Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

My Lords, it will be obvious that the proposals in the Bill are not the ones described in the book. The noble and learned Lord asks us why we have the proposals that we do, and obviously he was speculating about why they are there. If I were presenting to the House a Bill that had a 55 per cent majority and that was it, that would be a reasonable basis on which to say, ““This is how we arrived at 55 per cent””. Clearly, that is not what is proposed in the Bill, and I will address that in the course of my response to this debate. Subsection (1) provides the House of Commons with a new power to vote for Dissolution following a process that I believe is robust and transparent. My noble friend has indicated that he has his own further amendments about what might follow, including the point raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, about what would happen in the event of a Prime Minister resigning, and we will address these when we come to my noble friend’s amendments. The point is that if there is a clear consensus that there should be an early general election, it would be nonsensical to force the other place to engineer a vote of no confidence, particularly where confidence in the Government is not necessarily the issue and may not be what is driving the need for an early election. We believe that it would not be right or proper to conjure up a vote of no confidence in these circumstances. That is why the Bill seeks to prevent that with our proposal for a two-thirds vote. In the case of Germany, Governments have in the past had to engineer no-confidence votes even where there was a consensus in favour of an early general election, because there was no provision in its constitution analogous to the procedure for a Dissolution vote in this Bill. At that time there was no alternative to engineering a no-confidence vote. My noble friend reasonably asked about other nations. I spotted what he said about national parliaments, as opposed to the devolved Parliament and Assemblies, which have a provision that is very similar to what is set out here. I am unable to answer now but if I get information I will certainly write to him. The point was made in an earlier debate by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, that it is sometimes difficult to translate what happens in other countries to what happens here. This is where we reach a position that answers the question of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, about why we have two mechanisms. He is right about why the coalition agreement mentioned 55 per cent.