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Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Funnily enough, I had not thought of that. Perhaps I should have. It is not that I am innocent of such considerations, but on this occasion it had not occurred to me. The Bill does botch the job, however. It provides for a standard Parliament to be too long, at five years. It fails to clarify the procedures for confidence votes, opening up the possibility of a lame-duck Administration and constitutional limbo. It leaves a large loophole enabling Prime Ministers to use the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament, as happened recently in Canada. The mechanism for triggering an early Dissolution of Parliament may impinge—I put it no more strongly than that—on parliamentary privilege by creating the risk that courts could intervene on parliamentary proceedings. Much of the incoherence of the Bill is a consequence of the unnecessary haste with which it is being rushed through Parliament. A week ago, the House debated the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. That too is being rushed through, with the Deputy Prime Minister breaking all previous undertakings about the importance of pre-legislative scrutiny. If Members accept the imperative of a May 2011 date for the alternative-vote referendum—although I do not—at least the right hon. Gentleman has a fig leaf of an excuse for seeking to rush that Bill through at this early stage, but palpably no such excuse exists for rushing this Bill through. Had there been any justification, such as a packed legislative programme which might have hit the end-of-Session buffers, that excuse would have been blown away this morning by the ill thought through announcement by the Leader of the House that the current Session is to last for two full years.