Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Chris Green and Patrick Grady

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

[Chris Green]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson), who captured many of the points so clearly and effectively. I welcome the Bill and fully intend to support it and the reversal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. That Act was designed to deal with the short-term problem of a coalition, which is a relatively frequent occurrence in our democracy but is certainly not something that we would wish to have generally, because it causes a great many problems, with accountability being one of the most significant concerns. Following a coalition Government, there is always a question about blame and who is responsible for what actions. One side claims all the good things and blames all the bad on the other. We do not want legislation that reflects those problematic times and deals with that situation as a permanent feature. People across the country understand our political system and actually quite value the way we do politics, including first-past-the-post and having a majority Government, as we have recognised over many years.

Elections are wonderful occasions for a whole range of reasons. They are a festival of democracy and, in many ways, are uplifting, although I recognise the negativity of long election campaigns. My right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) made a very good point by referring to election fatigue. I am therefore very sympathetic to new clause 1. Even though I and many others quite enjoy elections and the campaign trail, we have to reflect on the concern that my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) highlighted so well about the exclusionary qualities of a long election campaign: it is very difficult for many people to engage in it if they are not already in Parliament or do not have wider financial support to be an active candidate throughout. I hope that the Minister will reflect on the new clause even if it is not pressed to a vote at this stage.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Member says that there is election fatigue and that people are worried about when election campaigns begin, but surely the effect of the Bill will be that the next election campaign will start now because nobody except the Prime Minister will know the date of the next election.

[Chris Green]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but I fundamentally disagree. In countries with fixed-term Parliaments, such as the United States of America, they legislate for two years and then campaign for two years, whereas if we do not know the time of the next general election, we do not know when we will start campaigning. Often, even Prime Ministers of the day do not know when the elections will be, because they are not fixed in time, so it is difficult for the Government to start campaigning. Actually, I think the Bill will reduce the campaign period.

There is a strong sense that once electors have made their decision, they have given their judgment not only on the political parties but, more importantly, on the candidates themselves. In constituencies, we are elected as individuals and then we form a Government among ourselves. It is not necessarily the largest party that will form a Government, because we might be in a coalition situation and other parties might seek that. With a fixed term, however, a party that is in the majority at the beginning of a Parliament may find, whether because of death, defection or fragmentation, that it is no longer able to function. Arguably, we have seen that recently.

I oppose new clause 2 because for Parliament to make the decision to permit an election would, in a sense, enable the House of Commons to hold the Government of the day to ransom. We saw that recently when the Government ought to have fallen and we ought to have had a general election. The British people ought to have been in a position to make a decision not only about the fundamental issue of Brexit but, more broadly, about how individuals here had represented the interests and concerns of their constituents, and then to return us to enact whatever manifesto we had come up with.

The idea that we could be in a position where the Opposition and perhaps fragments of the governing party could say, “No, we will just carry on as long as we see fit” would bring Parliament more and more into disrepute. We have to have the Prime Minister making these decisions. Fundamentally, who would fear facing the verdict of the people? It would be those who were doing a bad job, whether they were in opposition or in the Government of the day. I believe that the Prime Minister ought to make that decision within the five-year period.

[Patrick Grady]

I apologise, Dame Rosie, that I have been bobbing up and down this afternoon wanting to speak and not wanting to speak, but I think that some of our discussion on the new clauses needs to be teased out a little more. First, I would like to hear from the Minister in response to the point on which I tried to intervene on her, which was about the consequential effects, particularly with regard to referendums. The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) made a similar point about the ability of the UK Parliament essentially to take primacy over decisions already made by the devolved assemblies about the dates of elections and particularly of referendums.

Why could not the Bill have been structured in such a way that it simply stopped the Prime Minister from choosing a date on which a poll or plebiscite of some kind was already scheduled? Forcing polls or plebiscites in the devolved areas to be rescheduled instead entirely diminishes or takes away the idea that we are in some kind of union of equals and fundamentally reasserts the primacy of this place above all else. If that does not make the argument for the outcome of the referendum that I will be campaigning for, I do not know what does.

