In Tuesday’s Queen’s speech, the government set out its legislative agenda for the coming year, a programme consisting of pledges for home ownership, voter ID and a post-Covid recovery plan amongst other policy priorities for the Conservatives.
Also included in the programme were proposals for a series of new laws to scrap the Fixed-Terms Parliaments Act, legislation passed in 2011 designed to entrench government terms to set 5 year periods with fixed election dates.
The law was passed 10 years ago as an act of compromise between an unwilling Conservative government in coalition with a junior Liberal Democrat partner that had pledged to introduce 4 year fixed terms in their 2010 manifesto.
The bill was a non-negotiable for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems; fears that the Conservatives could prematurely end the 2010 government’s term if the polls suggested they could win a single-party majority were greatly prevalent in the early days of the coalition, and the FTPA was seen as a legislative barrier against any such attempt.
The passage of yesterday’s proposed legislation will roll back the FTPA and effectively allow Prime Minister Boris Johnson to call a general election any time before the current date of 2024, an attractive gain for the infamously talented campaigner that will hand him the power to call a vote at whichever time is most politically expedient for his government.
As such, this move can and should be interpreted as an incontrovertible power grab to consolidate his government’s supremacy.
It should come as no surprise that Mr Johnson has decided to try and roll back the 2011 election reform law. In 2019, while struggling to circumvent the “Brexit blockage” in Parliament with a minority Conservative government, he attempted on several occasions to secure the supermajority necessary to trigger an early vote as per the FTPA.
Opposition parties repeatedly blocked this and Johnson’s government instead had to pass the Early Parliamentary General Election Act by a simple majority to force through the December 2019 election.
Evidently, he hasn’t forgotten this and consequently now seeks to remove this procedural impediment for the future.
So, what is the issue with Johnson’s plans? Surely the option to have more/earlier elections is more democratic, leading to greater accountability and a better quality of government?
The reality is somewhat different.
The 2011 FTPA legislation was introduced because the electoral system in operation at the time had several problematic deficiencies regarding electoral dates.
The key criticism of the previous system was that it granted the Prime Minister of the day complete autonomy on the specific date an election would be held, scarcely regulated by a simple, vague provision that elections “should” be held around every five years.
The only thing the Prime Minister needed to do was to request the monarch use their Royal Prerogative powers to call the early election, a relative formality in a constitutional monarchy.
This authority allowed the PM to tactically pick a date that would be most advantageous for the fortunes of their party, such as one that coincided with an upward economic trend or the passage of a publicly popular piece of legislation.
In a similar mode to which referendums are sometimes criticised for only providing a snapshot of public opinion concerning a certain issue, an election of this nature could arguably provide an inaccurate depiction of public attitudes towards the incumbent government, disadvantaging opposition parties from the word “go”.
The political advantage afforded to the incumbent Prime Minister through scrapping fixed-term Parliaments cannot be underestimated, and the decision to roll back the landmark 2011 legislation should only be viewed in overtly political terms and as entirely regressive.
Several media outlets have already speculated that Boris Johnson will use his regained power over election dates to call an early election in 2023 in order to consolidate an already hefty parliamentary supremacy over a Labour Party in disarray.
A largely disappointing round of results in last week’s local elections, coupled with the bitter and divisive Shadow Cabinet reshuffle that followed, has left Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer with a Herculean task to repair the continuing divisions in his party, rebuild public trust and make Labour electable once again.
A 2023 election would give him just two years to do so, a miniscule amount of time when compared with the 14 years it took Labour to modernise and regain power under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair in the 1980s and 1990s.
Starmer has himself already reportedly instructed his party to prepare for an early election date.
Sources within No.10 have been quick to dismiss that the proposed rollback of the FTPA is being done with a view to hold an early election, with the official line being that “there are no discussions about an early election” and that the focus is instead on “recovering from the pandemic and building back better.'
Opportunities to gain advantage over one’s opponents are rarely passed up in politics, however, and for a Prime Minister as electorally adept as Boris Johnson, it is entirely possible that an early election could materialise to deal further damage to a disharmonious, dishevelled Labour at war with itself.
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