Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

My Lords, I am not sure that last Thursday would necessarily have been thought to be in my party’s interest. I shall not rehearse all the arguments for the coalition but we heard the comments of my noble friend Lord Dobbs, who has been there when some of these decisions have been taken. As he indicated, the question has been: can we win? No doubt all parties think that they are right for the country but clearly the decision is taken for partisan reasons—when they think they can win. If one looks at 1983 and 1987, it is interesting that Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, did not hold an election exactly after four years—or at least she did in 1987—but she made the decision in 1983 after the local election results had come through. If I recall correctly, that was when I was first elected. The Dissolution took place the week after the local government election results in the first week in May, when she quite clearly saw that that would be to her party’s advantage. It is also suggested that Parliaments that have gone to five years have been destabilising—I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, used the expression ““an awful fifth year””—but in many respects the term has been self-selecting, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra indicated. There have been fifth years under Governments who did not have the confidence to go to the country after four years because they did not think that they could win, having run out of steam and lost their way. No doubt they thought that if they carried on for a final year something might just turn up. That is not a very good argument for saying that five years would not work. I shall pay a passing compliment to the Government of whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, was a member. I suspect that if the Government elected in 1997 had gone into a fifth year, that year would still have been very purposeful. The noble and learned Lord shakes his head but I think that he may be doing a disservice to his party. As my noble friend Lord Rennard pointed out, it is also interesting that when the Government gave the devolved Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales the opportunity to change their election date to avoid a clash with an election in 2015—the offer was to hold an election between the first Thursday in May 2014 and the first Thursday in May 2016—in each case they opted for a five-year term. They could have gone for four years and six months or three years and six months but they opted for five years, and that Motion was, I think, assented to by the leaders of all parties, including the Labour Party, in both the Parliament and the Assembly. The question that has been raised, not least by the noble Lords, Lord Wills and Lord Pannick, is: how do we ensure accountability? Accountability can come in many ways. It is not just in parliamentary general elections that parties and politicians are accountable. My noble friend Lady Stowell talked about some of the ideas that came out in the Power inquiry to try to engage ordinary people in the political process. The point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Owen, in what I thought was a very thoughtful contribution, that five years is very often required for an assessment to be made of the effectiveness of a Government’s early policies and for people to make a proper and informed decision after there has been an opportunity for those policies to feed through.