As a Yank, I am always confused about how you all on the old side of the pond conduct your government.
I’ve read many of the threads and saw how many posters noted that the 2011 Fixed Terms Parliament Act (Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 - Wikipedia) had changed things. No more early elections and the like, but then I read this passage:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Section 2 of the Act also provides for two ways in which a general election can be held before the end of this five-year period:
If the House of Commons resolves “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government”, an early general election is held, unless the House of Commons subsequently resolves “That this House has confidence in Her Majesty’s Government”. This second resolution must be made within fourteen days of the first.
If the House of Commons, with the support of two-thirds of its total membership (including vacant seats), resolves “That there shall be an early parliamentary general election”.
[/QUOTE]
To me, this swallows the rule. If the majority party wants an early election, why can’t it just pass a no-confidence vote against itself and have an early election?
Why the need for the second 2/3 vote provision?
Also, how is this different than before? Prior to the Act, couldn’t Parliament dissolve itself on a no-confidence vote? If it can dissolve itself in the same manner, both before and after the Act, how are terms, in any meaning of the word, “fixed”?
It can’t. It’s got to vote against the Queen’s Speech, or against its budget in order to effect a vote of no confidence. Neither of which would be very palatable.
And you’re missing, for instance, the situation of the current minority government in the UK. Should the Liberals choose to no longer support the Conservative government, they could join with Labour to vote no confidence and force an election. (Subject, of course, to other parties choosing to throw a wrench in the works.)
In case absolutely everybody is fed up with the PM.
Prior to the act, the Prime Minister could call an election at any time for any reason. The act limits this.
Interesting. So if I am an MP, I cannot have my secretary type a bill which states:
“Be it resolved that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government”
and follow proper procedures to bring it to a vote? I assume not.
I can only vote against the Queen’s Speech? (and what does that signify? What, in particular, don’t I like about the speech? Part of it? All of it?) I assume that would be symbolic and only show my intent to vote to bring down the government.
or vote against a budget? What if I like 99.9% of the budget, but I don’t like the salary for the sewer commissioner in Brighton? I either approve his salary or bring down the government?
No-confidence votes are pretty rare but they aren’t restricted to voting on legislative agenda or supply. The John Major government effectively made the vote on the acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty a confidence vote, iirc.
The PM can be replaced by the governing party using their own internal processes eg Thatcher, unwillingly, and Blair, willingly. I’m trying to think of a scenario where a 2/3rds vote of the whole House would actually come into play. It would have to be some massive scandal, I think.
That I can’t answer. My understanding is that only the government can propose bills. The government obviously would not want that bill to proceed, but given the 2/3 exemption, there must be some way for it to happen.
Yes, in both of these cases, your only purpose in voting no is for the government to fall.
There’s nothing to stop you trying. It helps if the MP putting the motion forward is the Leader of the Opposition, mind you. Margaret Thatcher did just so in 1979, and won by one vote. (There was a Labour MP, literally on his death-bed, who was willing to be wheeled through the lobby, but the sitting PM decided that was a bit too much to ask and so the vote was lost. The MP died a couple of days later).
There’s Private Member’s Bills, but they usually don’t go anywhere without government support. The Abortion Act in Westminster got on the books that way in 1967.
It struck me that this may be unclear. The Queen’s Speech is a speech personally made by the Monarch at the opening of a new Parliament following an election. It is effectively written by the incoming Prime Minister, and lays out the plans of the new (or continuing) government.
Just so I’m clear, how do members/ministers propose the budget? Suppose the PM is from a city that wants to build a controversial new football stadium with public funds. The PM is all for it, but most members, even those from his own party, are against it.
Does the PM put forth the budget (with funds for the football stadium) and his party better damn well vote for it or have to face re-election soon? Or is there an internal mechanism where a majority (or at least a majority of the majority/coalition) can debate these things?
And did I understand you correctly that a vote against the budget is an automatically new election? So, as I said, I don’t think the sewer commissioner should have such a lavish salary. I feel so strongly that I will vote against the whole budget, but will gladly vote for a new budget without the high salary and keep every member in place. Under the UK system, that isn’t an option? My vote against the budget means that I am voting against the government and asking for new elections? That seems extreme.
The House of Commons sends a reply to the Queen after she opens Parliament, thanking her for being so magnanimous as to call them to meet and give them an agenda for the session. Since the contents of the speech are the government’s plan for the next year, it obviously has to pass.
