Austin Mitchell: How Theresa May could call an early election over Brexit

THERESA May has begun well. Rejecting the public school ‘blokiness’ and the mistakes of the Cameron government – particularly its biggest, George Osborne, the austerity Chancellor – she has bandaged the wounds of the Brexit battle and promised a fair deal for all the people, whether rich or poor.

It looks like, and hopefully will be, a new beginning and a new deal. It needs to be that because Labour’s choice of civil war as a system of party management means she will have no opposition to pull her to the centre ground.

Except for Labour Party hacks like me, it’s a good outcome. But, as Mrs May steers the ship in a new and more sensible direction, we have to ask whether it can last. Labour’s disarray probably will.

Hopefully Mrs May’s good intentions will too. But will her majority? It’s only 12 and we all know how public moods change. By-elections arise, and crises (and Brexit negotiations), can test to destruction. If a week is a long time in politics, three and a half years is an eternity.

Yet she’s got to stay the course to 2020 under the Five Year Parliament Act which the Tory party insisted on introducing back in 2010. She badly needs a new election to provide a bigger majority for effective government, but because her party tied her hands by a combination of two silly mistakes, fixed terms and a reduction in the number of MPs to 600, she can only have one if she gets the permission of two-thirds of the Commons.

If Labour can agree on anything, it will be to refuse her that. Alternatively she needs a score of her own MPs to commit hara-kiri by voting against their party on a motion of confidence. Gerhard Schröder managed to do that in Germany, but British parties aren’t as obedient or as self-sacrificing as their German counterparts.

The British public, which doesn’t like party manoeuvres, would see it as devious and dangerous. The Tory party would find it distasteful.

She can’t even do it immediately to avoid Gordon Brown’s disastrous mistake 
in not calling for a vote of confidence in his new government in 2007. The country is in the throes of an electoral redistribution which will change the boundaries of every constituency to reduce Parliament to 600 members.

The Boundary Commission’s first report is due in September and it will probably take up to a year after that to iron out all the objections.

This is manifestly crazy. The bill to reduce the size of Parliament was introduced to cut its costs, a very bad principle. You shouldn’t economise on democracy. For the last 30 years, an MP’s job has become tougher and more demanding.

Constituents demand that MPs live in their seats, the number of problems brought to them increases every year. The work of being local ombudsman, citizens’ advice and problem-solver has grown continuously.

MPs mostly have constituency offices and staff to run them and all this comes on top of the hard work required for the new select committees. Being a MP has become a full-time and very demanding job. The days when they could combine it with other jobs, devote their time to ornithology or stamp collecting or swan round the world on long holidays are gone.

To reduce the number of MPs in this situation will increase the workload, though it might add two score more seats to the Tory majority.

Carried out at this time, redistribution will set member against member, re-open the Brexit wounds and require both Labour and Tory MPs to pander to constituency parties which are mostly to the right and the left of their respective members. That’s what got Labour into such a mess.

So difficult as I find it to help the Tory party with no guarantee of a seat in the Lords in return, the only answer is for the Government to eat the words of 2010, blame it all on the Lib Dems, stop the redistribution, as the government did last time, and repeal both the legislation reducing the number of members and the Fixed Term Act. Then it’s free to hold a new election early next year (say May for May) to ask for a vote of confidence in the new Government and its programme, including a Brexit which we won’t yet have formalised, but where a stronger government 
is in a better position to get a better deal.

Only that can give the Government a bigger majority, and the country the strong government it needs in troubled times. It may even help the Labour Party if it follows the Kinnock, Foot and Callaghan precedents of the leader who loses an election stepping down to make way for a better alternative.

Heaven knows, by that time, one may have emerged.

Even if no one has, there’s nothing better than a near death experience to bring parties to their senses.

Austin Mitchell is the former Labour MP for Greater Grimsby.