26th June 2023
In the words of the eminent jurist Paul Simon:
“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities”
*
One hard structural fact about the politics of the United Kingdom is that the government is running out of time.
By automatic operation of law the next general election has to take place by 28 January 2025.
That gives the current government about 580 days left, maximum, before a general election which many forecast that the governing Conservative party will lose.
About 580 days sounds a lot, but it really is not – at least in parliamentary terms.
That date presupposes that the general election is called at the last possible moment – 17 December 2024 – leaving the longest possible election campaign.
Current speculation is that the next general election will be in October 2024, which means the last parliamentary session will need to be over by September 2024, and given summer breaks, that basically means legislation will need to passed by June/July 2024.
So that is about 365 to 400 days.
*
We are still – remarkably – within the same parliamentary session that commenced two prime ministers and one monarch ago in May 2022.
And as the Hansard Society averred in May, few of the Bills announced in that speech have become law:
It is expected that there will be a new King’s Speech this November.
This means that it is highly likely that there is just one more parliamentary session left before a general election – November 2023 to June/July 2024.
(There is the theoretical possibility of more than one remaining parliamentary term if the government has a sequence of truncated parliamentary sessions, with multiple openings of parliament.)
One implication of there being only one more parliamentary session before an election is that it is probable that there is not enough time to force any new legislation through the House of Lords under the Parliament Act, for that requires a Bill to be approved in successive sessions.
And then there are the recesses:
As one adds up the delays and holidays, and the speculation of an election by October 2024, the gross figure of 580 days becomes a lot less in practical legislative terms.
The grand hourglass of parliamentary time is running out for the current government.
We are not talking years, we are now talking months – and soon we will be talking weeks.
*
And not only time is against them – there is the problem of legislative preparation.
Put simply: this government is not very good at preparing legislation.
As the Hansard Society politely put it:
Parliamentary time for bills should not be, say, “step one’‘ of a process but about “step four” – after policy formulation, consultation and development – all within or by departments.
And so if you factor in the time to actually put together new practical – that is, passable – legislation then not even the maximum 580 days are really enough.
Even if following the conference season this year there is a “whizz-bang” King’s Speech with lots of legislative proposals, that whizzery and bangery needs to being prepared now in departments, and there is not a lot of evidence of any whizzery and bangery taking place anywhere in Whitehall at present.
Not only does the government need enough time to get legislation through parliament and implement it before the next general election, ministers and departments need lead-in times to get the legislation to be in any state to pass.
The time left looks very tight.
Too tight.
*
What we have is a government that not only is running out of time, but in some ways has already ran out of time to do anything radical and substantial in its one (likely) remaining parliamentary term.
And what makes this even more remarkable that this is a government elected in December 2019, on the back of Brexit, which had a substantial majority – only the second overall majority the Conservatives had had since 1992.
In legislative and policy terms, that majority has been largely wasted.
(Which may be a good or bad thing, depending on your politics.)
This is a government running out of possibilities.
*
“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities”
“Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
……”
W H Auden, If I Could Tell You
I’ve been wondering about that for a while.
Does that explain their excessive use of secondary legislation & regulation, that can go through much more quickly?
And will it be easier or harder for subsequent governments to unpick, if they want to?
A government can only make secondary legislation to the extent that Parliament has already enacting primary legislation giving the government power to make that secondary legislation. And, to the extent Parliament has done that, it’s considered proper for governments to implement their policy through secondary legislation rather than going back to Parliament and seeking primary legislation. “Why are you bothering Parliament with this? Parliament has already delegated to you the power to deal with this. Now go and deal with it.”
I think the answer to your second question is: it’s generally easier for a government to revoke secondary legislation than it is to go to Parliament and seek the repeal of primary legislation.
But before revoking secondary legislation the government has to ask itself what it wants to do instead. If what the government wants to do instead will require primary legislation, then obviously they have to go to Parliament for that, and it may be unwise or impossible to repeal the secondary legislation currently in operation until the new primary legislation has been enacted.
“Running out” just about sums this government up. They are now in survival mode and would probably prefer to have less time to survive for, not more time to govern.
Is whizzery and bangery a recognized legal term I ask myself
One of them is.
The singular problem of the 2019 election winning Conservatives is a total lack of understanding of the processes of law making and governing. Superficial “sound bites” are no substitute for thoughtful and well crafted legislation.
And there appears to be no understanding of the inevitable time lag between the vast majority of new legislation and its impact.
If the Government cannot grasp these simple fundamentals it will achieve very little. And that has been the fate of the Conservatives since 2019. Clearly that has been partly due to the simple lack of competence of the various prime ministers, but it is also due to the lack of understanding in the wider party, especially the MP’s.
Like the Paul Simon reference, but how about a little Jackson Browne.
‘Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields’
‘Running on (running on empty)
Running on (running blind)
Running on (running into the sun)
But I’m running behind’
Perhaps some time could be better used by politicians using an electronic voting system rather than lining up to go through archaic voting lobbies. That might free up a little more time to get things done.
The real time bomb hasn’t fully exploded yet. By the time we get to an election all of the sub 3% 2 year fixed rate mortgages will have expired. Nearly 90% of UK mortgages are arranged on a fixed rate and the vast majority of these are for 24 months or less. There is carnage in the market at the moment as borrowers already hit by cost of living crises are now facing significant debt pressures.
The 24 month cycle for the last 15 years has been:
Remortgage home and debts
Run up credit cards
Property value increases
Remortgage home and debts
Repeat.
The music has now stopped and there are very few chairs left to sit on. The ‘promise’ (that was reduced over the weekend to a ‘priority’) to reduce inflation is unlikely to alleviate this crisis ahead of any election date.
Seize the opportunity to post Susannah Hoffs! Good show.
What in the British legal environment would prevent a government that was so-minded from passing an Act to allow for 6 years between elections? Or 10 years? And thus allowing themselves to stay on forever?
I realise that this would cause all kinds of other political / civil problems, but from a legal perspective, it’s often said that Allowing / Banning X is only ever an Act of Parliament away, and this would seem to be an obvious case for any opportunistic executive who were worried about losing their grip on power and weren’t proverbial “good chaps”.
Nothing stops it. Parliament determines the frequency of elections and can, and does, vary it. The maximum five-year term was only set in 1911 (prior to that it was seven years), and even that has been varied. The Parliament elected in December 1910 ought to have been dissolved by December 1915; it was extended by a series of Acts and wasn’t dissolved until November 1918; the Parliament elected in November 1935 was likewise extended annually on repeated occasions and wasn’t dissolved until June 1945. There is nothing to stop Parliament extending its own life for as long as it likes and as often as it likes.
This is correct as a matter of domestic constitutional law – and it is difficult (if not impossible) to see how a domestic court could gainsay such a parliamentary manoeuvre.
But, for what it is worth, such a ploy would likely be a breach of our international obligations under the ECHR https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Guide_Art_3_Protocol_1_ENG