Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Michael Gove)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

It is a real pleasure to move the Second Reading of this Bill. The Bill contains provisions to ensure that we supersede the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 with appropriate, democratic and timely reform in order to ensure that we restore to this place and to the people an opportunity to ensure that the Government that govern in their name can command the confidence of this House and the confidence of the public.

The legislation that we are bringing forward will I hope command support across this House, because it was a manifesto promise in both the Conservative and Labour party manifestos. Both Front-Bench teams are committed to the legislation, and it follows on from an excellent report by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), and from recommendations made by the Constitution Committee in the other place. It has also received extensive scrutiny and support from a Joint Committee of the Commons and Lords. With both Front-Bench teams and three important Committees all in favour of this legislation, we can see already that the arguments that have been lined up for it are powerful and command wide support. I sincerely hope that nothing I say this afternoon undermines that consensus.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Sit down now!

[Michael Gove]

That is very good advice from the hon. Gentleman. He, like me, believes that brevity is the soul of wit.

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[Michael Gove]

Regarding the coalition years, I think that others are better placed—given that I served in the Government for five years—to decide which was the worst piece of legislation that was passed. The one thing I will say for the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is that it was very much a child of its time. It did achieve one purpose. It was introduced at the request of our Liberal Democrat coalition partners in order to ensure that, for the five years of that Parliament, neither party could collapse the Government in a way that might secure for either the junior or the senior coalition partner perceived political advantage. It did serve that purpose for those five years. Notwithstanding the points made by my hon. Friend, there was a significant range of achievements that the coalition Government can take pride in; nevertheless, the Act was specifically a child of its time. While it worked in that narrow sense, in cementing the coalition and ensuring it could achieve the policy gains that I believe were gained during those five years, its utility beyond those years in tougher circumstances has been tested to destruction.

[Chris Bryant]

I will let the Minister in on a secret: not all of us supported everything that was in the Labour manifesto at the last general election.

Is there not a worrying issue here, which is precisely what the right hon. Gentleman refers to as “the child of its time”? If the Government can always reconstitute the constitution every time they can pass a law, we have a problem here, because the Government are most likely always to do so in their own interests.

[Michael Gove]

I take very seriously the points that the hon. Gentleman makes, because there are few deeper scholars of our constitution or parliamentary history than him, but I would say two things. First, sometimes there are constitutional experiments or innovations, and it is understandable that they will have partisans who can see benefits from them; but then we can see in real time and in real circumstances whether those constitutional innovations are right and work, or whether it is appropriate for us to go back to the situation that prevailed before, which has actually proven over time, in a variety of circumstances, to be both more robust and more effective.

The second point is that of course there is always a temptation for Governments or any Administration in power to seek to look to the rules and to derive advantage perhaps from changing them, but the critical thing here is that, ultimately, the decision on whether an election has been called and Parliament has been dissolved appropriately rests with the people. We can look at historical examples; for example, in the 1970s Edward Heath decided to go to the country to ask the question, “Who governs?”. He believed that, in choosing the timing of the election, he was doing so to his party’s advantage, but when he asked, “Who governs?”, the country replied, “Well, not you, mate.” On that occasion, it was the case that a miscalculation on the part of the Prime Minister resulted in the electorate deciding that Edward Heath’s Administration should end and that Harold Wilson’s should take over.

[Chris Bryant]

In which case, one could conceive of a situation in which the Government were aware of something coming up that the public were not aware of—a report or a major security breach that had not yet been made public, for example. Or, for instance, the Government might choose to hold a general election before boundary changes because they thought that it might be to their advantage. Would it not make far more sense for the House simply to be able to vote at that moment?

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[Chris Bryant]

Historically, many different things have counted as motions of no confidence—for instance, losing a vote on an amendment to the Loyal Address following the Queen’s Speech or on an amendment to the Finance Bill, or refusing to grant supply for a military intervention or to allow a military intervention. Does the Minister think that all those things would still count as a motion of no confidence?

[Michael Gove]

The formal motion of no confidence that is traditionally requested by the Opposition and has to be granted within a day is a classic example, but on the question of military intervention, I personally believe—again, it is for the House to take a view—that that is a proper exercise of the prerogative power in certain circumstances. That is perhaps for debate in other forums, but it would not count in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests.

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. If any Prime Minister felt that the House’s decision not to grant supply, the House’s decision to censure an individual Minister or the House’s decision not to authorise support for military action was a matter of confidence, that might mean that it would be appropriate to request a Dissolution at that point.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the Minister give way?

[Michael Gove]

Not for a little bit, because I want to run briefly through the clauses in the Bill.

There are six clauses and one schedule. The first clause repeals the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. The second clause revives the prerogative power and allows the Prime Minister to request a Dissolution from the monarch. The third clause is specifically to ensure that that decision cannot be reviewed in the courts. It is what might be called an ouster clause. It is there explicitly to say that proceedings in this House relating to the exercise of the prerogative power should not be justiciable.

It is very important, following on from the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), that the House understands, appreciates and supports the Bill on that basis. It has been constitutional practice since 1688 and the Bill of Rights that it should not be the case that these matters are reviewed in the courts. Let me say that judicial review is an important part of keeping Governments honest, but there needs to be an absolute limit on what is considered justiciable and it should not be the case that the courts can prevent the request for a Dissolution on the part of a Prime Minister. If that decision is mistaken, then it is for the people to decide in a general election what is appropriate. I was very pleased that the Joint Committee confirmed in its report that it would be appropriate for Parliament to affirm that.

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[Michael Gove]

Exactly so, and it is absolutely important, as my right hon. Friend points out, that we stick to the principle that, immediately upon receipt of a request from the Opposition for a vote of no confidence, such a debate is granted and that the Prime Minister of the day would make their case. Following the defeat of an earlier attempt by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) to secure support for her withdrawal Bill, a motion of no confidence was tabled by the then leader of the Labour party. That motion of no confidence was defeated and that allowed the Prime Minister to consider other ways of fulfilling that mandate.

