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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, the next General Election will be held on May 7th, we all know that because it’s written down in law, the Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2011 to be precise, which means that elections can only be held every five years but is five years sometimes too long?  Well Sir Alan Duncan is a Conservative MP, a former Minister for International Development of course and this week he will present a Bill to parliament calling for the Fixed Term Parliaments Act to be repealed.  Well a very good morning to you, Sir Alan, why, what’s wrong with it?  It gives certainty to a government, it knows it can get its legislative package through parliament.  

ALAN DUNCAN: Well it has with this Parliament and it was basically the way they glued the coalition together at the beginning but it is actually a massive constitutional change which I think will have very, very perverse consequences for future parliaments.  Now with this one it’s worked but what happens under this law is it is five years fixed rather than a maximum of five years unless a government loses in a vote of confidence, in which case the other side has got two weeks to see if they can form a government or if two-thirds of parliament votes for an election.  But the problems will arise if you have a parliament of different arithmetic and everyone thinks we might have that after the next election, although obviously I’d like an overall majority but let’s say I get my way and we do have an overall majority.  If it’s only three, you can’t govern for five years with a tiny majority of three, you need a mechanism probably for going back to the people and the problem with this Act of Parliament is that it puts parliament and MPs first, cobbling together deals and coalitions, it puts the people second and whereas I think it’s important for someone to say actually this isn’t working very well, let’s have another election to see if we have a different outcome.  

DM: But what about the counter argument that we’ve heard about it, that if you don’t have this Act you can have an opportunist Prime Minister who gets his Chancellor to give us a very nice budget and then runs to the country on the basis of some promises which may or may not be delivered and increases his majority?  It allows a Prime Minster to manipulate the timing.  

ALAN DUNCAN: Well you can get that anyway.   

DM: But under this Act you actually have to then I suppose find a way of losing a vote of confidence, it’s not a platform to go to the country on.

ALAN DUNCAN: But there are two things here, firstly as you get up to the five years you can have all that opportunism anyway but also …

DM: Will we see it now?

ALAN DUNCAN: Well you may, you may now, I’d like to say it is the principle of an improving economy which is undoubtedly true or you can have what the press is also saying, the complete freezing of all government activity and they are now calling it the zombie parliament.  That again would probably happen anyway but what you could have under this piece of legislation is this absurdity – if you have got an election which leads to a majority of three and let’s say eighteen months in the Prime Minister thinks right, look, this is just not working, we’re going to have by-elections, deaths, I can’t send the Foreign Minister abroad because I can’t then win a vote, let’s have an election.  He could move a motion of no confidence in himself so the only way you could call an election is to have a vote of no confidence in yourself, a sort of upside down vote.  Now logically that’s possible, you could with that small majority possibly repeal the Act anyway so you’ve got all of these messy arithmetical possibilities and I think that what we’re going to find is actually something even worse than that which is you might have a trio coalition which then changes in its composition after by elections and deaths and party splits so what you have in that five year period is this constant churn of deal making, horse trading, stitching up, all that kind of swapping, if you do this I’ll do that and I think the people will then say yuck, that’s not what we wanted, can we please have an election.  

DM: Well we’ll see how that Bill progresses.  I want to ask you now, the big theme of the times post-Paris of course, this is about community cohesion and what’s going on in this country. Okay there is the fight and the worries about a specific terrorist incident but what is it doing in your view to community cohesion?  We are going to have a general election campaign, there is going to be some very, very robust debate but hopefully we don’t turn to violence.  Do you feel things slightly coming apart at the seams?

ALAN DUNCAN: I think there’s a danger.  Look, I think extreme Jihadism, going off to Syria to fight, doing what happened in Paris are motivations which the rational person finds utterly incomprehensible but I think probably in our midst there are undoubtedly dangers and curiously some of them may be in a third generation immigrant of even Pakistani descent or something, who suddenly wants to wield a machine gun or a bomb and we say we just don’t understand where this comes from but I think there is a broader underlying concern which all of us politicians should have which is that we do not really understand and nor have we paid enough attention to our nearly three million Muslims.  In this election campaign which is going to be for the next four months, I think we ought to focus a lot on that population, all of our parties should think seriously about it to make sure we don’t have a them and us, that we don’t ever have them feeling they are second class citizens and we don’t have a new version if you like of Disraeli’s two nations where they are one nation and we are another.

DM: But you’ve had thoughts in the past haven’t you about Israel’s actions vis a vis the Palestinians, do you think that that has an effect on some of the perceptions that Muslims have about the West?

ALAN DUNCAN: Yes, I wouldn’t for a second say that it either motivates or in any way justifies any kind of extreme violence or extreme behaviour but it does introduce an underlying concern that somehow we have double standards and that there are two sets of values and that somehow the immorality and illegality, in my view, of Israeli settlements is allowed to happen without any kind of actions and strangely enough I think this doesn’t just effect Palestinians, I think we have to understand that this pervades the mentality of a broader Muslim population who feels that their values, their decencies and their rights are not given equal significance to others and that does matter and ultimately it is very corrosive.

DM: Well Sir Alan, thank you very much indeed.  Sir Alan Duncan, very good to see you, thank you very much indeed for those thoughts.