(Actually, I don’t think it ever comes up for a vote directly. That would be rude to the Queen, to reject a motion thanking her for popping in. If there’s a push to topple the government on the issue of the speech, IIRC it would be done by inserting a no-confidence statement into the reply. “Most Gracious Sovereign, blah blah thanks for coming. By the way, we regret to inform Your Majesty that this House has no confidence in Your Majesty’s government.” The moment the amendment is approved, the government no longer has confidence and the PM will be expected to call an election or quit.)
As a backbench MP, it probably wouldn’t occur to you that you should have such control over minutiae in a major bill.
The Budget isn’t about locally trivial things like that. It’s about levels of income tax, excise duties, tax relief, allowances, departmental budgets etc. Remember that the UK isn’t federalised the way the US is.
The Queens Speech is the presentation of the government’s legislative agenda for the next year - what bills they intend to introduce. As an MP you are - depending on how you feel about career prospects - free to object to bits of it as they are brought to parliament. To object to the whole lot is another level, a vote against the government as a whole.
There’s actually another category - the Private Bill - where individuals or organizations can get something through parliament. Divorce used to be handled through this mechanism, a long time ago though! It seems to be mostly used now by local government authorities who need primary legislation to get something done, or private companies who have a complicated history eg various banks whose establishment dates back to a bill passed in eighteen-oatcake.
A formal vote of no confidence is a procedural motion, not a bill (a bill being a proposal for a law or a change to an existing law). It could be proposed at any time with due notice.
A vote of no confidence doesn’t force an election. The Head of State, as their first option, offers the prime ministership to whomever they think could can run the government either as majority or as next option minority.
Were an election called the outgoing government would have considerable difficulty campaigning on their record of competence having just voted no confidence in their own capability to do that job.
Unlike other early election triggers, the government isn’t going to the electorate early seeking a refreshed mandate because of obstruction to their legislative agenda.
Electorates don’t like having the expense/disruption of unnecessary elections imposed on them and if done on such a blatant pretext you’d expect a significant swing to any coherent opposition.
If a party controlled a workable majority, voted no confidence in itself and lost the subsequent election on an electoral backlash then I’d think the party would be finished as a political entity.
There would always be a reply, as you say. But the contents of that reply has to be approved by the House (the Lords sends it own, separate, reply, but as it is the weaker chamber in theory if it rejected the Queen’s speech, nobody would listen. But that doesn’t happen anyway).
Anyway, the Government will naturally table a Reply to the Address, and any Member (ostensibly the Leader of the Opposition) can propose amendments to that address to alter its meaning, so instead of saying ‘thanks’, it would say ‘thanks, but we are dismayed that your speech didn’t mention X, or did mention Y’ and so on. Doing so would indicate the House does not approve of the government’s plan, and puts its authority into question.
It’s down to the government as to what happens next if it lost control of the Reply. Almost certainly it would mean the resignation of that government, or at least a serious reshuffle. It’s not happened in a long time, so it’s difficult to say for sure.
You can. Any Member can propose any Bill they desire. But there’s no guarantee it would be passed by Parliament. Given our system, which has an in-built bias towards the governing party dominating the agenda of Parliament, it’s unlikely to succeed unless it’s a ‘moral’ issue or something which the parties recognise as necessary but don’t want to be ‘their’ responsibility. Typically about one or two Private Members’ Bills are passed annually, if that.
A Bill to withdraw confidence in Her Majesty’s Government is almost certain to fail because of its import and the fact that the Government normally has an intimate relationship with its own Members.
You can offer amendments on the Reply, to the affect that you can express general approval of the Speech, but deplore a particular policy, or the absence of one.
Something of that subject tends not to be something Parliament is interested in, but leaves it to the Department to handle. Parliament will be more interested in the budget as a whole than in a particular officials’ pay. We do have a rather splendid Standing Order in the Commons which I am fond of, which prevents any proposal to increase the burden on the public purse from being considered by the House unless it is ‘certified’ by a Minister of the Crown.
In effect, this means that increases in public spending cannot happen, even if the Commons wants them, unless the Government gives them its stamp of approval. This has been around since about the 1660s, and is a mechanism to restrict pork barrel.
The Budget is laid before the Commons and has to be approved by the Commons before any charge on the pubic purse can be made. The process by which this is done is considerably different from the US Congress method, although the details escape me right now, but I can dig it up if you are interested.
