When will it be?

 

When will it be?

 

For days now the chattering classes in and on the media have been banging on about the possible date of the next general election.  With so much actual news to report, from the sickening  traumas in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere, tensions between Taiwan and China, the inadequacy of our flood defences, homelessness, children in poverty,  to the star quality of  a sixteen-year-old darts player, it is irritating in the extreme to find so much air time and print space devoted to something that the pundits know no  more  about than we do.

The next election will happen at a time when Prime Minister Sunak and his cohort feel will maximise the Tories’ chances of winning, or minimise their losses.  That’s it.

What I haven’t heard mentioned is the absurdity that, in a mature democracy, it is the right of one of the contestants for power to decide when the contest should take place.  If in a running race we allowed one of the runners to wrong-foot the others by allowing him/her to fire the starting gun we should recognise that as blatantly unfair.  Yet in the far more important arena of how and by whom we are governed this goes without comment.

The Liberal Democrats believed we had put an end to this anomaly by passing the fixed Term Parliament Act during the 2010 -15 Coalition.  This decreed that parliaments should normally last five years, and elections for a new one should take place on the first Thursday in May  five years after the election of the last one (cf presidential elections in the US taking place every four years on the first Tuesday of November, and similar arrangements in most other democracies.)

There were arrangements in the Act for the five-year term to be curtailed in exceptional circumstances – more of which later.

The present government, with its majority of 80 won for them via Boris Johnson’s lies and bluster, repealed the Act in 2022, and we now revert to the unfair archaic system.  This is just one of the ways the current Tories are chipping way at our democracy (see previous post.)

The “exceptional circumstances” referred to above meant that a parliament could be dissolved  if two thirds of MPs , a “super-majority”  (no such safeguard was included in the BREXIT referendum) voted for it.  This happened in 2017 when the then Prime Minister Theresa May was finding it impossible  to get the Commons to  agree to  the terms on which to implement BREXIT and leave the European union.  She miscalculated, the Conservatives lost their majority, and the new parliament still could not gain a majority for a BREXIT deal. 

The argument for invoking the premature dissolutions was that the parliaments were preventing the executive from carrying out its well.  This, claimed the Brexiteers, was wrong.

 In fact, these parliaments were acting at their best.  They recognised that there was and is no BREXIT deal which is not damaging to the interests of the British state and people, as we are now discovering to our cost.

The irony is that those same right-wingers are now huffing and puffing that our parliament is sovereign  and it is very wrong of the “lefty lawyers” and courts (enemies of the people) to prevent it from deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Logic is not their strong point.

Be that as it many, I understand the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey,  has said that the restoration of Fixed Term Parliaments will be in our Liberal Democrat manifesto.  I doubt it if this issue would be likely to be a bargaining chip in the negotiations for the formation of  a coalition or “confidence and supply”  arrangement.  Rather, if the result of the coming election gives no one party a clear majority, which I earnest hope, the progressive forces could insist on a series of citizens’ assembles to discuss fundamental reform of our constitutional practices, and this could be one of the essential issues included for consideration.