Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

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 the that 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””."