Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Nick Boles Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

I accept that entirely. Constitutional legislation is always complicated and we should always seek consensus on it. I have to say—I believe Members know this—that I can think of plenty of occasions when I brought forward constitutional legislation and then had to take it away again. With the single, terrible exception of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill—for which I have already abjectly apologised as it was a dreadful piece of legislation—I have always both provided sufficient time and quite often changed proposed legislation addressing this complicated territory in the light of what was said in this House or the other place in Committee and the Chamber.

To consider why we have ended up in this situation, we have to return to a point made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) in an intervention on the Deputy Prime Minister. The hon. Gentleman echoed a comment made last week by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who said of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill that people might have more respect for the Government if they admitted that it was about party advantage. There would have been greater respect for the Government over the timing and abject drafting of the Bill before us if the Deputy Prime Minister had said, “Yes, we brought this forward—and the Prime Minister has stood on his head on this—because we did a deal for a variety of reasons which I shall explain. That is the price the Prime Minister paid for this bit of the deal, and we are rushing it through for internal reasons.” The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex was absolutely right to say—he can correct me if I get a single preposition in the wrong place—that the Bill smacks of gerrymandering the constitution in favour of the coalition, which is what I heard him say, and that it was legislation on the hoof. That is true. The Deputy Prime Minister should have taken his time and invited the other parties into discussion, sought the advice of the Liaison Committee and others, and come forward with a much better proposition.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

rose—

[Mark Durkan]

rose—

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[Mr Straw]

If I may first make a little more progress, I will then give way to both hon. Gentlemen.

The irony will not be lost on the House that had the previous Labour Administration acted in such a fashion, Members of the current Government parties would rightly have expressed outrage, and Liberal Democrat Members would have done so in unbearably sanctimonious and pious terms. Everybody knows that to be the case.

Professor Robert Hazell of University College London’s constitution unit has said:

“The legislation could still be introduced with cross-party support, if the government is willing to take it slowly. That is what the government is seeking to do with reform of the House of Lords”—

I commend the Government’s approach on that—

“It should adopt the same approach with this Bill.”

Notwithstanding the fact that the Bill has now been introduced, my very strong advice to the Deputy Prime Minister is that he should take a long time before bringing it back before the House so that the Select Committee can have a look at it. If he wants examples of Bills just sitting around for some time while Ministers have repented at leisure of mistakes they and their colleagues have made and regrouped to bring back something better, I will provide him with them.

As we know, the Bill’s primary purpose is not high-minded; the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex was correct about that. Its effect may be welcome, but its primary purpose is to serve as a form of constitutional handcuffs to prevent either of the coalition parties from assassinating the other. This is, indeed, a partnership characterised by paranoia.

[Nick Boles]

The right hon. Gentleman criticises my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister for not giving time for consultation, yet even before the Bill was published he had taken on board concerns expressed on both sides of the House about a specific provision relating to early Dissolution and radically changed his proposal. It seems to me that he is listening much more intently than the right hon. Gentleman ever did when he was proposing constitutional reforms.

[Mr Straw]

I was just checking with my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) whether the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) was a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat, because I was very confused after this morning’s pamphlet, but I gather from my hon. Friend that he is both. I am going to buy and distribute copies of his pamphlet in all Liberal wards—there are none in my constituency, but there are some in the borough. I shall dish out copies of the pamphlet in the borough, because one of my views about this coalition is that it made every bit of sense for the Conservative party and was total madness for the Liberal Democrats. With a little luck, the Liberal Democrats will go the same way as their predecessor party did in the early 1920s as a result of exactly the same process.

The reason why the hon. Gentleman’s right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister had to change from the abjectly partisan proposal of 55% was that it was too obvious, since they had 56% of the votes. They must have thought that we were all stupid. He had to change that before he introduced the Bill because he would not have had a dog’s chance of getting a Second Reading had that ridiculous and outrageous proposal remained. It was survival that led to the change, not high principle.

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[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

This has been a fascinating five hours of debate, and I have learned a great deal. I have been vastly entertained, not least by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), but I have to admit to being somewhat puzzled. I thought that I would hear the great champions of parliamentary privilege and parliamentary sovereignty—

[Mr Cash]

I have not been called.

[Nick Boles]

One of the great champions has not been called, but he has certainly intervened many times, and we have heard from other great champions, not least my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope). I thought that I would hear them make an argument for giving Parliament even more control over matters as vital to our democracy as the timing of elections, but no. We have been given an object lesson in that great phrase “looking a gift horse in the mouth”.

I just wonder what would have happened to the Government if they had come to the House with a proposal to abolish elections altogether or to abolish the role of the Speaker in deciding whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be dragged here to answer an urgent question. Imagine what our reaction would have been then. I listen to the criticism that has been made—that the proposal is somehow fragmentary and piecemeal—and I ask myself whether those critics have any education in the history of our constitution at all. I am the least historically educated person I know, but I know that this country has only ever made change fragmentarily, in a piecemeal fashion and for naked partisan political interests. We even invented an entire new Church—the leader of the Church from which we separated ourselves is about to come to this country, and we welcome him very much—just to enable our sovereign to marry somebody whom he fancied rather more than his wife at the time.