[Chris Bryant]

I do not want to test everybody’s patience, but the one time when that course is not available to the Opposition is immediately after a general election, before Parliament has got on to actually meeting; and it is the Government, and only the Government, who decide when the House meets and what it debates. I note that we still have no formal process in our system of knowing when, after a general election, the House will meet to transact substantive business, other than to elect a Speaker and have the swearing-in.

[Michael Gove]

That is an important point, but it is also important to recognise that no newly elected Government can effectively govern without Parliament. It would be impossible without a vote of supply and without a Queen’s Speech to ensure that the basis on which they were elected, and the effective governance of the country, could continue. It is important that we recognise that that is the principle that prevailed beforehand, and it is the principle that we should adopt now.

I shall conclude, because many hon. Members wish to speak. I return to the point that I made at the start. Those who brought forward the Fixed-term Parliaments Act were motivated, I think, by two entirely reasonable motivations. The first was to ensure that the coalition Government—the first coalition that we had had since 1922—was able to proceed and govern in an effective way; of course it was against the backdrop of economic crisis. As a member of that coalition, I do not resile for a moment from the many decisions that were taken during that five years, and I take the opportunity to thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and others who served in that coalition for putting the national interest first at that time.

The second thing that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was designed to do was to ensure that our constitutional arrangements became more predictable. Although the FTPA succeeded in the unique circumstances of the coalition years, it emphatically has not made our constitutional arrangements more predictable, as what happened in 2017, and indeed between 2017 and 2019, reinforced. Indeed, the circumstances of the 2017 to 2019 Parliament reinforced in the public mind—and certainly that was reflected in the general election result of 2019—the need to move to a more flexible, more responsive, more agile, more familiar and more tried and tested set of constitutional arrangements. It is for that reason that I commend the Bill to the House.

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[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.

[Chris Bryant]

Might there not be a point where the Opposition just wanted to form a Government, because the Government had lost the confidence of the House but the Prime Minister would want to have a general election, because the numbers in the House might allow two different kinds of Government?

[Cat Smith]

I find it difficult to disagree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, the points that he has made, not just in that intervention but in earlier interventions on the Minister, have raised some important questions that I hope the House will consider. I am grateful that the Bill will be considered in Committee of the whole House and that we will have the advantage of my hon. Friend’s insights at that stage, as well as his contribution in the Joint Committee.

There is no way that this legislation would be before us this afternoon if it did not provide an electoral advantage. When Governments decide when elections happen, there is absolutely no doubt that it can be played to their advantage. As has already been made clear, the Government can call an election before bad news is about to be delivered, or if they feel that their Opposition are in disarray. Professor Petra Schleiter from Oxford University did a comparative study of 27 western and European democracies and found that when governing parties had the power to control when elections happened, they gained, on average, a 5% electoral advantage. Those of us who live and breathe politics will understand that that is the difference between forming a Government and falling out of government. That is why I would argue that it is anti-democratic to allows all the power to lie in the hands of one individual.

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[Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith) back to her rightful place on the Treasury Bench. May I say how appreciative I have been of her attendance at the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which I chair, over recent months to discuss this subject and others?

I thank my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for his mention of our report on the Bill, although it perhaps had a slight difference of emphasis to that which came from the Joint Committee. As he is in the Gallery today, I pay full tribute to Lord McLoughlin from the other place for so ably chairing that distinguished Joint Committee.

There are many minds in the House greater than mine that have given this subject a lot of thought—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”] On this subject, there certainly are, if I can be self-deprecating. As Bagehot would have it, we are discussing, and indeed legislating on, the at once solemn but also practical interaction between the “dignified” and the “efficient”—that is to say, the transaction between the monarch and the Prime Minister. On that note, I was pleased to see that the draft Dissolution principles were changed on the advice of the Joint Committee, such that the Prime Minister now shall not advise the monarch of the need to dissolve Parliament but rather make a “request” so to do.

How have we reached this point? I suggest that the disputatious nature of politics in recent years is too easily given as a reason. I contend that part of the real reason is the lesson of not tinkering with the constitution to suit immediate circumstances, which brings me to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Was it a high political ideal, as advanced by some, or a case of political expediency? I humbly suggest that it was the latter. It was of course necessary for a smaller coalition partner to have the assurance that it was not going to be cast off part way through a term, when it might have been to the larger party’s advantage to seek an election.

In all this, motivation is key, so it is perhaps helpful to consider briefly the Dissolution principles, which have been mentioned already as the Lascelles principles. In May 1950, Lascelles, the King’s private secretary—Senex being his pseudonym—wrote to The Times to suggest that “no wise Sovereign” would refuse a Dissolution except in three instances. We have heard them already, but the first was if the existing Parliament was still viable. The second was if a general election

“would be detrimental to the national economy”.

The third, and perhaps the most interesting and still relevant, was if the sovereign could find

“another Prime Minister who could carry on his Government, for a reasonable period, with a working majority in the House of Commons.”

Do they all stand today? As I have said, I think the latter one certainly does.

Most people’s knowledge of Tommy Lascelles, I am afraid, comes from “The Crown”. That is how we learn history these days, and of course it is a flawless representation of the truth. People know him from that, rather than from his letter to The Times some 70-odd years ago. Here I seek to make a tangential link to the world of drama, for all are players in our unwritten constitution. Each has a role set for them, even if it is unscripted. The actors must conform to the expectations, if we are to avoid the play that goes wrong, or indeed the Parliament that goes wrong.

