Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I want to group Amendment 37, which stands in my name, with Amendment 34. The officials have been advised. The Minister has also had a little notification of that.

Amendment 37 would replace 14 days with five days. The Constitution Committee accepted 14 days as reasonable. However, would the country accept it? A 14-day limbo seems excessive, not least to the bankers and to what we used to call the gnomes of Zurich—now the genomes of the internet or something. As everyone else discusses whether an election will take place, it could be a long wet fortnight. As David Laws acknowledges in his most helpful book on the five days, there has to be early reassurance of the market. In his wise words:

“neither the British media nor the financial markets nor the public would tolerate a prolonged period of uncertainty”,

as a,

“failure to form a stable government could have a real impact on the UK bond market and on the UK interest rates, as well as on confidence in the pound”.

He well describes how:

“The British press and the British people are used to seamless and swift transfers of power”.

He admits that, anyway, more time would not guarantee a better coalition agreement.

All this, of course, is without thinking about the implications of Ministers from a defeated Government going off to negotiate for Britain in key EU, G20 or IMF meetings over that period of 14 days. In her evidence to the Constitution Committee, Professor Oliver said that she thought that it was against the public interest for there to be no effective government of the country, and even the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, Mr Mark Harper, admitted that,

“it would become clear pretty quickly that the government could not put together an alternative government”.

Similarly, David Laws—I am sorry to quote him again, but he is very helpful—testified that David Cameron himself wanted negotiations to be over in days, not weeks, and preferably before the markets got jumpy. Nick Clegg believed at the time that the deal could be done in two to three days.

Therefore, I have to ask why the coalition, which was put together in just five days, thinks it needed longer for that task. Was it too pressed in May 2010 to take sensible decisions? Some of us would say, of course, that the evidence of the coalition agreement supports the idea that it is right in that assumption. Perhaps the chaos caused by the raft of unco-ordinated constitutional changes, of which I believe the present Bill is just one, is evidence of a rather over-hurried deal. Perhaps coalitions anyway should be about domestic and economic policy, not about the country’s constitution, which is far too precious for late-night bargaining.

Certainly, while the price for the Lib-Lab pact was electoral reform—the Lib-Conservative pact; I am sorry, I am too old, although they did not get quite so much out of us, I have to say—it is clear from David Laws that the issue of fixed-term Parliaments was not an end in itself as a real democratic need but was, to use his words,

“to avoid a second election”.

So is it uncertainty about their relationship that leads to this Bill and its 14 days? The coalition expressly does not want to rule out the possibility of a House changing its mind within 14 days. “Changing its mind”, of course, is a euphemism. I shall quote the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, at Second Reading, as it is so good:

“As for introducing a 14-day cooling off period, the mind boggles ... imagine the cornucopia”—

a wonderful word—

“of inducements, together with the bullying, which a future Government might carry out during those 14 days. We might even get a few more Dukes in this House”.—[Official Report, 1/3/11; col. 1030.]

My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, a former Chief Whip, said:

“Are we to have 14 days so that Government Ministers can offer jobs to rebels or inducements or threats”,

or is 14 days,

“simply designed as a mechanism for one partner in a coalition to try to persuade a different partner to enter a new coalition and form an entirely different kind of majority in the Commons without an election”.—[Official Report, 1/3/11; col. 1035.]

An academic rather than a practitioner of the dark arts, my noble friend Lord Plant contemplated,

“a series of coalitions arising during a fixed-term Parliament, without a straightforward appeal to the electorate, that would be club politics of the worst possible kind”.—[Official Report, 1/3/11; col. 1033.]

