Is there a workable alternative to a Prime Minister picking the date of the general election?
Or does the sorry history of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act show there is no real alternative?
One of the strange features of the United Kingdom is that the executive decides when there will be elections for the legislature.
The Prime Minister (exercising the royal prerogative) can decide when one parliament will be dissolved and a new parliament elected ( subject to a five year maximum).
Of course, there was a recent attempt to remove this feature. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act enshrined (ho ho) into law that parliaments would last for so long before a scheduled general election.
It was a singularly ineffective Act. Only one general election, in 2015, happened according to plan. In 2016 there was a Commons vote within the terms of the Act for there to be an early general election; and in 2019, MPs voted for legislation to enable an early general election, notwithstanding the existence of the Act.
That is the thing about supposedly entrenched legislation: what can be legislated for by parliament can be simply un-legislated for by parliament.
That Act is now repealed, and with a deft “again” the latest legislation revives the royal prerogative:
There was some (academic) discussion about whether a power of the prerogative, once abolished by statute, can actually be revived. Now we know: slip in an “again” and it exists again, as if by statutory magic.
Pow!
*
And so we are back to the familiar position - but just because a position is familiar that does not make it any less strange.
The one merit of the 2016 and 2019 parliamentary votes for an early election was that: that they were votes by the parliament, and so an early election was not at the sole fiat of the prime minister.
But.
What is the alternative to the current position?
Another - somehow better - Fixed-term Parliaments Act?
If so, as in 2019, there would be no way to prevent it being undone by another simple Act of Parliament.
And requiring parliamentary majorities for an early election places the control of the election into the hands of government supporters who may have very little interest in an early exercise in democratic accountability.
Or perhaps we can just abolish the royal prerogative - and really, really mean it this time? We would then have full five-year terms, with parliaments dissolved by the automatic operation of law.
But the prerogative can be revived with an “again”.
There appears to be no easy long-term solution to the problem of the executive controlling the calling of the election of the legislature.
It seems every conceivable limitation can easily be un-done.
And so it looks like we are stuck with this odd feature of our constitution.
Most countries (or at least the ones I know about) have elections every four years. They also have proportional representation, another element which limits the ability of a single party to call all the shots, particularly when they are elected on a minority vote, as well as being very unpopular. Both measures would, I think, benefit our ailing democracy.
But the point of the FTPA was that it effectively placed the date of the election in the hands of Parliament and not the Prime Minister. Where the government has an overwhelming parliamentary majority (and its MPs follow the whip) there perhaps isn't much difference between the position under the FTPA and the PM exercising prerogative powers. However, where there is a minority government, the FTPA had a real impact in transferring power to Parliament from the executive. So I would argue that it was effective during the period of minority Conservative governments, as it placed the timing of elections in the hands of Parliament, and not the PM.