In recent history, I am afraid that at times some have gone off the unscripted script, if such a thing were possible, because politics is a numbers game, and the reason we had such a quagmire in the last Parliament was that the numbers did not quite add up. That going off the script was not surprising, given the testing circumstances of the 2017 Parliament, but it is also a reflection, if I can be charitable, of the constitutional short-sightedness or, if not, vandalism done by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Add to that the novel action of the Prorogation that never was, if I can put it that way, combined with the actions of the former Speaker of this House. In short, everybody went off script. Fortunately, the ultimate safety valve of our constitution—a general election—worked.

[Chris Bryant]

In your view.

[Mr Wragg]

Of course, this is all my view. The House will have a chance to listen to the utterances of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) later on, and we look forward to that immensely. He will teach us a thing or two.

I support the Bill, but I fear that clause 3, the so-called ouster clause, may be superfluous. Its inclusion could be seen by those of a cynical bent as being a hangover from the intervention of the Supreme Court in 2019. We should hold more surely to the Bill of Rights of 1689. After all, the Queen in Parliament is not justiciable—at least that is my understanding.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

May I first say what an utter delight it is to see the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith) in her place? Cancer is a bugger, and quite a lot of us have been through it. At the rate we are going, we will have a very large cancer survivors unit here in Parliament, and we shall overcome.

I know the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) is not present, but there is nothing more miserable than parts of one’s private life going through the public domain. I wish him and Sarah well.

The hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) has come back. I was going to criticise him because he had just departed, having said that he was looking forward to hearing what I was going to say, but now he has returned.

I am afraid that I dislike the Bill from beginning to end. I know it was in our manifesto that we would repeal the 2011 Act, but there were lots of things in our last manifesto with which I did not fully agree, so merely saying that it was in our manifesto does not cut the mustard. Our 2010 manifesto said that we wanted to move towards a fixed-term Parliament and to hand over significant elements of the prerogative to Parliament. Indeed, I note that the Conservatives’ manifesto in 2010 said that they wanted to make

“the use of the Royal Prerogative subject to greater democratic control”.

I supported bits of the 2011 Act when I was the shadow Minister dealing with it at the time, in 2010. There were bits of the Act that we criticised but, broadly speaking, we supported it. What I object to in this Bill is that it significantly increases the Government’s power over Parliament. Indeed, when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was introduced, it was a major transfer of power away from the Executive, and a major strengthening of Parliament’s authority over its own lifetime. By definition, this Bill is exactly the opposite of that. The Bill assumes that all the players in the so-called golden triangle—why on earth do we resort to such outdated concepts?—will be good guys. I use the word “guys” advisedly, because quite often they are guys, but of course there is a danger that the Bill also brings the palace and the monarch directly into party politics.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case that it should not be a question of the Government against Parliament, but does he not agree that it should not be a question of Parliament against the people? That is the situation that we were nearly stuck in, because the Government, by wanting to be dissolved and have an election, wanted the people to have the final say about Brexit, but Parliament did not want the people to have the final say about Brexit. So the hon. Gentleman needs to be very careful, because there is a lot to be said for the Government not overruling Parliament, but there is not much to be said for Parliament not overruling Government when the Government are trying to give the final decision to the people.

[Chris Bryant]

Well, my point is simply that we need to have a level playing field in any general election. The Bill deliberately gives the Government the upper hand. It places them on the hill surrounding the territory. It means that they determine the territory on which a general election will be contested. They determine many other aspects, such as who is able to vote, who is able to register to vote, how the boundaries are constituted and so on. I start to ask myself: how much power do the Government want to have?

[Dr Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman is extremely kind in giving way a second time. I do not think he answered my point, which is that the key thing about Dissolution is that we are giving power to the people to have the final say.

On the hon. Gentleman’s other point, he says that the Government are able to choose a time that is to their advantage. The alternative is surely that when we have a fixed date when the election has to be held, the Government will still try to manipulate the situation so that it will coincide to their advantage at that date. We cannot really escape the question of manipulation entirely.

[Chris Bryant]

If there is a fixed date for a general election, there are fewer options for the Government to manipulate the situation. That is a publicly known fact to everybody, so there is a level playing field. Indeed, over the last 20 years or so we have had a set of rules in this country that mean that in the six months before a general election, the Opposition are allowed special access to the civil service. If the Opposition do not even know when the general election will be, they never have that opportunity.

Time and again, the Government get to set the rules, and there is a significant party political advantage to being able to set the date of a general election. That is why Governments never wanted to change that. They did it in 2010 for 2015 only, because they wanted to solve a specific problem. My biggest anxiety is that, while we all love the fluidity of our constitution, the downside is that it becomes the plaything of the Government of the day who want to jig and rejig bits and pieces to benefit themselves and keep themselves in power.

One instance of the kind of behaviour a Government today might conceivably think of is to hold a general election immediately after the new boundaries come in, or immediately before the boundaries come in, for their own party political advantage because that is how they will have assessed that. Alternatively, they could decide that we will not have a full judicial review producing a report on the lessons learned from the covid pandemic until after the date of the next general election. The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) is absolutely right that it could be after 2025—they could decide that it will not produce its result until 2027. My point is that even if a report is about to be produced, they could decide to have a general election.

The Minister herself gave evidence to our Joint Committee on the Fixed-term Parliaments Act saying that the public would punish nefarious activity of that kind. I am not convinced by that, because in a general election the public are making a whole series of decisions, and the simple matter of whether the general election should have been called is probably round about number No. 535 on the list of issues that are of concern to them. My simple point is that this is about having a level playing field. We insist on that for other countries and democracies. It is a fundamental principle of what constitutes a fair democracy.

I will deal with some specifics, if I may. First, five years is far too long for a Parliament. Over the past 200 years, they have tended to run for about four years, including when we had a seven-year term for Parliaments. It would make far more sense for us to have a four-year term—that would be more in keeping with the rest of the country. If the Bill passes Second Reading, I will table an amendment to curtail it to four years. We do not even say that it is five years at the moment—it is five years plus with the additional bits. The five years is not from the start of one Parliament to the start of the next Parliament; it is from the date of the Parliament’s first sitting until the general election.

