Fixed Term Parliaments Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. It is difficult to believe that last year the whole political and media establishment of this country spent more than two months doing little else but speculating about whether there would be a general election and when it would occur. By the end of it, people had become experts in the most extraordinarily arcane subjects, such as the likelihood of rain on particular Thursdays in November, the hours of daylight in that month, or the details of precisely when the electoral registers were compiled. In the end, the only way one could have guessed that the Prime Minister was going to bottle out, as the inelegant phrase of the time had it, was if one understood that if he were to go to the palace at the time that he was rumoured to be doing so, there would not be enough time to turn off all the Members' computers in the Palace of Westminster. We therefore knew at that point that there was not going to be a general election. The political system was reduced to a sort of guessing game. That seems to be a bizarre way to run a country. One has to be some kind of Hercule Poirot to work out whether there is going to be a general election. That entire episode was, of course, subsequently disastrous to the Prime Minister's own political reputation, but it was also ridiculous and damaging to the whole country and to the political system itself. As a consequence, I went back to an old proposal from my party that in future Prime Ministers should not have the power to decide when general elections should be held but that the parliamentary term should be fixed by law. The current position, as everyone in this House will understand, is that the Government can in effect call an election whenever they want within the five-year term of Parliament. If the Government win that election they get another five years, and the whole thing starts again. The first and most obvious thing wrong with that arrangement is that it gives an enormous unfair advantage to the incumbent party. It is rather like having a 100 m race in which one of the runners has the starting pistol, and can occasionally use it to shoot one of the other runners. The incumbent need wait only for a few favourable polls and call an election within a three-and-a-half week period and is then rewarded with another five years in power. That makes politics rather more a matter of luck than of performance. As we all know, in political life there are times when Governments are blamed for events entirely beyond their control, but there are also times when they receive the credit for events that equally had nothing to do with them. Of course, if the Prime Minister had called the election last autumn and won it on the basis of a bit of luck about foot and mouth or the floods not being the disastrous administrative episode that they might have been, we would now be facing another five years of him. I am not sure whether that prospect would be very attractive to the country, to his party, or, sadly, to himself. Our system can produce unfortunate results for all concerned, and it is the ultimate in incumbency advantage.