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Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

As an ex-academic, I find that the best way of alienating the House is to quote other academics, so may I just say yes to that question and move on? I was making the point that around the world, the most democratic polities—I gave Australia and New Zealand as the examples—have more frequent and more regular elections. The less democratic polities have longer spaces between elections—witness the French presidential system, where it was seven years, or the old British constitution when it was an oligarchical system with seven-year terms. This is an issue of basic democracy. The measure is not an attempt to think about the constitution and to reform it along sensible lines; it is a political fix. The Government have just gone for the longest time they think they can possibly get away with. That is it. They want the coalition to be bound together, nailed together and stuck together for five years and they hope that they can do that with this measure. They are entrenching bad practice. Most Governments in this century have gone for shorter terms than sitting out the maximum. As I said earlier, it is only the bad Governments—the failing Governments—who have gone right up to the buffers. Governments who are in a mess cling on because they are deeply unpopular.