The Government get to decide the date not only of a Parliament’s first sitting but of its first sitting to transact substantial and substantive business, which traditionally starts with the First Reading of the Outlawries Bill, followed by the Queen’s Speech. Even after the Queen’s Speech, it is for the Government to decide when we actually get into proper business and, during that period, whether there might or might not be a motion of no confidence. That means that after a general election, such as when Baldwin lost the general election, there had to be a motion of no confidence in the new Parliament, but that depended on the Government bringing Parliament to sit. We are almost unique in the world by not having any provisions in statute or our Standing Orders guaranteeing that the House will be able to transact business within a certain number of days, let alone set up Committees and all the rest.

I am very worried about snap elections, because often they mean that parties are not able to provide a duty of care towards potential candidates. I will mention only one, Jared O’Mara. If we had had a more sensible run- up to a general election, we would have served him better, because we would have gone through a proper process of selecting candidates. I could look at other instances across the last few years. As Chair of the Committee on Standards I am painfully aware that sometimes people become candidates without being prepared, briefed and given the support they need to enter into what can be a very difficult and painful place.

We have already seen that the Government have phenomenal powers over prorogation, and I simply do not understand why the House of Commons cannot have a vote beforehand. We would nearly always grant it, but if there were any jiggery-pokery, we might not. Government Members might say, “You are only doing that for a party political reason.” We could point to the Labour Government in the 1940s, who brought forward a special prorogation so that three Sessions of Parliament ran during one year, to meet the requirements of the Parliament Act 1911. Why does prorogation remain a simple act of the Executive? I think it is a mistake. Indeed, it would assist the Government simply to say that every time there is going to be a prorogation, just as there is before a recess, there will be a vote in the House of Commons.

I completely agree with the hon. Member for Hazel Grove, although when he is being sarcastic and ironic it is sometimes slightly difficult to determine which side of his own argument he is on. I think he was suggesting that the ouster clause may be a bit of an own goal. It sounds a bit like, “the lady doth protest too much”. It is as if we do not have confidence in the Bill of Rights.

[Mr Wragg]

I was being enigmatic.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is the Mona Lisa in so many ways. I do not know what to make of that. My point is that the Government are protesting too much. I think that is counterproductive and will lead to the exact opposite of what they are trying to achieve. They virtually invite the courts to have a pop at them, which is a mistake. We should rely on the fact that proceedings in Parliament shall not be impeached or questioned in a court of law or any other place, under the articles from the Bill of Rights.

I am concerned about what constitutes a confidence motion. It should be perfectly possible to bring down a Government by virtue of refusing to allow them either money, or the basic thrust of their programme through the Queen’s Speech, or a major item of foreign policy, such as sending troops into war. In 1784 that was one of the first reasons a Government were brought down by a motion in the House. If I am honest, I was perplexed when David Cameron and William Hague—now Lord Hague—did not resign or even seem to think worthy of comment the fact that they lost a vote on sending British troops to war. In any other generation of our political history, that would have meant the Government would have fallen. This is an important principle: on big national issues, whether something is a matter of confidence should not simply be a matter for the Government. We all know that money, major policies, and issues of war and peace are fundamentally matters of confidence.

[Mr Carmichael]

I hesitate to intervene, but the record should show that the particular motion to which the hon. Gentleman refers from 2013 was not one that committed the country to deploying troops. In fact, in specifically guaranteed that before that happened, the matter would come back before the House.

[Chris Bryant]

I think I am right in saying that the original motion tabled by the Government did commit, but the version carried by the House, which was an Opposition amendment, said that the matter would be brought back to the House.

[Mr Carmichael]

indicated dissent.

[Chris Bryant]

Well, the record will have to be found, won’t it. I completely agree with the comments made by the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) about the election period being far too long. I have some sympathy with the fact that many people now vote by post, and there are issues for electoral registration officers and all the rest. Honestly, however, it cannot be beyond the wit of woman and man in this country to bring a general election in a shorter period than we currently do.

My bigger point—I will bring my remarks to a close after this—is that the Government already have phenomenal power in this country. In our system, the amount of power that Government have in Westminster is most extraordinary. They determine every single element of the timetable and, indeed, they do more so now than they did in the time of the second world war. If we think of one of the big confidence debates, in 1939, there was the debate on the summer recess, because people who were opposed to appeasement were terrified that Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister was going to use the recess to do a deal over Poland with Hitler. There was a chance in those days for another Member to table an amendment to the date of the recess. The rules now specify that we cannot even table an amendment to the date of the recess that has been tabled by a Government Minister.

The same is true of nearly every element of our expenditure. We cannot table a motion from the Opposition. Only a Government Minister can table a motion changing a tax, increasing a tax, laying a duty or a tax on the people, or increasing expenditure. We barely do a process of expenditure in our system at all. We do not really have a Budget, not in the sense that any other country would understand that they have a Budget. We have a statement by the Chancellor every year. The power that Government hold in this country is absolutely phenomenal and I do not think that simply to allow a few things such as a vote on Prorogation and a vote on Dissolution is too much to ask.

[Jonathan Edwards]

As a Welsh MP, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would agree that one benefit of a fixed-term Parliament for this place is that there cannot be a clash with Welsh elections. Although the Bill says that there cannot be an election for the Senedd and a general election at the same time, the Library note states:

“Regulations can be made to hold”

an “extraordinary general” election. The question for us, if the Bill passes tonight, is: what are those extraordinary circumstances and how will UK Ministers co-ordinate with Welsh Ministers and the Welsh Parliament?

