Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill (Instruction)

John Redwood Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

Well, indeed. “If not now, when” is always a good question, and better people than me have put it. This instruction has been laid by the hon. Gentleman, who goes back a long time in this House. He and I have had constitutional battles on the Floor of the House for about 10 years, and I am always delighted to do battle with him. I may concede to him in some cases that he is a better hon. Gentleman than I am. However, the point today, in answer to his question, is that his instruction seeks to widen the scope of the Bill considerably and at this stage I do not think that hon. Members could be fully clear about the extent of his vision for such a change. I do not think it is clear, beyond just the one amendment today, what he may have in mind to discuss about Prorogation. I do not think it is fully clear from this half hour of quite warm-tempered debate what other hon. Members and right hon. Members have in mind to change about Prorogation. This instruction could leave the field of Prorogation open of course to further debate—that is its point—amendment and qualification. Of course, that must be its point, but all of that is somewhat larger than is revealed by today’s amendment. I would be a little surprised if hon. Members wanted to vote with him on a motion that does not give any more time than that for consideration of a very important area of our constitution.

Let me point out how much time we have taken to get to what we are doing today on Dissolution. There have been manifesto commitments from both sides of the House, as I have said. There have been detailed reports from Committees of this House and the other place, as well as a high degree of consensus and many years of reflection on the operation of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. I do not believe that a great deal of realistic notice, ahead of the amendment and this instruction, exists in respect of Prorogation. For that reason, I suggest that now is not the time for that debate, and it is not for me to suggest another time for such a debate.

The hon. Member for Rhondda raised some other points that ought to be answered. There are compelling practical reasons why we do not need to go into the territory raised here today. He raised the spectre of a Government using Prorogation simply to keep on going, but the point needs to be made that any Government would want a new parliamentary Session to begin as soon as possible to pass their Queen’s Speech at the earliest opportunity and to have supply. Quite rightly, no Government can operate without supply and they therefore need Parliament to be in existence. No Government, whether the Government of the day or a future Government, would want to introduce hurdles between the end of one parliamentary Session and another. Their purpose would be to move the legislative programme forward so that they could deliver on their commitments to the electorate. These are fundamentally important points about how Governments and Parliament work together, and I think that that is a quite reasonable answer to the points that have been made today about whether a Government could indeed prorogue forever and whether they ought to be stopped in some way.

More broadly, the Sovereign exercises the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister and that has always been the case. What I think is coming into this debate on the instruction, and may come into the discussion later if this motion were to be passed, is the concept of introducing prescriptive statutory approaches into our flexible constitutional arrangements, and I would call that unnecessary and undesirable. The whole scheme of what we are doing in the Committee for this Bill is to remove constraining and inflexible schemes and return to flexible arrangements that work well.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is it not the case that those who wish to reopen this issue are revisiting a very dark chapter in the history of our Parliament, when Parliament decided to stand against the wishes of the British people expressed in a democratic referendum? It required the British people to reassert their will and their decision in a general election to clear the air, but is it not great that we cleared the air?

[Chloe Smith]

The point is that we have an opportunity to clear the air in regard to legislation that is highly prescriptive and has not worked. That is the aim of today; it is not to extend at relatively short notice into a very large subject for debate, for which the ground has not been properly prepared by the hon. Member for Rhondda, although I admire his spirit in trying to do so. Instead, we ought to be able to move past this instruction to change the scope of the Bill and conduct our work through Committee, thus discharging at least two manifesto commitments from either side of the House and returning our constitutional arrangements to a form of stability that works.