I beg to move,
That this House believes that the Government should bring forward proposals to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.
The motion, which stands in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) and other Members of this House, is to review and repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. The Act was passed, of course, in the heady early days of the coalition, with many new Members present. This is a good time, after four years, to think about it, to review it and, I hope, to determine to repeal it.
Fixed-term Parliaments were marketed to us as a restriction on the excessive power of the Executive. In reality, fixed-term Parliaments are a restriction on democracy, not on the Executive. It was claimed then that a general election called at a time advantageous to a sitting Government, or because Parliament clearly needed refreshing after, say, four years, was somehow less legitimate than a general election held at a fixed time every five years.
Leaving aside the point that a democratic mandate is a democratic mandate whenever it is held, a Dissolution is forbidden under the Act unless two thirds of the entire membership of the House, including any vacant seats, support a motion calling for an election. That means that a party or group that has just one third of the seats has the power to block a Dissolution and can prevent the Government from consulting the people. How is that democratic? I think that undermines the whole democratic legitimacy of the Government, whether it is a majority or a minority Government. The old system, of course, allowed a Prime Minister to find a route out of decisional gridlock. It permitted the Government to consult the people on developments which may have been unforeseen at the time of the last general election. Governments who found themselves hanging under a parliamentary scandal—or when the economy is going badly or something has gone badly wrong—had an easy route out, and voters could give them their marching orders or return them to power.
We have always valued the combination of the general election and the first-past-the-post system, because it is, we say, capable of producing strong sustainable Governments who can deliver on their promises to voters. That has always been our pride. To an extent, we have therefore defined ourselves in opposition to other systems which have to form coalitions after general elections. I think all of us hope that the present coalition is an aberration. Our major political parties—particularly the Labour and Conservative parties—are, of course, coalitions in themselves, formed before elections in order to present voters with real choices.