[Chris Bryant]

My personal view for some time has been that it is probably for the convenience of the people to have a more or less fixed time of the year when we have elections. The beginning of May seems to work for local elections and I do not see why it would not work for most other elections. I am not personally opposed to having several elections on the same day either. I know others are, but I think that that would be for the greater convenience of most people in the country.

My biggest fear is that the present Government have a very high theology of strong government. It feels to me akin to the Stuarts’ divine right of kings, which is not to say that they feel that they have a divine right to rule, but that they think that the Government have the divine right to rule. What makes me think this is the number of times that the Leader of the House—we had it again today from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster—referred to the “addled Parliament” of 1614. It was the king who called it the “addled Parliament” in 1614 because the king did not get his way. There are many ways of interpreting what happened in the last Parliament, but the Government did not get their way—we know that. I think that when the Government feel that the constitution has to change because the Government have not managed to get their way through Parliament, that is a worrying moment.

The truth is that the whole of this system depends—I mean the word “depends” deliberately—on a very, very thin thread of confidence in the Government. I think a better way of understanding politics is that Governments govern by consent, and that consent is not just earned at a general election. It is constantly earned and has to be constantly earned in this arena—in here. I worry that the Government do not feel that way. I personally do not trust any Government who abrogate more powers to themselves. It is even worse when a Government then claim to do so in the name of democracy, as we heard in the very first sentence of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s contribution earlier. Such abrogation nearly always rapidly descends into the arrogance of office. I think that there is a particular irony in the fact that the people who shouted “Take back control” again and again now ratchet up their own control over the British constitution.

Power is always best spread thin. Even a Cabinet Minister is only dressed in a little brief authority. Our constitution must never be a plaything of the Government of the day.

[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.

[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.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Committee stage & 3rd reading
Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

But it is not actually five years; it is five years and a bit, is it not? As the Septennial Act 1716 did, it goes from the date of the first sitting of the new Parliament. It means that, if we stick with this, we will have the longest period from election to election of any democracy in the world. Would it not be better for the period from election to election to be at most five years?

[Chloe Smith]

The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my remarks in respect of his amendment, which I will endeavour to come to after I have worked through all the clauses.

The scheme that we are proposing is the right one and I will come in a moment to why I think that that is the case when compared with other technical methods of achieving a five-year term that the hon. Gentleman is thinking of. This clause provides for a maximum parliamentary term of five years from the date that Parliament first met, so we measure five years from the date of first meeting to the Dissolution of Parliament, and that is the Government’s proposition. We think that that provides the right balance of stability, flexibility and accountability that is entailed in returning to the arrangements that allow for a general election earlier than that. On that basis, I recommend that clause 4 stand part of the Bill.

I shall speak very briefly to clause 5. It introduces the schedule to the Bill, which makes provision for the consequential amendments that are needed to ensure that other legislation operates effectively once the 2011 Act has been repealed and we return to the status quo ante. The consequential amendments primarily reverse or alter legislative amendments made by the 2011 Act. They remove references to the Act in legislation and ensure that, after the repeal of the 2011 Act, other legislation that links to it still works. For example, in repealing the 2011 Act, they reflect the fact that there will no longer be fixed-term Parliaments, so the concept of an early general election would no longer exist in law.

Clause 5 also provides that the repeal of the 2011 Act by clause 1 does not affect the amendments and repeals made by the schedule to that Act. This ensures that essential provisions are not lost. It allows us to modify changes made by the 2011 Act and ensure the smooth running of elections by retaining sensible improvements made by that Act or subsequent to that Act. I know that those are some topics that we will come back to a little later as we progress through our debate this evening.

The schedule also makes a small number of minor changes to ensure the smooth running of elections. In short, this clause is necessary to ensure that electoral law and other related parts of the statute book continue to function smoothly. As such, I recommend that clause 5 stand part of the Bill.

Clause 6 is the one that we all know and love that deals with extent, early commencement and short title. It confirms that the territorial extent of the Bill is the United Kingdom, except for a very small number of amendments in the schedule where the extent is more limited. The clause ensures that the Bill has an early commencement, meaning that it comes into force on the day on which it receives Royal Assent, and it provides that the short title of the Bill will be the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2021.

That gives me an opportunity to explain that the Government have agreed with the recommendation of the Joint Committee that a Bill of constitutional significance that seeks to put in place arrangements that deliver legal, constitutional and political certainty around the process of dissolving one Parliament and calling another should be titled accordingly. The short title now reflects the purpose of the Bill and will help to ensure that it is clearly understood and that successive Parliaments are able to discern the intended effect of the legislation. I therefore propose that this clause stand part of the Bill. Mr Evans, would you like me also to make a remark about the schedule and then turn to the amendments?

--- Later in debate ---

We have already referred to amendment 2 and the discussion that we should indeed have about how we set the clock on the parliamentary term. As I understand it, the amendment, again tabled by the hon. Member for Rhondda, would mean that the clock on the parliamentary term would start from the date of the general election. By contrast, under the Bill, Parliament would dissolve automatically five years after it had first met. Those are the two rival designs that we might debate this evening. In practice, what we are putting forward in the Bill represents a return to the tried and tested arrangements. It is also the clearest and simplest way of calculating the parliamentary term—from the point at which Parliament is actually sitting. Under the amendment, the clock would instead begin while Parliament was still dissolved.

[Chris Bryant]

All right then, if it is the simplest way of doing it, what is the last date that the next general election can be held if all this is carried as the Minister says?

[Chloe Smith]

With respect, that is not the right quiz question—the right quiz question is whether, under the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, the period would be five years plus 25 days. That would, I believe, arise from his amendment, because he is not counting the length of the election campaign, whereas our provision is five years from first sitting to last sitting, so we are trying to measure the life of a Parliament. I am not trying to engage in maths problems; I simply think that this is the most sensible way to measure it, and I hope hon. Members might agree. [Interruption.] I am really not going to engage in maths questions beyond that. We need a clear and easily understood scheme. I think we are all agreed that it ought to be five years, and we are dealing with how to achieve that. The Government’s proposition is that it should be, as I say, from five years after Parliament has first met. That is important.

