Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

The Bill will have to go to the House of Lords, and I was therefore extremely interested in a paper by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, which was published on 16 December. It may or may not have been noticed by Members, but the majority of the Committee believed that the appropriate length of a fixed parliamentary term should be not five years, but four years. That is very interesting, because given the shenanigans that we have been witnessing in the other House, which seem to me—

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is called proper scrutiny.

[Mr Cash]

The hon. Gentleman corrects me by saying that it is proper scrutiny.

The Committee stated:

“Whilst acknowledging the case made by the Deputy Prime Minister for a five year term”—

it is so nice when the authors of such reports use expressions like “whilst acknowledging the case” and “with respect to”—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) knows what is in my mind. The Committee continued:

“nonetheless the majority of the Committee consider that a four year term should be adopted for any fixed-term Parliamentary arrangement at Westminster. In the view of the majority, the shift from a five year maximum to a five year norm would be inconsistent with the Government’s stated aim of making the legislature more accountable, inconsistent with existing constitutional practice and inconsistent with the practice of the devolved institutions and the clear majority of international legislatures.”

That is quite a condemnation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristram Hunt]

I am grateful that we have been allowed to discuss the Bill. Today’s debate has been awash with the abuse of peers at the other end of the Palace who have simply being doing their job of scrutinising Government legislation. We should not omit the vital role of the newly ennobled Lord Fellowes in that act of scrutiny, whose contribution was, we are told, to give an hour-long talk in an upstairs room entitled “A life on stage and screen”. Such are the indignities of packing the second Chamber.

I wish to focus on the length of the fixed-term Parliament. We have seen, in the actions of the Government in relation to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, that what drives them is not the good of the nation but the good of the coalition—or the Tory-led Government, as we like to call them. They are always at pains to ensure that the yin and yang of the coalition are in perfect harmony, so, rather than giving people the chance to put away the notion of the alternative vote on 5 May, they are demanding to keep the two parts of the Bill together to keep the coalition happy. And so it is with this Bill. It proposes a Parliament of five years, not four years, because that is what the coalition, not the nation, needs.

Professor Robert Blackburn, of King’s college, London, put it well when he said:

“It is likely that the Coalition’s concern with concretising its political alliance and having the longest period possible in which to implement its tax increases and cuts in public expenditure and then recover sufficient popularity in time for its next meeting with the electorate, has affected its judgement in this matter. In my view, the period between general elections should clearly be four years”.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I do not understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument. If the coalition’s motive had simply been to postpone an election for five years in order to have more time to sort the country out, that could have been achieved by prime ministerial decision. What the Bill does is to ensure that the next Government, and the one after that and the one after that, will be subject to these provisions. Perhaps, some day, the hon. Gentleman’s party will recover enough to form such a Government.

[Tristram Hunt]

Coalition Members really do not understand the difference between the norm and the maximum. We have had this problem with them over many weeks now. The issue is whether we want to move from the norm to the maximum. Across the academic and political communities, we can see—if we look at the work of Robert Hazell, for example—that four years are preferred to five. The view of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee—on which I am happy to serve with the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart)—was that most opinion suggests that it would be better for general elections to be held every four years, rather than every five.

[Simon Hart]

The hon. Gentleman is suggesting that fixing the term at five years automatically favours the Government of the day, whereas it can of course have the opposite effect. Does he agree with me, as did some of the witnesses who appeared before our Committee, that by tying themselves into a five-year fixed term, the Government might find that the election coincides with a rather dismal period in the opinion polls, giving great advantage to the Opposition? I thought that that evidence was given to the Select Committee—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We are grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but his intervention is getting rather long.

[Tristram Hunt]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point, but the benefits of a fixed-term schedule outweigh those potential risks. I regard four years as within the rhythm of this country, as it is within the rhythm of other European as well as Westminster-style democracies— Canada, Denmark, the American presidential term, Germany, Sweden. The change to five years is for the good of the coalition, not the nation.

The Deputy Prime Minister referred to and quoted the Chartists again in today’s Question Time, but the Chartists believed in annual Parliaments, not in extending the term to five years. As we have heard, the Liberal Democrats used to believe in four-year terms—before the allure of office moved them to change their minds. May I suggest that the coalition listen to a real coalition leader, the late Herbert Asquith? On introducing his own cut to the parliamentary term, he spoke of securing a House of Commons that is

“always either fresh from the polls which it gave it authority, or—and this is an equally effective check upon acting in defiance of the popular will—it is looking forward to the polls at which it will have to render an account of its stewardship.”—[Official Report, 21 February 1911; Vol. XXI, c. 1749.]

That seems to be the perfect combination. I will move on quickly, as others wish to speak.

I do not feel that the Government have dealt with the problem of exclusive cognisance very effectively, so it still poses the danger of judicial interference. This Bill fits all too neatly into the Government’s overarching constitutional reform strategy: coalition first, country second. Whether it be packing the House of Lords, increasing the number of Ministers by 10%, undermining the Union by slashing 25% of constituencies in Wales, or overriding historic or geographic settlements in new parliamentary boundaries, it is Clegg and Cameron first, country second. That is the abiding weakness of coalition Government. The tragedy is that if this Bill is passed, we will have five years of it.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—