Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Peter Tapsell Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman is a great expert in expressing his views regardless of what the Whips say. Whipping is of course a matter for the parties. I question his suggestion that there is something unorthodox or unwelcome about giving the House more power. We have a Prime Minister who is the first in history to relinquish the right to set the date of the general election. Surely the hon. Gentleman, who has always fought so valiantly for the rights of the House, welcomes that shift of power from the Executive to the legislature.

[Sir Peter Tapsell (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman has just made a statement that the Prime Minister has made on a number of occasions—that he is giving away a power that no previous Prime Minister has chosen to do. Why do the right hon. Gentleman and our Prime Minister think that they are wiser than their 40 predecessors?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As I said, the virtues of a fixed-term—[Interruption.] It is not a question of wisdom; it is a question of the weight of history. We have been talking about this for decades, the Labour party campaigned on it, as did other parties, and at a time when we are trying to restore people’s confidence in politics after the expenses scandals, one of the essential ingredients is to strengthen the rights of the House at the cost of the excessive powers of the Executive.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman may be referring to the continuation of the existing powers to prorogue Parliament, which will remain in place, particularly after the House has been dissolved for exceptional reasons. In addition, the Bill provides for a new power for the House of Commons to dissolve Parliament early by means of a motion, passed by a majority of two thirds of the total number of seats in this House, which states that an early general election should take place. This new power ensures that Parliament will be able to dissolve itself in any eventuality, regardless of whether the reasons relate to the merits or failings of the Government of the day.

As you will be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, these votes have already been the subject of considerable discussion. I shall therefore take a little time to explain to the House exactly how they will work. First, on the new power of early Dissolution, the defining principle of this Bill is that no Government should be able to dissolve Parliament for their own political advantage. So as I said, in order to secure a Dissolution motion, a vote will need to be passed by a majority of two thirds of MPs— the same threshold that is required in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Hon. Members will remember that originally the coalition proposed a threshold of 55%. That was not found to be satisfactory by many Members of this House, who feared that it would not provide a sure enough guarantee against a Government with a large majority triggering an election for partisan gain. We listened to those arguments and we agreed that the bar should be raised. At two thirds, we have settled on a majority that no post-war Government would have been able to achieve. It will be possible only if agreement is secured across party lines, thereby preventing any one party or the Executive from abusing this mechanism.

On powers of no confidence, no-confidence votes have until now been a matter of convention.

[Sir Peter Tapsell]

Before my right hon. Friend moves on to his next point, can he explain why, when he is putting forward a Bill of the most enormous constitutional importance, almost revolutionary in concept, there is not a single Conservative Cabinet Minister on the Front Bench to support him?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I am sure that they have other things which they need to attend to.

As I said, no-confidence votes have until now been a matter of convention. Although it has been widely accepted that a no-confidence vote would require a Prime Minister either to resign or to call an early election, there has been nothing to date to enforce this. So for the first time, the Bill gives legal effect to a motion of no confidence passed by this House. Such motions will continue to require only a simple majority.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Straw]

It is an unsatisfactorily prepared Bill—on that the hon. Gentleman and I are in absolute agreement—but we may be in disagreement on the principle of the Bill. I have done many things from the Front Benches in 30 years to seek to justify difficult positions and have emerged upright at the other end, but with a commitment as clear as daylight in our manifesto—of blessed memory and only five months old—that said, in terms, that the Labour party would introduce legislation for fixed Parliaments, it would have been a bit tricky for me to have come to the House and opposed the Bill. [Interruption.] The Deputy Leader of the House may say that that did not worry me a week ago. But it did. [Laughter.]

There is a serious point. Had the subject of this Bill been tied up with a proposition with which we wholly disagreed—as with the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, where the Government could and should have separated the alternative vote and boundaries issues—that would have been different. As I explained to the House this time last week, I would have been delighted to vote in favour of the Bill if all that it contained was part 1. The Deputy Prime Minister knows better than me why he has decided to put alongside that proposition—one that was broadly agreed—an entirely separate and unrelated proposition wholly to change the agreed and consensual way in which we have set boundaries in this country for many years, a manner last amended by this House not under Labour, but under the Conservatives.

[Sir Peter Tapsell]

May I put to the right hon. Gentleman an historical example of how the Bill would have created great problems in the past? In 1950, the Labour party won the general election with—if my memory is correct—an overall parliamentary majority of seven. That entitled a Labour Government to stay in power for five years. They were never defeated on a motion of confidence in that Parliament, but by 1951, Mr Attlee, a great statesman, felt that his Cabinet colleagues were exhausted and that it was against the national interest for the Labour Government to struggle on with a majority of only seven. He decided to ask the King for a Dissolution. He would not have been able to do so under the provisions of the Bill.

[Mr Straw]

With great respect, I anticipate that he would have been able to do so. I am not seeking to justify in detail what is in the Bill, but let us take that as a possibility. That was an unusual circumstance; Attlee and his colleagues, the senior ones of whom had been in office for more than 11 years and all the way through the Churchill coalition Government, were completely exhausted. Some were dying; others had already passed away. Attlee was right to say that there should be a Dissolution. Under the terms of the Bill, he would have put that to the House. I cannot see that the Conservative party would have opposed it; it would have been astonishing if it had, since it thought that it was going to win. In that situation, the likelihood would be that the resolution of the House would have easily exceeded the two-thirds threshold. As a matter of historical record, that has to be the case.