Let me turn to the pair of amendments that relate to the shortening of the election timetable: new clause 1 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and amendment 3 in the name of the hon. Member for Rhondda. I am absolutely sure that there will be some very strong arguments put in this area. To try to help the Committee, I will set out why we have our current timetable and then seek to address what I would anticipate to be some of the core arguments that right hon. and hon. Members will raise.

The current timetable was introduced in 2013 through the Electoral Administration Act 2006, which absorbed fundamental shifts brought about through having postal votes on demand and individual electoral registration. As I have explained, the Bill seeks to return us to the status quo ante while retaining sensible changes that have been made since 2011 to enable the smooth running of elections, which are, in my view, of benefit to voters. The current timetable is one of those changes. It provides a balance between allowing sufficient time to run the polls effectively and for the public to be well informed, while not preventing Parliament from avoiding sitting for any longer than is necessary, which is a very important consideration.

On the requirements for running polls effectively, the 25 days working days are necessary to deliver elections, which are now often more complex than at any other point in our history, for reasons, as I mentioned, to do with postal voting on demand, but also online individual electoral registration. That was a fundamental constitutional change that enabled increasingly higher numbers of last-minute applications. To illustrate that, at the most recent general election almost 660,000 applications were made on the last day possible. Before 2000, as I said, there was no postal voting on demand, and it has since grown in numbers to represent nearly 20% of registered electors. Both things increased the complexity and demands of an election timetable.

The amendments refer to weekends and bank holidays in the election period. Local authority electoral services teams who do this work are already often working weekends and overtime to make elections work successfully. I also note that elections do not just rely on local authorities and their staff; there is a significant commercial element to their delivery through many suppliers, including, but not limited to, the software for maintaining the registers, and the printing and postage of paperwork such as the poll cards, ballot papers and postal votes. There is very little room for error on all that. Creating and maintaining the capacity to deliver it can be extremely challenging, especially at short notice. Weekends and bank holidays are not necessarily in our gift.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I will not debate the points of politics with the hon. Lady. On her comments about using Parliament for Dissolution, we have had all of that. There are probably few Members of the public watching us in the Chamber tonight, but they certainly watched what happened in 2019. Surely when we have a Chamber in stalemate, the Government should be able to resign. She will recall how her then leader stood on Parliament Square to say that the Government should resign but then came in here and stopped them from resigning, which was incredible. Surely when Parliament is deadlocked, as it was then, the Government should be able to resign and that should just happen, not be stopped by Parliament.

[Chris Bryant]

They should do it today.

[Cat Smith]

I agree with the heckling from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda. I think the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) is quite wrong and that the public are watching the debate with deep fascination. He underestimates the passion for constitutional legislation in this place. The point is that the new clause would remove the possibility of the courts being involved, and I think there is consensus across the Committee that that would be desirable. It strikes me that new clause 2 would be the most straightforward and easy way to do that. Of course, we know fine well that if the Government of the day can carry the House—in most cases, they can—there would be no issue in having a Dissolution. It would also avoid dragging the monarch into politics and remove the governing party’s electoral advantage. The new clause therefore strengthens the Bill, so I support it.

I turn to amendments 1 to 3 and new clause 1 on the length of an election campaign. It is impossible to look at the Bill without considering how it would move us to a position in which pretty much all elections will be unscheduled. I say “unscheduled” rather than “snap” because I recognise that an election period is very long; it certainly does not feel very snappy for candidates, voters or anyone campaigning. Unscheduled elections cause a problem for our electoral administrators. From having spoken to many of them and heard representations from the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators, it is clear that many close misses happen on the timetable, and a reduction of the timetable alongside the Bill, which could lead to more unscheduled elections, risks the public’s confidence in our democratic elections. For that reason, although it would be desirable to have shorter elections, I cannot support those amendments.

The Bill is not in a vacuum—we also have the Elections Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill before the House—and taken together, it is clearly part of a political power grab with a movement of power away from Parliament. It is a movement away from 650 Members to the hands of one man or woman who is Prime Minister, who will decide when the starting gun will be fired on an election. The Bill is, frankly, an overreaction to and misunderstanding of the causes of the gridlock in the 2019 Parliament. The principle of fixed terms is not wrong, although the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was clearly flawed. Prorogation should be in the hands of Parliament, not the Executive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Mrs Miller]

If I could finish this point, I will then allow the hon. Member to intervene.

Another of the pieces of legislation deployed under the coalition Government was the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, section 14 of which extends the timetable of a general election from 17 to 25 working days. That neatly carves out bank holidays, weekends, high days and holidays, and anything else that might get in the way, when in fact all of us sitting here know that once the starting gun is fired, everybody—just everybody—is working their socks off in electoral offices up and down the country to make sure that we deliver the election on time. The provision is just not truthful, and it needs to be a better reflection of what goes on.

[Chris Bryant]

I think, therefore, that if the Bill goes through as the Government intend and we do not have the right hon. Member’s new clause or any other amendment, the last date that the next general election can be held is 23 January 2025. Is that her understanding?

[Mrs Miller]

Oh, the hon. Gentleman is getting me into the maths quiz with which he tried to tempt the Minister. I will leave the Government to decide that, because it is more in the Minister’s bailiwick than mine.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Cox]

It is stand part that I am addressing, Mr Evans.

This Bill should warmly commend itself to those on both sides of the Committee. My only caution—my only plea—is: let this not be the last word we say upon the British constitution.

[Chris Bryant]

It is a delight to follow that Third Reading speech.

I have enjoyed today, not least because it is such a delight to be vindicated. I feel as if I have been saying the same things for 20 years. Some of what the Minister said today, if we put the word “not” in, was what she said 10 years ago, which is kind of entertaining but rather irritating.