Is that what the coalition favours: a sequence of groupings, anything to keep in power? Is it knowing that five days will not suffice next time round? Only a coalition with parties bent on staying in office could have dreamt up the notion of two weeks of haggling to cling to power. The Conservative and Liberal Democrats commenced and consummated their relationship in just five days. They seem very happy, so are they repenting at leisure or do they feel that they needed more time for that coalition agreement? Perhaps they are beginning to worry about the commitment to early legislation to recall an MP, as Mr Clegg is somewhat unpopular in Sheffield. Is it because the commitment to the binding resolution in the other place that an election would be held in May 2015 has already fallen apart, and that has made them realise that they need more time? Is it perhaps the commitment to PR for the House of Lords, given that they have yet to even get a yes for AV in the Commons, and that they are now wondering whether they did that right? Or is it that they wanted time to include in the coalition agreement, “We will cause chaos in the health service and totally upset the BMA, patients and the public by unnecessary reorganisation”? Instead, of course, the agreement says that the Liberal Democrat and Conservative ideas are stronger when combined, such as on the NHS. The agreement states:

“Conservative thinking on markets, choice and competition and add to it the Liberal Democrat belief in advancing democracy at a much more local level, and you have a united vision for the NHS”.

I am not sure that the good noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, has read that.

Those are just some comments on the present coalition agreement. My worry is the essence of the 14 days, because democracy is about more than just numbers; it is about being able to vote out a Government. This measure seeks to entrench one. For that reason, it should be avoided.

I have two questions for the Minister. Why, when this coalition was put together in five days, does he now think that it would take 14 days to repeat the exercise? How does he think that markets and our allies, or indeed our foes, would respond to 14 days of dithering, bargaining and negotiation?

[Lord Cormack]

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has made an interesting speech and has raised a number of fascinating questions. But there is a danger that we will have a bit of confusion because Clause 2 is concerned wholly and specifically with holding an “early parliamentary general election” during a fixed-term Parliament in the event of the Government of the day coming unstuck for some reason or other. Although the remarks about the time taken to form the present coalition are intensely interesting, this clause does not affect what happens after a general election when there could be—perish the thought—unlimited time.

I believe that this clause is wholly misplaced. It needs to be deleted and replaced with something far simpler, more specific and more precise. At a later stage in the Committee’s deliberations, I shall seek to move an amendment to that effect.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

Perhaps I may help the Committee by saying that when the Constitution Committee, to which my noble friend Lady Hayter rightly referred, appeared to support the notion of 14 days, this was an entirely constitutional judgment in the context of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. It was not a political judgment.

Perhaps I may draw the attention of the Committee to the exchange between my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith and Mr Mark Harper when he appeared before the Committee. My noble and learned friend suggested to Mr Harper that this was a complete change from the previous practice:

“For example, we could end up with Labour and Liberal Democrats. That could not happen under the present system, could it?”.

However, Mr Harper replied:

“That depends on the way people conduct themselves, but I think that it could”.

He said that if it was “early in a Parliament” that the Government were defeated, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has just suggested,

“and there was a viable alternative government and—prior to having published this Bill—a Prime Minister had sought a dissolution, it is perfectly possible that a dissolution would not have been granted”.

My noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith asked him if there was a recent example of that, to which the answer was no.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I am trying to address the arguments advanced by a number of noble Lords and will certainly come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. He asked what was wrong with the position in 1979. Under our constitution as it then was and as it stands today, the Prime Minister followed a course of action which was constitutionally acceptable. We are looking at a situation where that would not be the framework within which the Prime Minister was acting—he would be acting within the framework of a Parliament elected for a fixed term. The then Prime Minister had the choice of whether to resign or immediately call a general election. He chose to seek a Dissolution. Resigning would not be possible under the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. What we are seeking to do is take away the power of the Prime Minister to call an election. I think my noble friend was trying to get in earlier—

[Lord Cormack]

Yes I was. I am most grateful to my noble friend, who is the most conciliatory of men—but. The two devices of the 14 days and the two-thirds majority are in this Bill to protect whoever is the Prime Minister and whoever are the Executive, and there can be no getting away from that. Surely, allowing a Prime Minister, having lost the confidence of the House of Commons, 14 days, or allowing two-thirds of its elected Members—not two-thirds who are necessarily there at the time—to vote for a Dissolution, is a protective device and one that gives time for the powers that be, the Whips Office and elsewhere, to work on Members. It will make for a thoroughly undignified situation, and it will only add power to the Executive and take it away from Parliament, where it rightly belongs.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My noble friend Lord Lamont has also been trying to get in. If he wishes to ask a question, I shall deal with it and then press on.