Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, as we set out today on proceedings on this important Bill, those on the Pensions Bill set out in parallel in Grand Committee in the Moses Room. At Second Reading on that Bill, I averred that I was batting much too high in the batting order, but that misgiving was as nothing compared to my similar concern about overpromotion today, given the wealth of batting still to come. However, it gives me the unwarranted opportunity to be the first from these Benches to welcome the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Cormack and to congratulate him on it. The debate might have been made for him on this occasion.

It is also the greatest of pleasures, with one caveat, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. He always speaks with such uncommon good sense on these matters that my one caveat must necessarily be that if I find myself disagreeing with him, I shall spend the rest of the debate asking myself how I could have got it so wrong. Fortunately, I shall give so few hostages to fortune in what will be a brief speech that I shall enjoy the rest of the debate even more. My first observation is based on the symmetry arising from the repeal of the Septennial Act 1715. That Act was preceded in the reign of Queen Anne by paving legislation in 1706; that in the event of the Hanoverian succession, Ministers should cease to sit in the House of Commons. That Act was then repealed in 1708. I had always wondered why the repeal occurred. My only likely conjecture has been that the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 had overtaken the need for the 1706 legislation. I was greatly reassured when I found that my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern agreed with me. Interestingly, the great historian GM Trevelyan, in his magisterial four-volume history of the reign of Queen Anne, draws attention in a footnote to the fact that Montesquieu, writing in 1739, had alluded to the passage of the 1706 Act without apparently realising it had been repealed. After paying a warm tribute to the great understanding of this nation in these affairs, he prayed the 1706 paving legislation in aid of his own argument for a separation of powers, which Trevelyan believed had affected American and French thinking on their own constitution building at the end of that century.

If I fast-forward three-quarters of a century to the last two decades of that century, and concentrate for a moment on the Americans and ourselves—the French Revolution not being exactly conducive to a Speaker’s Conference—it is interesting that while the Americans were soberly, if a little informally, going about their own constitution building, Charles James Fox, who beats me into fourth place in terms of longevity as MP for Westminster, was embarking on his dedicated campaign, born of his own brief experience in Cabinet, to remove the royal prerogative in the calling of elections; the story which is in the very context of this Bill still gripping us today two centuries later.

The reference to the Bill encourages me—and perhaps your Lordships’ House—to cover the next two centuries in a single sentence and to bring me straight to today’s proceedings. We are much in the debt of the Constitution Select Committee in your Lordships’ House for providing us in its eighth report with an energetic canter over the issues. It was admirably and reassuringly assisted by the UCL Constitution Unit—even if one piece of briefing sought to translate that acronym into the disguise of a “University of Central London”. I must remark that, although the Mediterranean littoral is currently seized of a massive political upheaval, in the western democracies less is happening than two centuries ago in terms of constitutional reform—although the recent inability of the Belgians to form a Government runs counter to that universality of peace and quiet. There is, therefore, a general absence of external infectiousness towards reform here.

Of the three major parties, the essence of this Bill contained in its title “Fixed-term Parliaments” uniquely did not appear in the Conservative Party’s manifesto last year. This is clearly a coalition measure and very much in the care of the Deputy Prime Minister. I mean no disrespect either to him or to our coalition partners if I say that I had some difficulty in parsing Mr Clegg’s reply before the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee when he said,

“Do I think that in practice 12 months makes an earth-shattering difference in terms of the length of time of a fixed-term Parliament?”,

and he answered his own rhetorical question,

“No. I do … ”.

If the trumpet sounds an uncertain note, who will gird himself for battle?

I understand that several national polling projects have reported that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the nation are in favour of fixed-term Parliaments, but I have not seen any qualitative evidence of why they hold that opinion. For myself, I find the arguments for one side or the other remarkably evenly balanced. I do not propose to draw up a personal balance sheet but shall listen closely to the rest of the debate.

In the mean time, as I am speaking from the government Benches, perhaps I may say that I approve of the argument that a fixed-term Parliament would make for better planning of parliamentary business; nor am I disturbed by the alternative contention that a fixed-term Parliament would enable Her Majesty’s Government better to manipulate the economic cycle. Given that any Government hope to succeed themselves, I do not have such unyielding confidence in Her Majesty’s Treasury so to conduct itself as to achieve the optimal result.

I also think that there is much to be said for the final sentence in lighter print—not the heavy print of a recommendation—of paragraph 43 of the Constitution Select Committee’s report:

“There is a case for saying that any new Prime Minister should at least have the opportunity to seek a fresh mandate in a general election”,

as Eden did in 1955 and as Mr Blair’s delayed retirement prevented his successor from doing, had he wished, prior to the Summer Recess in 2007.

For myself, I am left a little agnostic about the balance underlying the Bill. Where I may be in a gang of one—as my noble friend Lord St John of Fawsley once described the then Mr Hattersley, now the noble Lord, Lord Hattersley, in his winding-up speech in the Queen’s Speech debate in 1979—is that, despite the coalition’s rapid resolution of the post-election crisis of last year, I doubt whether the crisis of February 1974 would have been resolved as rapidly without the benefit of the Queen’s prerogative in the background. Together with my noble friend Lord Taverne, I have spent many happy hours explaining British politics to young American students at the start of their semesters abroad in British universities. The students’ curiosity about the Queen’s position in the British constitution always prompts me to allude to February 1974.

It is in part because of the abolition of the prerogative—and, were this the subject of polling, I doubt that a national majority would be found for its abolition—that I regret that a move towards more constitutional consultation or scrutiny on these issues has not found favour with the coalition. There are enough loose ends lying around on the quarterdeck, as the Bill now is, to prompt resort to the memorable conviction of that tersest of American politicians, President Johnson’s great Texan ally, Sam Rayburn, that the wisest words in the English language are, “Wait a minute”. On St David’s Day, I am encouraged by the speech of my noble and learned friend and fellow Welshman Lord Howe of Aberavon to believe that the remaining stages of this Bill are going to be interesting.