Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill — House of Lords, 2022-02-09
Topic: Government Operations
Richard Newby (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I am not quite sure I know how to follow that last remark. I have put my name to this amendment for the reasons so eloquently given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. Like him, I carefully read the considered and lengthy response of the noble Lord, Lord True, to the equivalent debate in Committee. The noble Lord set out to make our flesh creep about the consequences of this amendment. I shall deal with three of his arguments, one of which has already been dealt with today. First, the noble Lord said that, if this amendment were passed, the chance of zombie Parliaments would remain high. As we have already heard, the last Parliament was a zombie Parliament to the extent that the Fixed-Term Parliament Act requires a two-thirds majority. Without that, it would not have been. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, said, "Ah yes, but there will be other circumstances in which such a zombie Parliament could obtain". The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has explained the first next step if a Prime Minister were unable to win a majority. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, is asking us to entertain as plausible the possibility that, if nobody could form a Government, Parliament would decide that it wished to continue in existence without there being a credible Government. This is completely implausible to me. I cannot foresee circumstances in which such a situation would obtain for more than a very short period—a day or two at most. The noble Lord did not set such circumstances out. I do not believe that this amendment makes zombie Parliaments more likely Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord True, said that the amendment is "dangerously silent" on the status and practice of the conventions associated with confidence. Of course it is silent on the convention because conventions are not law. In the case of a Motion of no confidence having been passed, it seems blindingly obvious that, at that very minute, there would be a vote under the Act, as it would then be, to call an election. I cannot see circumstances in which that would not happen. The fact that conventions are not mentioned in this Bill is impossible and largely irrelevant Thirdly—and most extraordinarily—the noble Lord, Lord True, argued that this amendment, if passed, would deny or "overturn" the votes of millions. What on earth does that possibly mean? When millions vote, they do so in the expectation that there will be a full term of Parliament. During the course of a Parliament, they may or may not at any particular time wish that there were another election. As it happens, today, I suspect that most people would be rather glad to have an election, but that is not the way the constitution works. Parliament is elected for a period. If that period is to be truncated, the authority for truncating it rests with Parliament. The people have no say in whether to have an early election under our constitution, and the Government are certainly not proposing that, so the argument that, somehow, the amendment would frustrate the votes of millions is completely misplaced It comes down to a simple question: where should the ultimate source of power in our constitution rest? This was the question which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, posed. We contend that it should be with Parliament and not the Executive. We contend that the steady accretion of power to No. 10—which, to a limited extent, has been further added to by the decision of the Prime Minister to set up a prime ministerial department— is not good for democracy. The amendment is one small way of reversing that trend.