I am grateful for the opportunity to speak for the Opposition in this debate.
I listened very carefully to the case that the Minister made for his motion to remove Lords amendment 1 to clause 2. I was sad to hear it, and I think we could do better. He is right that Labour, both in our manifesto and in the two years since, has supported the principle of the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, which was an ill-thought-out and poorly executed piece of legislation. I gently say, though, given how strongly the Minister stressed that, that it was this Government’s piece of legislation, not ours. He cautions us against novations in this space, but that was actually a lesson for themselves, and it is not quite fair to point it in our direction.
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Our support for the repeal of the Act does not mean that we cannot put better arrangements in its place. Those two processes are very much related. It was not clear from the Minister’s opening remarks whether he thought that the events of September 2019 were pertinent. For the first six minutes of his speech, they were, and then, in addressing the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), they were not. We think that they demonstrated that the previous arrangements were not fit for purpose and that many of the arrangements prior to the Act were better, especially in a time of parliamentary balance.
We have been supportive thus far, but the issue at stake today is that the Government have learned the wrong lesson from that debacle—that rather than bringing Parliament with them, it is instead preferable to exclude Parliament, the courts, as we have seen, and the civic space. They say that their actions two and half years ago were the right ones but there were too many safeguards preventing them from getting their way. In reality—I do not look back with any fondness on that period, but having been an Opposition Whip during it, I remember it very well—that is the opposite of what happened, and the Government ought to have taken a different lesson from it. I am surprised that they do not want to take this opportunity to, of course, remove the old arrangements,
but also to modernise what was in place previously to strengthen the role of this legislature and to protect parliamentary sovereignty rather than just going back to a situation where a Prime Minister gets an election whenever they want one. What a waste!
This is about one Lords amendment to one piece of legislation, but it is also a continuance of a pattern of behaviour by this Government in strengthening an overbearing Executive. There is this Bill, the Elections Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and previously we had the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 and the Trade Union Act 2016. All these have sought to strengthen the Executive at the expense of the legislature, the courts or the shrinking civic space.