Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I apologise for not being here earlier in the debate, but I am seriously concerned about what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting, which is a degree of politicisation of the monarch, as Head of State, from which I would draw back. If a degree of automaticity were involved and any Prime Minister of the day who could not form a Government automatically, as a convention, asked the leader of the next major party to form one, that would be one thing. If the monarch is making political judgments about who he or she should choose, that is a very different matter. When George V involved himself in helping to form the national Government in 1931 that was pushing the monarch too far into politics. Heads of State should not have that role.

[Nick Boles]

The hon. Gentleman also makes a strong argument and has much greater historical knowledge than I do. I would say only that if the Bill becomes law, it will become a clear part of our constitutional arrangements that the expectation, the desire and the will of the people is that we have fixed-term Parliaments lasting five years. Therefore, should there be an interruption that led to a vote of no confidence in a Government and the Prime Minister came to the sovereign asking for her to prorogue Parliament, it would be clear to the sovereign, who would also receive advice from her advisers, that there was a danger of frustrating the constitution and frustrating the will of the people for us to have elections every five years.

Given that the Prime Minister would have lost a vote of confidence in this House—in the old days that would normally have automatically led to their no longer having a right to govern—I do not think it would be classified as the sovereign “meddling” in politics were she then to say that she would invite alternatives if the Prime Minister could not tell her that he or she could form a stable Government without going to the people in an election. If the Prime Minister could not give her that reassurance, it would be entirely proper for the sovereign—her advisers would tell her this—to see whether the Parliament that had not run its full course did not contain an alternative stable Government who could be formed and for her to invite the relevant leader of any such Government to kiss hands, become Prime Minister and resummon Parliament to see whether they could win a vote of confidence. That is why the fear of the hon. Member for Rhondda is not justified. In fact, a reverse fear is involved.

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[Nick Boles]

That is an even more ingenious attempt, Mr Deputy Speaker, because it is harder for me to appeal to you for succour on this point, but I reject my hon. Friend’s point because I believe that the Bill is one of principle. I believe that the idea of Prime Ministers picking the dates of elections is wholly outrageous in a modern democracy and that we must have fixed-term Parliaments. I happen to know that this argument has been raging inside the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties for years, so it is a cause of high principle.

The history of the British constitution is that changes of high principle happen only when the parties in power see political advantage in such change; that is how democracy works. Britain has been reformed when the great causes have been aligned with low party interest and I thank—I am not sure if I am allowed to say what I was going to say—the stars that in this Parliament at this time that alliance of high principle and low politics has come together and that we are putting through Parliament a Bill that will establish fixed-term elections and remove the Prime Minister’s right to choose a date that is to his or her advantage.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I am listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman. But I would be more convinced by his argument if the Bill were to apply after the next election, but this looks like a Government trying to perpetuate their term in office to five years.

[Nick Boles]

I detect from the hon. Gentleman’s expression and demeanour that he is worried, but he should not be because we genuinely want the changes to become permanent—as much as the constitution of our country can allow that. We genuinely want there to be, at least for as long as any of us can see, a habit, norm and expectation deep in our society that there will be elections in May every five years. I hope that is how the situation will be perceived in this country after the Bill is passed—without my hon. Friends’ amendments.

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[Kelvin Hopkins]

When I first heard the suggestion, I thought that the electorate might consider that such a Government had behaved irresponsibly and therefore should not receive its support, but if the vote was a simple device for calling an early election that took only a few hours, the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has a point, in that the mechanism would just be another way of calling an early election, and the position would not be very different from where we are now.

[Dan Byles]

I will have to agree to disagree with hon. Members about this, but I do not think that a Government going into a general election would want to see headlines on the front pages of The Sun and other tabloids screaming, “Government falls after losing confidence vote in the House”.

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[Dan Byles]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point.

The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) likes to cite a figure of 3.7 years as the average length of a Parliament since 1945—he does not need to jump up and do so again now—but we need to tackle that statistic head on, because it is quite disingenuous. The statistic includes the three occasions on which a Parliament lasted for less than two years. No one would suggest that Parliaments of less than two years should be the norm—they occur in unusual circumstances—so it is misleading to include them in statistics to show the average length of a Parliament since 1945.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Is not the great advantage of our present system that if a Government do not get a particularly big majority—such as in 1964 and February 1974—the arrangements are sufficiently flexible to allow us to hold another general election fairly soon afterwards so that one party or another can get a reasonable majority?

[Dan Byles]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting argument, because he seems to suggest that any Government of the day should have such a strong majority that they can bash their legislation through. I believe that Labour Members referred to that arrangement as an elective dictatorship when they were on the wrong side of such figures in the 1980s. In this day and age, if a Government need to be a bit more consensual and cleverer about getting their business through the House, it is considered to be a good thing. Do we really want to say that whenever a Government do not have a huge thumping majority we should have another election?

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[Thomas Docherty]

I do not like to leave the House in suspense, but on this one occasion hon. Members will have to wait and see how many of our amendments the Government are prepared to accept. Clearly, if the Minister accepts all the considered amendments that we have offered, we would be more than happy to give strong consideration to supporting Third Reading. I look forward to the Minister’s reply shortly.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My hon. Friend is being very generous to the Government. Even if they accepted the amendments, I would be inclined to vote against Third Reading.

[Thomas Docherty]

The Minister is a thoroughly reasonable individual and I am sure he will not hold that statement against the rest of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition when he considers accepting our amendments.

As has been outlined previously—it would be inappropriate for me to go into great detail—we do not support the principle of a five-year term, for one practical reason that has not been touched on before, which is that it would take us into a clash with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland elections that are scheduled for 2015.

As this is the first opportunity that the Minister has had to address the House on the matter since our Committee stage last year, I hope that he will be able to provide us with an update on the Government’s plans for providing flexibility to the devolved Administrations to vary the dates of their elections. That is an extremely personal matter, as I shall explain. Perhaps he can tell the House what progress has been made in his consultation with the devolved Administrations on how any such alteration of the date of their elections would be achieved.

That is directly relevant to the issue under discussion because of the different number of days of Prorogation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda outlined, we have 25 days for the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the National Assembly for Wales and local elections, and just 17 days for this place. Let me give a simple local example to show why new clause 4 and others are so important to the date.

The differing number of days will cause great confusion for parties and for the electorate in the 2015 election cycle. Part of my constituency is the Dunfermline East Scottish Parliament seat. We have an MSP called Helen Eadie. Under the current rules—we still do not have firm proposals from the Government to alter the date—some two and a half weeks from polling day it would be legitimate for the Labour party, for example, to send out leaflets saying, “Vote Helen Eadie for your Member of the Scottish Parliament and vote Thomas Docherty for Member of Parliament.” That is an unsatisfactory situation, and it is the reason why my hon. Friend and I are hoping to persuade the Minister tonight that he should change the length of Prorogation to 25 days to give us consistency across the whole of the United Kingdom.

There is also the question of how campaign finance will work. Members are painfully aware of the importance of ensuring that money is correctly apportioned to the long campaign, as it is commonly known, as opposed to the short campaign. Joint elections could give rise to difficult legal and technical disputes, as we saw in the case of the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), if sums of money are inadvertently misallocated. We therefore hope that the Government will accept our reasonable amendment.