This is, in all probability, the last “View from Westminster” that I will be able to provide before the general election is upon us.
We are, of course, already in the phoney war that inevitably precedes a general election in the fifth year of a parliament.
When elections are called in the first, second, third or fourth year of parliaments, they do not create this phoney war – because, in those years, no-one know which weeks are the weeks just before an election. But when a parliament stretches on towards the end of its final year of lawful existence, the date of the election becomes ever more determinate and the pre-electoral period becomes more and more obviously a pre-electoral period.
This takes us back to the interesting question of whether it would, in the long run, be preferable to have fixed term parliaments.
In a recent ‘View from Westminster’ column, I said “it remains a mystery why, when the Quinquennial Act was being introduced, our predecessors did not even discuss the possibility of a regular cycle”. And I added that, if our predecessors “had been forced to limp through the last few months, they might have come to a different conclusion.”
Interest in the proposition of fixed term parliaments has certainly risen during recent years – and I now receive a slow but steady stream of correspondence from people who are promoting the idea.
The arguments in favour are very clear. Everyone knows where they are. The Prime Minister of the day cannot play games with the date and hence with the electorate. The Civil Service can prepare in an orderly fashion for any likely transition. And the costs can be minimised by co-ordinating the parliamentary electoral cycle with local election cycles.
True, as the last few weeks have shown, a system of fixed term parliaments would have the disadvantage of creating a phoney war (and hence a prolongation of what is effectively the election period) at every single election. And I’ve no doubt that we will go on discussing this issue for some time to come before a national consensus emerges.
But I suspect that we may eventually get to the point at which fixed terms seem somehow more natural then the floating arrangements we have grown used to over many years.