For now, though, it suffices to say that the relationship between the PM and the Members of his party is symbiotic. He’s going to be considerably more successful if he communicates and co-operates with his Members in advance. The major parties have quite sophisticated policy-formulation and scrutinisation architectures in place, both to make plain what leaders want, but also what backbenchers want, and for ideas to be filtered through and improved upon before they reach the Commons.
The PM can in extremis pull rank in the way you describe, but doing so is hazardous. Doing it for such a scheme as a new football pitch in his own constituency would almost certainly fail as it would only harm the party and bring no benefit to anyone. Even if he did succeed in getting his party to support him entirely on it, the proposal would still require debate and approval by the Commons, and the Opposition will do their darndest to expose such a crooked and flawed scheme and make life hard for the Government in Parliament and the press. The Government may end up abandoning the proposal themselves if they find that it makes them look stupid, even if their own Members favoured it.
If a Budget failed, the more likely short-term result would be a new Government. The PM would resign, or failing that a major reshuffle of the Cabinet, and the new ministry would try again. The Budget is voted in chunks, department by department, so you could block the spending proposals for DEFRA while still upholding the rest of the plan.
Thanks for all of the answers. Many of the procedural niceties are still confusing to us over here. But I picked this out because it illustrates my lack of knowledge in what
“confidence” in a government means. It seems to me that if I am a Tory, and the Tories control the government, as a Tory MP, I must agree with everything the party proposes and not wish it proposes more.
Say I’m the Tory equivalent to a tea party Republican and my two biggest issues are eliminating national health care and banning same sex marriage. (Or pick two others; the issues aren’t important, but my hypothetical strong belief in them are)
These are things which obviously don’t have the support of government, or even the minority party, but when I ran on the issues, my constituents strongly supported them. They elected me to Parliament, in part, to get these issues in the public spotlight for debate.
But I am also a Tory, and I support what the Tories are proposing. At least I support the Tories to a greater degree than any other party.
I’m seems to this American that a vote to say that I was dismayed that Her Majesty did not mention dismantling the national health system and outlawing same sex marriage is also a vote against my stated principle of supporting the Tory government. It is certainly NOT what I am trying to say with the vote. Do parliamentary governments in general want to stifle independence within their own parties?
Yes they do; but the trust in fulfilling the party program will have different burdens on both sides. Parliamentary systems rely a lot on central executive leadership; they hold the government to account to hold to what it proposed. Many of our mainstream parties are big-tent, so there’ll be plenty to agree and disagree over.
The main difference I think that matters here is that in the US, the more doctrinaire party members can kick up a stink knowing there’s little that their detractors can do to penalise them; they are immune until the next election. In the UK, there’s always a risk (less so now with the FTPAct, but still present) that they may go to an election to resolve a policy dispute, meaning the issue is taken from the smoke-filled rooms and is exposed to public debate. This could risk the doctrinaire people being embarrassed by by a crushing defeat. Think of the UK system as being two agents with guns against each others’ heads. They have more incentive to co-operate than to openly fight.
On the other hand, they may be looking forward to a victory in an election that could embarass the more moderate party leaders, so it’s actually in the interests of the party leaders to avoid on. So they will look to co-operate more with the other party leaders on a long-term basis to get policy they all agree on through, and isolate their more nutty wings. Then you’ll get attempts by the nutty wings to attack the Queen’s Speech and the Budget. Maastricht’s an example.
I don’t think I explained it particularly well, so to recap: extremists within parties will have their hobby horses they will want done, so will put pressure on the leadership to enact; but they generally approve of the broader party philosophy. The restraint on their behaviour is the risk of isolation in Parliament, or embarassment in an early election. Alternatively, the probability of them doing well in a future election will inecentivise the leadership to work with the Opposition to get policy through and isolate the backbenchers. For the extremists, this means they are prevented from influencing said policy and they weaken themselves. Better constructive involvement in a lukewarm policy than isolation and a terribly policy enacted.
In the UK, cross-party co-operation, when it happens, tends to be on a more long-term, strategic basis; in the US, as there’s no danger of early elections, co-operation tends to be case-by-case and piecemeal, with less consideration of long-term consequence.
Another point on the same subject: the British system has a strong emphasis on central executive responsibility. This means that when a policy is enacted, or not, it’s almost always down to the Executive to explain why. There’s little opportunity for them to pass the buck, and almost always the Opposition will work hard to refocus attention on blaming the Government. A divided government does not look healthy in the British system, and a split party will not be treated kindly by the electorate at the polls. Therefore, it is in the interests of moderates and extremists in the same party to co-operate to ensure their own party remains in power whatever happens, as anything’s better than the other guy.