I am not going to speak at length, but we have to go back to fundamental principles when we are talking about the constitution. I like Parliament sitting. It is good for Governments to face the scrutiny of the Commons elected. Long interruptions are a bad thing. We take a long time to get a Parliament going after a general election, and now, with a long general election, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) referred to, it can be several months that parliamentary scrutiny is effectively out of action, before Select Committees are fully set up and all the rest of it.

The Executive and the Parliament need to be in balance with one other. There is a real danger that we are moving in the direction of what I call an over-mighty Executive. The Leader of the House in particular has what I call a high theological understanding of government—the Government are always right, by definition. In our system, the Government have considerable power. That is why some have called it an elected dictatorship.

The constitution should always stand the test of time and the test of bad actors. We always presume we will have a good monarch. We have had bad monarchs in the past. We presume we will always have an honourable and good Prime Minister. We might have a bad Prime Minister, who might choose to—[Interruption.] I am being ironic here. We might have a Prime Minister who deliberately chose to subvert the constitution and use it to subvert democracy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Aaron Bell]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—the right hon. Member, I should say.

[Chris Bryant]

Just hon.

[Aaron Bell]

Not yet. I am sure it will come in time.

I will not repeat my Second Reading speech—this is the Committee stage—but I still welcome the Bill for all the reasons I gave on that day. I welcome the Government’s continued engagement with all of us who have an interest in it, in particular members of the Joint Committee on which I served with the hon. Member for Rhondda and many other Members, with whom I made friends and now sign amendments with. Perhaps the Whips will regret putting me on that Committee in the fullness of time.

I will turn to new clause 1, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), in a little while, but first I want to discuss the overall principles relating to Dissolution. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) said on Second Reading that the right place for a proper discussion of the principles was in Committee, so I think it is probably right, with your indulgence, Ms Winterton, that we have a little discussion about them. Perhaps the Minister can reflect on them in her closing remarks, too.

We heard about Tommy Lascelles and his principles from 1950. Younger viewers will remember him from “The Crown”, played by Pip Torrens, as the private secretary to Her Majesty, but at the time he was the private secretary to His Majesty. He was talking about the principles in another closely contested election period—1950 and 1951. Those principles are relevant today, but the second one about the national economy was widely considered to have fallen into abeyance. There are other principles that we should perhaps consider. It was the opinion of the Joint Committee that the Dissolution principles document issued by the Government did not go quite far enough and did not cover other aspects of Dissolution—the calling of the new Parliament and so on. I therefore ask the Minister to comment a little on the 20 principles in our report: on the overall paramount confidence in our system, what it means to lose the confidence of the House and how to determine that, and what the Prime Minister ought to be doing in certain circumstances, whether to offer the resignation of the Government or to request a Dissolution from the monarch, and when it would be more appropriate for the Prime Minister to resign. We said that it would be more appropriate if there had recently been a general election, if there was a new Prime Minister from that Member’s party, or if it appeared that another person might command the confidence of the House—that was, of course, the third of Lascelles’s principles. The work of the Committee in putting together a more complete list of principles around confidence ought to be reflected in the debate and I ask the Minister to reflect on that in her closing remarks.

Turning briefly to new clause 1, since I am a signatory to it with my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, I am grateful for the comments the Minister made from the Dispatch Box. I am also grateful for her engagement with those of us who signed new clause 1. I welcome the additional research we ought to see. As I said in my intervention on her earlier, the purpose of an election is not simply to have the most perfectly admirable election in the world, but to resolve things. The longer we take, the more people we can register and persuade to vote, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson) said, eventually they might get bored and not vote. The point of an election is to resolve things. We want to make sure people vote—once and once only, as I said in my speech on the Elections Bill the other day—but the key purpose of an election is to let the country move on from a moment of tension, contest and electoral joust between opposing candidates in our constituencies. I do not think it serves anybody for that to go on a day longer than is truly necessary. That is why I was happy to put my name to new clause 1.

I listened to the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators. I understand that there are complications with going back to the status quo ante of 17 days as things stand, but I reflect on what my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) said. Rather than saying it cannot be done with the rules as they are, we should look at which rules we could change to get back to the status quo ante. The Bill takes us back to the status quo ante in so many ways and I welcome that, but the real key is to get everything back to how it was before. I remember, as a teenager, watching elections that were short, sharp and got the job done. It did not work for us in 1997 when I was a teenager, but it got the job done and let the country move on. That is what we should have with our elections. They should not be dragged out for months. For the reasons I have given and for the candidates too, we should look at ways to make them shorter, notwithstanding the arguments that have been made by the administrators.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood]

Opposition parties are struggling a bit with this idea of democracy, are they not? Taking back control was to have control by the people and for the people, and offering the people an early general election so that they could choose an effective Government when a Parliament was logjammed, hopeless and not prepared to govern with clarity and passion was the right thing to do. I just cannot understand why Labour and the SNP are still queuing up to defend the indefensible, and to say that because they may well be faced again with a situation in which they do not dare face the electors, they need some kind of legal rigmarole and manipulation of votes in a balanced or damaged Parliament to thwart the popular will yet again. “Never let the people make the decision,” they say: it must be contained within Parliament, even when a Parliament has obviously failed, as it did when it could not implement the wishes of the British people over the great Brexit referendum.

I want assurances from the Minister that this new policy will protect the Crown—the Queen—from the difficult business of politics. I think the Minister’s version of it is better than the version from the other place. Of course, it must keep the courts out. There is nothing more political than the decision about when we go to an election and when we give the people their power back and the right to make that fundamental choice. It is a choice that now can mean something, because we do not have to keep on accepting a whole load of European laws that we have no great role in making. Again, we need that absolute guarantee that we will have this freedom so that that can happen.