The point about setting the date of the election, which also relates to new clause 2, is particularly important. The effect will be not only that the Prime Minister alone will know the date of the next election, but that he will know all the consequent dates that fit alongside it, particularly the regulated periods, the short campaign and the long campaign. It will therefore affect the ability of parties and individual candidates—as the hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) said, we are all individual candidates for election—to spend money and to decide when and how to do so.

That point relates to the Elections Bill, which is about to be considered in Committee, and speaks to the piecemeal approach that this Government are very slyly taking to what is actually a very serious package of constitutional reforms that undermine democratic protections and positions that people have enjoyed across these islands for some considerable time.

That was a bit too long for an intervention, Dame Rosie, so I have taken advantage of the fact that the Committee still had a bit of time to run. As the Minister was not willing to take my intervention, I hope that in her summing up she will be able to reply to some of my points.

O’Neill Review

Debate between Chris Green and Patrick Grady

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Grady]

It is still a pleasure to be serving under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter.

Antimicrobial resistance was described earlier by another Member as a market failure. I have also seen it described as a “tragedy of the commons”, which is a phrase that some of us might associate with the hassle we have to go through because of the antiquated voting systems in this House. It is actually an economic term describing where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good by depleting a resource that should be there to serve everyone. That is precisely what has happened through the misuse of antibiotic medicines over the years. It shows that the resistance we are discussing today is an avoidable and man-made problem, and it is therefore in our gift to overcome the challenge.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

One of my concerns is that we view this as though there should be a proper market functioning. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we do not actually want a functioning market, in that we want a new generation of drugs to become available and then, as far as possible, not to be used? We do not want the market to operate; we want the use of such drugs to be in reserve.

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree. That leads me nicely on to my first point about the particular challenge faced in developing countries.

All Governments in the world have an obligation under the sustainable development goals—it is in SDG 3—to ensure health and wellbeing for all, which includes access to safe, effective, quality and affordable medicines and vaccines. That is about access to medicines; it is not about the right to buy or sell them on the market, it is about treating them as a common good. That is precisely what we want to do, otherwise there is a real risk of backsliding on progress that has been made in tackling neglected and tropical diseases. We heard earlier about TB being responsible for more than 5,000 deaths per day, and about malaria, which is often treated by very strong antibiotics and affects more than 200 million people worldwide a year. That is why there needs to be a broad, co-ordinated response. Drugs that treat TB are often used to treat other infections as well, so in boosting research into neglected diseases there is an opportunity to supercharge the pipeline of development and make more drugs available for treatment as we need them.

I am glad the Minister is back in the Chamber. It would be interesting to hear what further commitments the Government can make. We welcomed the commitment to the global fund, but how is the Department for Health working with the Department for International Development on these issues? In particular, how much of her Department’s spending will be counted as official development assistance when it comes to tackling antimicrobial resistance? The Ross fund was set up by the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), who is no longer in his place, and I congratulate him on it. What progress is being made on that fund, and what support will there be for researchers on the ground in developing countries? I am not opposed to using the ODA budget to fund Departments other than DFID, but wherever possible it should be used to support research on the ground in developing countries.

I want to speak briefly about domestic responses. I recently met a constituent, Linda Brooks, who has become the chair of the Scottish steering committee for synthetic biology—an initiative supported by Scottish Enterprise. She is also a manager at the company Thermo Fisher, which supports research in the life sciences sector including pioneering work on antimicrobial resistance and, in particular, the technology of genome editing, which has huge potential. It would be interesting to hear whether the Government provide any support in those areas.

We all have responsibility for the effective use of antibiotics. During the hiatus in this debate I was able to sign up online to become an antibiotic guardian, which Public Health England supports with the encouragement of all the devolved Administrations. It includes a range of pledges to treat symptoms, to talk to pharmacists, to dispose of unused antibiotics carefully, to take the flu vaccine and to always complete the course—I hope everyone will sign up to that pledge.