Early Parliamentary General Election Bill

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Main]

I do not blame you at all for unleashing a vial across anybody, Mr Speaker. I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, but the point is that the people were asked. We cannot now say we should not have asked the question. Plenty of colleagues went around the country framing the arguments—plenty of colleagues framed the arguments for, and plenty of colleagues framed the argument against.

I come back to the point that the only reason we need a general election now is that the public have seen how we have behaved in here. The public have seen which party is the most likely to honour its pledges made to the British people in 2017, which party came out with a deal that this House found favour with, and which party remembers that we are only here to carry out the referendum, not to ignore it or to change it.

[Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is also about ending uncertainty? Only with a general election and a Conservative victory can we show the path of certainty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I wonder why on earth we need a four-hour debate, because we have a very simple choice: we either want to vote for a general election or we do not. I voted for a general election last night and I will vote for one tonight. Let us be truthful: I do not think anybody in the House, listening here or in their rooms or wherever they are listening, will change their mind one iota on how they are going to vote because of this four-hour debate. Some Members are probably using the debate more as an election address. I do not have to do that, because I am not standing again, but I want to say why I will support a general election in the vote tonight.

Let us not forget that the public have been looking into Parliament a great deal more in these last few months than ever before. What they have seen is a Parliament that does not and cannot allow the Government to govern. The Government do not have a majority. The Government have not been able to get their withdrawal deal through; they have not been able to get much else through. Without doubt, there are Members who will never vote for any withdrawal agreement whatsoever, no matter how wonderful it is, because they do not want to leave the European Union, and the reality is that people out there know that. They know that we now have a Parliament that is a bit of a shambles.

Anyone who goes out and talks the public, whatever their views and however they voted in the referendum, will know that they think this Parliament is a bit of a shambles. They are seeing that even today. A simple vote on whether we have a general election is now being turned into a debate, with very little time, on whether we want 16 and 17-year-olds to be added to the electoral register and whether we want to give European Union citizens the right to vote. Even if I supported those proposals 100%, this is not the time to be changing who is on the voting register; in reality, it is pretty difficult for that to happen before a general election on 9 December or 12 December.

[Mr Fysh]

Does the hon. Lady agree that people outside might think it a little disingenuous of some Members to say that they want to vote for an election, while seeking to add wrecking amendments, such as votes for children or for EU nationals?

[Kate Hoey]

A lot of people who have seen how Parliament works over the past few months will have seen that wrecking amendments, delaying amendments and procrastination are now part and parcel of how we work in this Chamber. That is why we are here now talking about a general election.

The last general election we had, in 2017, was entirely unnecessary. Many people know that it was ridiculous to have a general election and the public punished the party that called the general election, when it had a majority and there was no need for a general election. The situation is very different now, because the Government cannot govern and the public deserve the right to have a Government, of whatever party, who can get their business through the House and who can get some general sanity into what we are doing in our procedures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

The honest answer—I have truck with honesty—is that I am not entirely sure, but does the hon. Lady understand that we tried to get the biggest piece of legislation through this House in three days? I am certain that the wit of the people in this Chamber could organise a referendum, even to be on the same day as a general election.

I do not particularly like the idea of a general election in December for all the reasons people have mentioned. The main thing I do not like is exactly what I have said: it will be used by people afterwards to say that it meant what they wanted it to mean. That applies not just to the Government side, but to the Opposition. No one can answer the question of what happens when we return a hung Parliament to this place and we are stuck once again in Brexit paralysis. What will we do then? No one is answering that question because everybody is acting completely arrogantly and doing that thing we all do on the stump when we say, “Here’s the next Prime Minister” even if we are in a minority party with about four people in it. It is totally ridiculous. It does not answer the question of what we do if we return a hung Parliament that, just like in 2017, is split exactly down the middle and we cannot get anything through.

[Mr Fysh]

What is the hon. Lady’s view of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 in such a situation, where hung Parliaments cannot do anything? Should we look at abolishing it? Would the Labour party support that?

[Jess Phillips]

I do not speak for the Labour Front Bench or those who make policy, but the Act seems to have caused paralysis. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there is nothing ideal about the situations that any of us have found ourselves in since 2016. None of this is ideal. Frankly, it needed people who could put most things aside and try to do what was best, and I am afraid that this House has largely failed in that endeavour to try to find consensus.

And so we face the future. After the next general election, will we all agree to try to build a consensus, if it returns a hung Parliament with no clear line? Will we all put that in our manifestos? I do not know the answer to that. “Make it end” could just carry on in perpetuity. Nobody wants that.

I want to build consensus. A man was arrested and charged for trying to break into my office, calling me a fascist because I would not vote for the deal. I asked for him to be shown leniency in court, and I asked for us to be able to sit down and talk to each other because I do not believe that I cannot find something in common with this man who is the same age as me and grew up streets away from me. I believe we can find consensus, but I am not sure a general election campaign is where we will find it.

I can guarantee to all hon. Members that an onslaught of money will come from who knows where to fund propaganda in our election: when our electoral laws in this country are currently not fit for purpose; when we are about to enter into a battle where foreign funding can flood into our system; where the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who led a campaign that has been found to have broken the law, is going to be in charge of some of that propaganda machine; and when the Prime Minister himself refuses to answer direct questions on exactly his role in the decision-making and when he found out.

In the recent European Parliament election, a man stood on a platform, completely legitimately, when the thing that made him most famous was whether he would or would not rape me. Our electoral laws are not fit for purpose. So what are we all going to do—all of us sitting here pretending that what we want is honesty and that we do not just want to win? What are we all going to do during the election campaign to make sure it is fair, to make sure it is legal and to make sure that it is not trying to say from the other side that people like me are a danger to the country or from my side that people like you are, so that people who hear that turn up and try to break into my office, scream in face and send me death threats? What are we going to do? It might be much easier for everybody to get a one-line Bill through, but a one-line Bill on an election does not answer a single one of the questions that every single person in this place has been asking for a very long time.

I shall finish my remarks by saying that I will gladly go back and sleep in my own bed for a solid six weeks, see my children every day and join the camaraderie of the hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who will join me in my seat as they do every time we have an election, but what happens next is the question that nobody can answer. Until that is the case, the one-line Bill is useless.