Those who say that they do not want the Prime Minister to have this much power have surely been in the House long enough to know that, while the Prime Minister has considerable power from his or her office, they are also buffeted and challenged every day by a whole series of pressures in this place and outside. If a leader of a party with a majority wanted an early election that their supporters did not want, I suspect that that would get sorted out without an early election. So we are only talking about what happens when a Government have lost their majority and the Prime Minister is doing his or her best to govern as a minority. We get the extraordinary position we got when the whole Opposition wanted to gang up to thwart the public making a choice, but did not want to govern. That was totally unacceptable, and the Opposition should hear the message from the doorsteps in the 2019 election. The public wanted a Parliament with a Government who could govern, so they decided to choose one. Those who sought to block it made themselves more unpopular, and they showed that they do not understand the fundamental point of democracy that, when Parliament lets the people down, the people must be able to choose a new and more effective Parliament.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I apologise to the House that, because I have been in Committee Room 10 launching the call for evidence on setting up a national strategy for acquired brain injury, I am afraid I was not able to hear the wonderful speeches that doubtless came from those on the Front Bench—well, on the Opposition side anyway.

I completely agree with what the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has just said. Yes, I think the people of this country are crying out for a Government who can actually govern. They still were after the general election, and they certainly are at the moment. Yes, of course, the Prime Minister is buffeted, and I think the Prime Minister should be buffeted a bit more, to be honest.

What I do not understand is that this is the tiniest, most minimalist check on government that one could imagine. It simply means that a Government, which by definition already has a majority of Members of the House of Commons, should be required to come to the House of Commons to get a vote through to have a general election. It is absolutely minimal.

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[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Is it equally the case that including this vote in the Bill would not mitigate people not being good chaps? If a Prime Minister has a majority and they could get that vote through—who knows what their reasons are—when they see things coming over the horizon that might give them some advantage, it makes it difficult for the monarch to say “no” under the Bill. Is it better to preserve what was best about our constitution before 2010, which relies on the Prime Minister and the monarch being responsible, and the good behaviour that should follow?

[Chris Bryant]

I think the danger is precisely the opposite. The arrangements that the hon. Lady would like us to have are ones that put the monarch in a regular position of making a decision, and brings them closely into not only party politics, but sometimes into partisan politics within a political party. It is perfectly possible that a Prime Minister might have lost, or be about to lose, the confidence of their political party, but that political party might still want to govern and carry on under a different leader. In other words, there may be within the House an alternative Government who would be better for the nation.

My other problem is that there seems to be a very high theological understanding of the role of the Executive. I think the former Leader of the House set that going with his rather Stuart early-17th-century understanding of the constitution, which is that basically, as long as the Prime Minister has the confidence of the House of Commons, he or she should be allowed to do pretty much anything and, frankly, parliamentary democracy is a little bit of an irritant. It is worth always bearing in mind that the Executive today is the only body who can ensure that business and legislation are considered, and the only body who decide when Parliament sits, when it will go into recess, and how long it will go into recess for. If we had the same rules today as we had in 1939, nobody would have been able to table an amendment to the recess debate that led to the big row before the beginning of the second world war. Today we have an Executive who are more powerful than they have been at any stage since the early 17th century, and it is time, occasionally, that the House of Commons said, “You know what? We’re a parliamentary democracy. Let’s take just a tiny bit of power into our own hands.”

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I will be brief as I gather I have only a few minutes to speak. The Lords amendment would require the House of Commons to give prior approval to a dissolution of Parliament, and that would be done by simple majority rather than the two-thirds majority required by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. On the face of it, that would be an improvement to the existing position, but it is still something of a half-way house that causes confusion. In the event that a Government lose their ability to command a majority in the House of Commons, it does not automatically follow that the House would vote to approve an election.

For example, it may suit Opposition parties to keep a lame-duck Government in place, so that they can inflict parliamentary defeat after parliamentary defeat, as a means of further undermining confidence in the Government. But in whose interests would that be? Certainly not the interests of the country. As hon. Members have said, we very much saw that in the “zombie” Parliament of 2017-19, when Parliament initially refused to allow an election to take place. The country became ungovernable, and contempt for Parliament rose dramatically—I speak as somebody who was outside Parliament at that time, and who shared in that contempt. I submit that that is not in anyone’s best interests.

We recently heard some confused interventions on this matter from the other place. For example, a Liberal Democrat peer asked:

“But why should a Prime Minister who cannot get a majority of the House of Commons for an election be entitled to a Dissolution?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 February 2022; Vol. 818, c. 1590.]

I am still not sure whether that was a rhetorical question or whether the Lord in question was trying to figure it out for himself. Either way, it is non-sequitur reasoning because in the example he gave, a Government would not seek to dissolve Parliament unless they found it impossible to gain simple majorities in the first place. In my opinion, a rather better, and frankly rather more honest question would be: why would Parliament want to avoid an election, unless it feared that the result would go against its own wishes? That is the real question that those who support the Lords amendment must ask themselves.

There is concern in certain quarters that going to the electorate to seek a new mandate would allow an opportunistic Government to call an election at a convenient time to increase their majority. It is true that the power to call an election gives an advantage to a sitting Government, but that ability is a double-edged sword and can seriously backfire against a Prime Minister seeking to exploit a perceived opportunity. Post-war history is replete with examples of an incumbent Government misreading the political situation, and calling an election that fails to deliver the result they wished for. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1970 and Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in February 1974 are obvious examples of that. Similarly, a failure to call an election can damage an incumbent Government. The obvious recent example would be from 2007 when Gordon Brown publicly flirted with calling an election, only to back off at the last moment and cause irreparable damage to his public image as a result. The power to call an election—or not—does not automatically confer an insuperable advantage on the incumbent Government. The Lords amendment is therefore completely unnecessary, and I will continue to support the Bill as it stands.