Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-30
Topic: Government Operations
Simon Denis Brown (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support the Bill. While it appears that no one really wants to keep the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, there are obviously differing views about what should replace it. There seem to me to be three basic suggestions: first, that the Commons should have a vote; secondly, that the Prime Minister should decide, subject to the courts’ supervisory jurisdiction; and, thirdly, that the Prime Minister should decide but do so under a non-reviewable prerogative, which is what the Bill proposes. As I said, I favour the latter To clear the ground—the noble Lord, Lord Newby, has just done this—obviously, the three alternatives, if you can have three, are mutually exclusive. If the Commons has a vote, that decision is plainly unreviewable: Article 9 of the Bill of Rights plainly puts that out of court. It should further be noted that there is disagreement among lawyers as to whether, given that the FTPA earlier replaced the prerogative, the prerogative—certainly in an unreviewable form—can now be restored. My own clear view is that it can, and that is certainly the view of Lord Sumption and Mark Elliott, the leading Cambridge professor of public law, who advises the Constitution Committee and who supported the decision in Miller II With Clause 3 in the Bill, I simply cannot see any court, and certainly not the Supreme Court—now under new management, with a new president—contemplating reviewing the prerogative of the Prime Minister. Indeed, even without Clause 3, I do not think that it would have done so, but it is there for the avoidance of doubt. Indeed, one reason for having it there is to relieve the court of the embarrassment of being drawn reluctantly—believe me—into this rather sensitive area. Let me explain now why I see no basic objection to an unreviewable prerogative here—it is, or would be, exercisable by Her Majesty not on the advice but at the request of the Prime Minister—and then I must explain why I do not think that the House of Commons should have a vote. As to an unreviewable prerogative power, I gather that there are those who worry that that could place Her Majesty in an invidious position if, for example, the Prime Minister did not like the result of a general election and thought he could get a better majority with an immediate further election. That sort of thing, besides being flatly contrary to the conventions set out and agreed on all sides, is really a purely theoretical risk. Any Prime Minister has to have regard to the obvious general good sense of the electorate, and we all know that electorates can see through that sort of thing extremely readily. Certainly, it does not to my mind suggest for a moment that the Prime Minister could be mad enough to reach a decision that would actually embarrass Her Majesty As to the Commons having a vote, I object to that because it would leave wide open the possibility that we could return to the selfsame intolerable position that arose under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act back in the late summer of 2019. Paragraph 86 of the report of March this year from the Joint Committee on that Act said: "It would be possible to replace the Fixed-term Parliaments Act with a provision requiring a vote in the Commons before Parliament was dissolved. A minority of the Committee argues this would be the simplest and most obvious way of protecting the Monarch from being dragged into party political debate. The majority considers it a change which would only have a practical effect in a gridlocked Parliament, which could mean denying an election to a Government which was unable to function effectively, and which might therefore be counter to the public interest." In a letter dated 12 August, the Minister gave a well-judged response to the suggestion from the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee for a convention that there should be a Commons vote. The letter said: "To establish a convention that a resolution of the House must proceed an early dissolution would not be compatible with a return to the tried and tested arrangements for calling an election. Indeed, to create such an expectation would potentially only lead to a repeat of the circumstances of 2019 which this Bill seeks to avoid in repealing the 2011 Act and reviving the dissolution prerogative." The imperative, in my respectful suggestion, is to avoid any risk of returning to the position that arose then. In speaking in a debate on 5 September of that year, 2019, I deplored the situation brought about by the Kinnock Bill, an Opposition Bill to ensure that Boris Johnson could not pursue his essential policy of securing Brexit, even if necessary on a no-deal basis. Although I was certainly no supporter of the Prime Minister or of Brexit, and still less of a no-deal Brexit, I suggested that the Bill compelled the Prime Minister to go to Brussels cap in hand, not merely to seek but to obtain a further extension to that process. A little later, I said that "those promoting this Bill are at one and the same time intent on compelling the deep abasement of our sitting Prime Minister and yet refusing the Government the opportunity by general election to reinforce its right to govern, which we generally take for granted."—[Official Report, 5/9/19; col. 1177.] The imperative of this Bill is that we do not allow that to recur. Let us return to the safe and sound position we used to have—let us pass this Bill.