Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Maclennan of Rogart Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords—

[Lord Grocott]

I thought that I might provoke someone.

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

Does the noble Lord believe in the opposite proposition—that to give power to the electorate you should not have a referendum? That might affect some of his earlier arguments about reform of this House.

[Lord Grocott]

I do not know which of the various constitutional proposals increases the power of the electorate. The noble Lord referred to reform of this House. One of the key reasons why I am opposed to this being an elected House is that it would seriously diminish the significance of a general election to the House of Commons. I hope that my argument is consistent; I will have to read it in Hansard tomorrow.

I hope that I can put this with some conviction but, according to my maths, since the 1945 election there have been 17 general elections in this country. If this Bill had been an Act, we would have had 13 general elections. I simply put this proposition: does that or does that not weaken the power of the electorate? There can be only one answer to that. The answer is yes.

I do not want to go to absurd lengths but we can all assume that, if there were no elections, that would seriously weaken the power of the electorate. I am not sure about the other end of that continuum—perhaps the Chartists with their annual elections. But there is no doubt that the convinced and settled view of the members of the Government who are voting on this Bill is that since the Second World War the British electorate have had too many general elections. Which ones should we not have had that we did have? Was it wrong in 1951 for a Labour Government who were tired to seek another mandate? Was it wrong of Mr Heath? Was it wrong of Harold Wilson, who had a majority of three in 1964, to call another election, or should he have soldiered on for another five years? Should Harold Wilson's Government in 1974 have gone on without a majority?

I would like to know the answer to a fairly simple question: why do the Government think that we have had too many general elections since the Second World War? Which ones were superfluous? There could be an interesting answer to that.