No, I am not going to give way again.
The previous position gave the Prime Minister and the party of the Prime Minister an enormous advantage. Opportunistically timed elections allow Governments to ask voters to assess their performance at the time most favourable for that party. Research shows very clearly that British Prime Ministers from both main parties have made extensive use of this power, to time elections for reasons of partisan advantage. Just under 60% of our post-war elections in this country have been called early by the Prime Minister of the day.
It is inevitable under that previous system that partisan advantage played a part in prime ministerial decisions about when to call an election. When a Government party has been confident of its re-election, the Prime Minister would usually go to the country after four years, rather than five. As I said in an earlier intervention, Margaret Thatcher did so successfully in 1983 and 1987 and Tony Blair did the same in 2001 and 2005. Of course it does not always work, as was pointed out. Harold Wilson went to the country in 1970 expecting he would make use of his lead in the opinion polls and be re-elected, and he was not. Nevertheless, his intention was to go early because he thought he would win.
Parties that are less confident of their electoral position have tended to continue into their fifth year, leaving their reckoning with the electorate until the latest possible date. We saw that happen in 1997 and in 2010. It cannot be right that the governing body, of whatever party, has this massive in-built advantage.
Research from Oxford university suggests that strategically timed elections have allowed governing parties to achieve a bonus in elections over the past 70 years of about 6% in public support. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act creates a more equitable electoral playing field among the parties of Government and those of Opposition, which can only be healthy for our democracy.
It is now nearly 40 years since Lord Hailsham warned of the dangers of an “elected dictatorship”, with powers increasingly centralised with the Executive. Fixed-term Parliaments are one—only one—of the ways we can counteract that, by taking away the Prime Minister’s greatest chip: the ability to threaten a recalcitrant minority coalition partner, their own Back Benchers, or troublesome Opposition parties with the Dissolution of Parliament. That can be done at the behest not even of the party of Government, but of the leader of that party, the Prime Minister.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North that in the longer term there is the possibility— I do not put it any higher than that, as I am a realist—that fixed-term Parliaments can help contribute to a different style of politics. A greater responsibility of the Executive to Parliament demands a more pluralist style of governance. Some, like the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), clearly do not like the idea of pluralism. The idea that not all the knowledge and wisdom lies in his own party is clearly alien to him, but I think there are many in the British public who actually quite like the idea that people can sit down together and work together in the national interest. People get very frustrated with politics when we fall into petty tribal battles, and prefer grown-up debate about the issues.