It is a delight to follow that Third Reading speech.
I have enjoyed today, not least because it is such a delight to be vindicated. I feel as if I have been saying the same things for 20 years. Some of what the Minister said today, if we put the word “not” in, was what she said 10 years ago, which is kind of entertaining but rather irritating.
I am not going to speak at length, but we have to go back to fundamental principles when we are talking about the constitution. I like Parliament sitting. It is good for Governments to face the scrutiny of the Commons elected. Long interruptions are a bad thing. We take a long time to get a Parliament going after a general election, and now, with a long general election, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) referred to, it can be several months that parliamentary scrutiny is effectively out of action, before Select Committees are fully set up and all the rest of it.
The Executive and the Parliament need to be in balance with one other. There is a real danger that we are moving in the direction of what I call an over-mighty Executive. The Leader of the House in particular has what I call a high theological understanding of government—the Government are always right, by definition. In our system, the Government have considerable power. That is why some have called it an elected dictatorship.
The constitution should always stand the test of time and the test of bad actors. We always presume we will have a good monarch. We have had bad monarchs in the past. We presume we will always have an honourable and good Prime Minister. We might have a bad Prime Minister, who might choose to—[Interruption.] I am being ironic here. We might have a Prime Minister who deliberately chose to subvert the constitution and use it to subvert democracy.
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My final point on principles is that the constitution should never give a political advantage to the incumbents. That applies both to us as individual MPs and to Governments. My anxiety about this measure is that it gives a significant advantage to Governments. Being able to choose the date of a general election without publishing it in advance undoubtedly gives a significant advantage to the Government. That is why they want to have it.
New clause 2 rebalances slightly the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. It simply says that a dissolution can happen only if there has been a vote in the House of Commons. That solves many of the problems we have. It deals with the potential bad actor situation. I can conceive of a situation in which a Prime Minister would first of all demand to prorogue Parliament for perhaps one or two months and then, during that time, dissolve Parliament to avoid a vote of no confidence. The only way to get around that is to require for the Dissolution of Parliament a vote in the House of Commons. This is not the same as returning to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, because it should be a simple majority. Obviously, by definition the Prime Minister of the day should enjoy the confidence of the House and therefore be able to secure that vote in a fairly simple way. I am not sure that this is a very onerous point.
Dr Andrew Blick spoke to the Joint Committee, saying that a vote on Dissolution in the House of Commons would insulate the monarch from being placed in a position of choosing between refusing an appropriate Dissolution request and refusing the advice of a Prime Minister. Anyone who values the role of the monarch should vote in favour of having a vote in the House of Commons. It is also, of course, the simplest way of obviating the ouster clause, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) said, is a red rag to a bull. I know lots of judges who look at it and just go, “Yeah, well, we’ll have fun with that one.”
New clause 5 simply says that Parliament must sit within 14 days. I would prefer to be able to say that Parliament must sit to transact substantive business, rather than simply the election of a Speaker. By the time all Members have been sworn in and so on, it can
be a considerable period of time before Parliament properly functions again. If it comes around the time of bank holidays and all the rest of it, one can feel that Parliament has been stymied for the best part of six months.
The only requirement in law for Parliament to sit at all is because of the Meeting of Parliament Act 1694 and associated measures relating to the granting of supply, but the House should be able to determine more its own future and agenda. Theoretically, that is why we start with the Outlawries Bill straight after the Queen’s Speech has been read. It is a way of saying to the monarch, “Sorry, but you don’t get to decide what we are going to debate.” The irony, however, is that the modern version of the monarch is the Government, and the Government get to decide we are doing the Outlawries Bill and every other piece of legislation, what day we are going to sit, when we are going to start, how long the debate will go on for and so on. New clause 5 would simply mean that Parliament would have to sit within 14 days of a general election.
Amendment 2 tries to shorten the period. I note that the Minister did not know the last possible date for the next general election. I think it is 23 January 2025 under her provision. It would be a few days earlier under my provision. It would be only a few days because in 2019, because of the exigencies of Brexit, we ended up having the state opening four days after the general election, which is very unusual. If we go back to previous general elections, for example 2017, we would be sitting two weeks earlier and the Parliament would last two weeks less.
I would prefer a four-year Parliament. I tabled an amendment to that effect in 2011, during the passage of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. That is a more natural timescale. Governments tend to have run out of steam by the time they get to four years. They only end up not having an election at four years when they think they are going to lose, so they keep on running and running and running until they hope things will improve and something will come along. If we look around the world, many countries have elections after either four years on a fixed basis or three years. I think three years is too short. The idea that we should have the longest parliamentary term of any democracy in the world—any democracy in the world—is extraordinary and we should amend that, even if it is only to take an extra week off. I am grateful for Members’ attention.