Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

William Cash Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Shepherd]

The proposal suits the Government for their own purposes, and that is why the nation at large is cautious, as are many Members on both sides of this Chamber.

[Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend appreciate that many of us may well be cautious, because although we are concentrating on the question of a fixed-term Parliament, when we move on we will be examining the question of an early general election and questions of confidence—confidence in whom and for what? We will also deal with whether such questions should be decided by a simple majority or one of two thirds. These hugely important questions go straight to the heart of the future of this Parliament.

[Mr Shepherd]

My hon. Friend is, of course, right. This is a hugely important constitutional Bill and we should not doubt that. Every commentator of any serious worth has noted that this is an enormously important constitutional issue and we will try to tickle out its ramifications, including for parliamentary privilege, within our very tight timetable. What he says is true and just, and we should listen to it.

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[Chris Bryant]

Yes, of course. The hon. Lady is right in the sense that constituents will not have to worry about the date of the election. In fact, newspapers and the BBC will have to employ considerably fewer journalists, because they will know the date of the general election and actually have to obsess about something else. However, the past 50 years have shown that, for the most part, once a Parliament has run for more than four years, either the Parliament itself is so fed up with the Prime Minister that it chooses to change the Prime Minister before holding a subsequent general election, or the country is becoming pretty fed up.

[Mr Cash]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, really, this is not a fixed-term Parliament Bill at all? I mean not to criticise but to ask him a question, because, contrary to what he says, the Government do not make all the rules, the House of Commons does. If the House decided to go for a confidence motion because it happened to be fed up with the Government in question, as it did over Maastricht, we could end up with the situation in which the Government lost control. Then there would be a general election, and there would be no fixed term at all.

[Chris Bryant]

That is right, but that is a point in relation to clause 2 and at the moment we are dealing with clause 1. [Interruption.] At the moment we are talking about clause 1. In fact, the Bill is not really a fixed-term Parliaments Bill, because it does not determine how many days it should sit within those five years; it is a fixed-term elections Bill: it determines when elections shall be. There are things that we need to change in relation to Prorogation and so on, and we shall come on to that at another point in the debate, but, for the most part in this country, after four years and often before, the mandate on which the Government were elected becomes pretty thin, and they start doing things—sometimes pretty unpopular things—that were not clearly outlined in their manifesto. The party or parties might have made all sorts of commitments before they went into government, but events come along or the Government suddenly discover things that mean they have to break those manifesto promises or commitments, and the longer that a Government go on after four years, if they do so, the more likely they are to undermine respect for Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for sitting there in his rotund way—[Interruption] I am sorry, orotund way—and providing me with the suggestion that I might refer to France. He is absolutely right, and I will indeed come to France. He might also have mentioned, orotundly, that Italy, Austria, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg have provisions for five years. It is worth pointing out that in Italy there have been 17 elections for its Camera dei Deputati since 1945, and only twice in that time has the Parliament run for the full five years.

[Mr Cash]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Bryant]

Of course. The hon. Gentleman is very peripatetic this evening.

[Mr Cash]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman might take on board the fact that the systems of all the other countries in Europe that he has rightly cited are based on written constitutions. Does he accept that the virtue of the British system is its flexibility? Moreover, there is the example of 10 May 1940—the day I was born, as it turned out—when Chamberlain was effectively dispatched because he had completely failed and Winston Churchill took over. That was on the very day that Hitler invaded the lowlands. In other words, we make our decisions based on whether we in this House, on behalf of the people, decide that the Government have had their day.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is, in effect, making an argument against the whole of the Bill, because he is basically saying that we should not have fixed-term Parliaments. [Interruption.] I am sorry—he is chuntering so I cannot quite hear what he is saying. However, I disagree with him. My argument is that if we are going to have fixed-term Parliaments, they should not be of five years but of four years, partly because otherwise we will end up having the longest-running Parliaments in the European Union.

In Italy, very few Parliaments have gone on for five years because the President has the power to suspend the Parliament early. In Austria, there have been even more general elections—20—although that country has had a fixed five-year term since the war. Malta has had 16 elections since the war, and only since 1998 has it stuck to the five-year period. Cyprus has had regular changes to its constitution for a whole series of different reasons, not least in relation to Turkey. Only Luxembourg has a fixed five-year term that it has stuck to since 1974. In all these cases—I thought that this is the point that the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) was going to make—the elections are held on the basis of a system of proportional representation, where there is an expectation that Parliaments might fall rather more frequently because elections do not tend to bring in one party with an absolute majority of seats in the relevant House.