taken particular positions, but the history books show that it failed at every attempt. The way out of that situation is to go back to the people and to lay it on the table. That happened far too late, and in this place we undermined several attempts along the way.

I honestly believe that we have to be very careful at the moment. It is getting better now, but we have been through a period in which the value of the democratic processes in many democracies has been questioned. We have just seen a narcissistic, arrogant now ex-President of the United States with, quite frankly, low political intellectual ability, undermine the entire system to the point he literally caused five people to die because he did not accept the result of an election. He used social media and all the other things to stir it up by saying, “I won this election.” He clearly did not, but most polling shows that a whole swathe of voters in America think that he did, which again undermines democracy.

We still have some way to go to make sure we have the ability to dissolve a failing Parliament and go back to the people. It comes back to the point, which I have used in many a speech, of trusting the people. There have been comments today about how a Government could perhaps abuse a Bill, how we might not recall Parliament, how we could choose the date of the election or how we could delay and do all these things. I promise that the public would give us a right kicking if we did that.

One of the reasons the 2017 general election was, frankly, a disaster for my party was that we were looking to cash in. The people thought, “You are just trying to take advantage of the situation. You don’t actually need to have this election,” and we were punished for it. The public are not stupid; they recognise what goes on, and they have their own concerns. Ultimately, they give their verdict on us at the ballot box. Leading up to the December 2019 general election, the public thought that things had to change. It was noticeable that, whether people were remainers or leavers, they just wanted the situation resolved, which is why the result was the way it was.

I do not think what went on over the Prorogation helped the situation in any shape or form. Lord Roskill, in Council of Civil Service Unions v. Minister for the Civil Service 1985, stated that in his view prerogative powers were not susceptible to judicial review, yet that is pretty much exactly what happened, and it was applied retrospectively. There is precedent for longer Prorogations.

Again, it all added to the view—I do not want to use the word “establishment”, and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) might once again advise me on better language—that the establishment was against the view of the people and was trying to thwart clear instructions that had been given. And we remained powerless in this place to do anything about it, which was the fundamental problem.

I have been in this place long enough to know that, going into Committee, it is unwise to take a fixed position on Second Reading. I am over the moon to see my hon. Friend the Minister back in the House today. She looks in fine health and it is a source of great joy to us all to see her back in her place. I know she will be listening to all the contributions being made, including from the hon. Member for Rhondda. I remember being a new MP, and he and I sparring over the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill and the issue of four years or five years.

[Chris Bryant]

You voted for it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right: I did indeed vote for that Bill. I think what has been slightly overlooked in these arguments is that the question of stability at a time when the markets were in disarray over what happened was very important. We had not had to deal with those parliamentary maths, I believe, for nigh on 70 years and something had to take place to calm the markets. So that is why I think it is was worth it at the time. It is worth listening to the hon. Gentleman’s views on years. I still think five years is acceptable and he thinks four years. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) outlined, we really do need to shorten these elections.

Overall, the Bill is an important healing mechanism and stepping stone to starting to restore faith. If a Parliament in future ends up again in the situation we ended up in, where views were deeply entrenched and would not budge on either side of the argument, then surely, we must easily be able to dissolve that Parliament and go back to the people. We must always trust the people.

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[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am delighted to have the opportunity to make a contribution to the debate. I am sorry that the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), has just left the Chamber. I would just place on record—and I hope she will see it at some point on her return—that for me, as for so many others in this debate, it is a matter of genuine delight and joy to see her back in the House. Contrary to what we might read in some parts of the press, a lot of Members of Parliament are held in respect, but the hon. Lady is someone who is held not just in respect but in affection. The manner in which she has tackled her illness has been an inspiration to many, and we are delighted to see her back.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I hope that you will indulge me for a minute or two while I pick over some of the history of this matter and of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. I am not quite the last man standing from that period, but I am one of the last few. It is often said that history is written by the victors. Well, not even my sense of hyperbole would allow me to describe the Liberal Democrats as the victors in that episode in our political history, but I think it is important that we put a few matters on record.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in opening the debate, said that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was a “child of its time”. I openly accept that, at the start of the quite remarkable political adventure that was the coalition Government, the necessary trust that people might have had in a single-party Government was not there and, yes, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was a necessary safeguard for both parties to ensure that the Government would last the whole term. Remember what it was like at the start of that Government. All the commentators and all the clever people said, “This won’t last a month” and then, “It’ll not last two months”. They said that that Government would not last three months, then six months and then that they would not last a year. And then, eventually, it was accepted that that Government were going to last the whole term, as indeed they did.

The coalition Government did a lot of things that were very necessary in the interests of economic rebuilding after the crash of 2008, and it was necessary that we had five years of stability to be able to take those decisions.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I agree with the point that the right hon. Gentleman agree has just made. He will recall that, just before the 2010 general election, the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, said that whoever ran the next Government would be out of power for a generation because of the decisions they would have to make. Actually, we were able to bring that stability to the coalition, and one of the reasons that I happily backed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act then was to bring that stability. The public saw that there were two parties from different political spheres willing to do what needed to be done. I know that the right hon. Gentleman and I are on different sides of the coin when it comes to repealing that Act, but it is important to say why we both agreed on the importance of the Act at that time.

[Mr Carmichael]

I often say that the spending decisions that were taken—although, when they were implemented, they were actually the same as the ones that Alistair Darling had put in his last Budget in March 2010—were not taken on a whim; they were taken on the advice of the Governor of the Bank of England, and when that advice is given, any responsible politician or parliamentarian should listen to it.

I fully acknowledge what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said about that Act being a “child of its time”, but it was more than that. As I think the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) said, the fixing of the parliamentary term was in Labour’s 2010 manifesto, and the regulation of and accountability over the exercise of the royal prerogative was in the Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto. For my party, it had been a long-standing policy. We saw it as a necessary modernisation, and the logical conclusion of getting rid of it in the way in which the Government seek to do through this Bill would mean that we were risking taking significant steps backwards in terms of constitutional integrity and electoral law. I shall return to that point.