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Dissolution of Parliament

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for making this the subject of the first debate of the Adjournment process. I do not believe that this situation was caused by euphoria but, perhaps, by panic when the two parties found that they could not trust themselves by having the normal system of a simple majority. Before I came to this House, I taught government and political systems. I told my students that the House of Commons was based on the support of a majority of MPs, and that that was fundamental to our process, which was not like the systems that existed in other countries that were designed for coalitions. That has been the way in which our Governments could be held to account, and so they have been up until this time—until the introduction of the 55% concept, which my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan) has called the Mugabe clause. Much has been made of the existence of other systems—Slovenia was mentioned earlier—and particularly the system in the Scottish Parliament, where 66% is required for its dissolution. The difference is that that happened after almost 20 years of debate, with a constitutional convention, a great deal of study by Scottish constitutional experts, and advice on how to design a system whereby the Parliament could not have a majority held by one party. It is therefore not a good comparator; nevertheless, it has been made much of by my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the coalition in Scotland. That system was passed through an Act of Parliament here—the Scotland Act 1998—after great debate and scrutiny through a proper system of constitutional Committees in this House. It was designed to prevent any party from having a majority. It therefore had to bolster the Parliament as constituted so that it could run for its fixed term of four years. There is no similar proposal, I understand, for the Commons to bring in a proportional system. AV has been talked about in relation to a referendum, but there has been no proposal to bring in proportionality on the same basis as in Scotland. Let me explain the system simply. If a party's constituency Members win all the seats in a region, all the regional list Members are elected from the other parties. The party that elects all the first-past-the-post Members, and which therefore clearly has the popular vote of the people of the region, gets no further Members of the Scottish Parliament. The result is either a coalition, as existed between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party for two Parliaments in Scotland, or a minority Government, as we have at the moment. I believe that the Scottish National party Government are doing great damage to Scotland, mainly because they are supported on a supply basis—I do not know about a confidence basis—by the Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament. A minority Government run for two years unless two thirds of the Parliament votes to get rid of them. The system is completely different and not really comparable with the system that we are discussing. The parties in the UK Parliament went to the people of this country and asked for a majority, and they failed to get one. I agree with the hon. Member for Christchurch that that strengthened this Parliament. It was not the decision of the people of the UK to have a strong Government bolstered by a manipulation of the constitution such as the proposed 55% rule. I put it to the House that breaching the control of the UK Parliament through anything other than a simple majority is to betray the democratic credibility of the House and the electoral process in which the people have just voted. It is a shameful act, so I have a question for the Deputy Leader of the House: are there no depths to which the Liberal Democrats will not stoop to hang on to their tainted share of power?