That was just the starting point for a whole generation of constitutional change, so let us not deny the value of fragmentary and piecemeal constitutional change. Let us instead take advances when we get them, and if they are in the interest of the Government proposing them, let us be grateful for the fact that that interest is so well aligned with the interest of this House.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend recall the evidence that Professor Blackburn, the constitutional lawyer, gave to our Committee on the Bill? In question 75, I asked him:

“Does it enhance the power of the House of Commons at all?”

He replied:

“I am not sure that it does.”

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[Nick Boles]

I have always found it easy to disagree with academics on almost any subject, and I disagree with Professor Blackburn on that.

My hon. Friend’s question leads me neatly to my next point. With much more trepidation, I have to say that I respectfully disagree with what the Clerk of the House said in his contribution to our evidence about the risks posed by the Bill. I recognise that I am probably the least qualified person here to comment on orders of this House, and on the risks of judicial review that the proposed statute might create, because I am not a lawyer, a long-standing MP or a constitutional historian. However, it seemed inadequate for the Clerk of the House to suggest putting this fundamental provision into the statutes of the House—the orders of the House, as I believe they are called—because surely the House can do away with those orders on a relative whim.

The one advantage of the statute that the Government are proposing is that it will have to make its way through the other House. Any further changes will also therefore have to make their way through the other House, and we have a commitment from the Deputy Prime Minister that we will see full-scale reform of that other House before the next election, to which the Bill would apply.

[Mr George Howarth]

The hon. Gentleman is making a witty and amusing speech, but does he really believe that the courts inevitably act in a totally rational way in all circumstances? My experience of them, certainly in matters of this kind, is that they can be very capricious.

[Nick Boles]

I certainly agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that point—I should like to call him my right hon. Friend; I am very keen on people joining the coalition, as Members might know—but I am not sure whether the courts are any more capricious than Members of this House. Is that a terrible thing to say?

I am troubled by the proposal of the Clerk of the House, and I fear that those on my own side who advance it are doing so not because they really think that he has a better way to secure fixed-term Parliaments but because they do not believe in fixed terms, and they want to undermine the Bill. If it is going to be brought in, they want it to be introduced in as weak a form as possible. So let us not be deluded by that argument.

I want to turn briefly to the argument about election dates. I shall approach the subject with great deference to those who represent parts of the other nations of the United Kingdom, because they of course must be the ones who speak for their constituents. However, in the United States—a place where individual states have much more power and at least as much sense of their own independence and individual character—all the elections always happen on the same day. In that fine democracy, they happen on the first Thursday in November, either every four years or every two years. In the United States, people would consider it a constitutional outrage if elections were to happen on any other day.

If elections were held on different days, minor elections—I do not venture to suggest that elections to the devolved Assemblies are minor; I am talking about any that people thought were minor—might be used to express an opinion about a major subject, such as the economic policy of the UK Government. It is only by having elections on the same day that people can be guaranteed an ability to express their opinion on every issue that matters to them, be it local, regional or pertaining to their state, their governor, their mayor or the Government of the day. The same applies to referendums, which is why I also support the idea of their being held on the same day. I venture to suggest that hon. Members should really question whether they are assisting the independence of their local elections, and the autonomy of the decision making on the issues in those elections, by proposing separate election dates. I fear that they might achieve the reverse.

[Mark Durkan]

The hon. Gentleman referred to the United States of America, where there are no rules on media balance and supposedly no statutory protections for parties in the broadcast media or anywhere else, and where massive amounts of money are spent. The electoral climate in the United States is entirely different from ours. If he is suggesting that elections to our devolved Parliament and Assemblies and to this Parliament should be conducted in the way they are in America, what does he think the turnout would be?

[Nick Boles]

If people have to go to the polls only once and have to take seven decisions that will affect every single part of government, I suggest that that will make them more likely to vote in the “lower” elections than they would if those elections took place on their own, particularly when people might be busy, have to take the kids to school and get to work. I suspect that the turnout would advance, but let me make it clear that the Deputy Prime Minister has said that he will want to understand the concerns and that the final decision will be made in consultation with the devolved Assemblies.

In the remaining time available, let me deal with one suggestion—for an amendment to the Bill—made by the Select Committee, of which I am lucky enough to be a member. I hope that the Government will consider it in further stages. The suggestion was that, after an extraordinary or exceptional Dissolution, to avoid any jiggery-pokery or any attempt to engineer a Dissolution to the benefit of one party, the term of whatever Government came in after that Dissolution would be just for the balance of the normal term. If the extraordinary Dissolution came after three years, there would be only two years left for the succeeding Government. I think that might go some way to reinforce the Bill’s intention to ensure that a Dissolution is not done in a frivolous, arbitrary or partisan way.

In conclusion, let me say that that is the only amendment that I would propose and that I propose it in the spirit of improvement rather than criticism. I very much hope that Members will see fit to support this fine Bill.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

We have about eight minutes left, with two speakers to go. I call Richard Shepherd.