Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Jackie Doyle-Price

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

Let me just say that the pattern of campaigning across the constituencies represented in this House is far from uniform. I spent a significant amount of time in Chesham and Amersham not that long ago, for reasons that will be understood. I was a great admirer of the late Cheryl Gillan—she was another one for whom I held not just respect, but affection—but it was apparent that the Conservatives’ campaigning machine in that constituency had perhaps been left in the garage for a few years longer than was necessarily helpful. If what we are about is engaging the electorate on an ongoing basis, I am all for that. Indeed, I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that the best way to achieve that would be by getting rid of the notion of safe seats, which is a product of the first-past-the-post system, so I will look to enlist his support the next time my party brings forward proposals for introducing proportional representation.

I can see that your smile is becoming increasingly indulgent, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not carry on down this route for too long, but it is surely an important principle that we should never hand to one of the runners the starting pistol that will start the race. Whatever view people take of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, the principle that Parliament should be in control of its own timetable and election is surely something that all those who fought so hard to bring back control to Parliament would have found an easy sell.

There has been some talk about the Lascelles principles. My concern about the exclusion of any decision to dissolve Parliament from justiciability, as we find in clause 3, is that the debate is essentially about constitutional theory. If the Prime Minister were to go to the Queen and ask for a Dissolution and she were to refuse him, I suspect that, given the standing that the Queen has in the public’s affection, it is probably a constitutional crisis that we and the monarchy could survive. I cannot honestly imagine it ever happening, but given everything else that has happened in this country over the past six years, we should perhaps try to legislate not just for those things that we can imagine happening. The day may come when we have a different monarch—well, the day will come—and perhaps that monarch will need time to establish their standing in the way that Her Majesty has been able to do. For that future monarch, the temptation may be not to risk the instability.

Essentially, my concern—this is what the Lascelles principles were designed to avoid—is that the Bill as currently constituted risks bringing the monarchy into active partisan party politics. That is something we should countenance only with the very greatest of caution and the most careful consideration.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The truth of the matter is that our constitution does behave in a very dignified way. We know that Prime Ministers’ audiences with the monarch are, most of the time, entirely confidential—other than when Prime Ministers choose to leak them. I think we can trust Her Majesty never to utter what has been said to her in the confines of her study on those occasions. On that basis, can we actually be sure that those discussions have never taken place?

[Mr Carmichael]

No, we cannot. That is the self-evident answer to that question. I am fairly confident that conversations will be had by, as it were, the support teams on either side on a highly theoretical and hypothetical question, such as, “Well, in the event that this were to happen…” Indeed, that was why Lascelles wrote his letter to The Times in the first place—to give a bit of necessary transparency and certainty to the whole process, which in truth, because it is rooted in convention, has neither transparency nor certainty.

Ultimately, what we show here is that the insistence on continuing with an unwritten constitution becomes more and more difficult with every year that passes. Ultimately, that is something we will have to recognise. It will be the mother and father of all tasks to get the necessary consensus to codify it, but in an age when all the constitutional changes that we have had in the past few decades are there competing with the sovereignty of this House within Parliament in particular, it is in everybody’s interests that we should find the moment to do that. This is not the moment, for the avoidance of doubt. I think Parliament would need some time to be clear of its current concerns before we could undertake that.

Finally, I want to say a few words about the conduct of the 2017-19 Parliament. It is a shame that the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) is no longer in his place, because he outlined all the various actors in these dramas and how some might be seen to have executed their obligations better than others, but it is inevitably the case that where we have a system that relies on checks and balances, every time somebody takes out a check, somewhere else we have to adjust the balance. That is why although I felt exceptionally uneasy about the way former Speaker Bercow made some of his decisions, I thought they were necessary because the Government were getting close to abusing the substantial amounts of power that an unwritten constitution based on convention gave them. That is why instead of relying on nods and winks, and checks and balances, it is better that we should write it all down, as then everyone would know where they stood.

I do not think there is any hyperbole here, and it is overstating the case somewhat to suggest that the political turmoil of the 2017-2019 Parliament was a consequence of the term of Parliament having been fixed in 2017; there were lots of political reasons for that, most of them to do with the internal splits and divisions in the Conservatives, as the minority governing party after 2017. The fact that they had a minority set the political tone of that whole Government. Somebody said earlier that the election was far too late by November 2019. When would have been the right time? Perhaps it was when the Prime Minister became Prime Minister in July of that year, but I do not remember him having any great appetite for having an election at that point.

The truth of the matter is that we eventually had an election in 2019, at probably the worst time of year to be campaigning in Orkney and Shetland—we are never going through that again. That election required the Government of the day to work with the Opposition, with us and with the Scottish nationalists, and that is how it should be. That is effectively how the Fixed-term Parliaments Act did its job, when the Government eventually allowed it to do so. That is why I deeply regret this Government’s decision to repeal it, and why my party will be opposing them in the Lobby this evening.