Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this debate, Miss Begg. I want to focus on the practical issues, as we have heard quite a lot of constitutional theorising, and, indeed, a great deal of fascinating history. When I first saw these proposals, I assumed, perhaps rather naively, that the Government had simply made a big mistake, and that they had not realised that, as a result of going for five-year fixed-term Parliaments with immediate effect—that is, in relation to the length of this Parliament—the date of the general election would coincide with the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Welsh Assembly elections and the Northern Ireland Assembly elections. I thought that once they realised that that was a problem they would rethink their proposition, if only in purely practical terms and even if there were a theoretical argument for five years being better than four—and I have certainly not heard one today—but they did not do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) said that he hoped that when the Minister summed up the debate—on Third Reading, of course, the debate may be summed up by the Deputy Prime Minister himself—he would take some of those issues on board, but I fear that, if the previous constitutional Bill is anything to go by, that will not happen. The Deputy Prime Minister could have written his summing-up speech for the Third Reading of that Bill before the debate had even started. Indeed, I believe that he had, given that so little reference was made to the hours spent in Committee and the different arguments that had been put at that stage. It seemed that none of those arguments had been listened to. I appreciate that many Government Members have no experience of the practical issues that we have raised. There is, after all, only one Conservative Member of Parliament who represents a Scottish seat. There are Scots who represent other seats, but there is only one Conservative MP who does so, and as far as I am aware he has not been present much during our debates or contributed much to them. Some junior members of the coalition—the junior partners—represent Scottish seats, but they too have been fairly conspicuous by their absence for much of the debate. However, the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) has now arrived, and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) was briefly present earlier.