As the chief minister Alf Cannan faces the first non-statutory motion of no confidence in a chief minister in Manx history, we find out what that actually means.
Professor Peter Edge is an expert in Manx public law and has been explaining the process to Amy Griffiths:
Hi there, I'm Amy Griffiths and I'm one of the journalists in Manx Radio's Newsroom. And on this episode of Newscast, we're talking about no confidence votes in the Chief Minister, as for the first time in Manx history, a non-statutory motion will be debated in the House of Keys. Auf Kanan will find out whether his peers still believe he's the man to lead the island after electing him to the position three years ago. But the result won't be legally binding, so I've been speaking to Professor Peter Edge, who's an expert in Manx Public Law, to find out more about the motion that's being put forward. With the shift responsible government and the idea that a chief minister is primarily responsible for governing in the Isle of Man, you have a situation where they are not directly elected, they depend for their legitimacy upon support of MHKs. And so the statutory voter confidence is a mechanism by which if a majority of MHKs vote against the Council of Ministers, they say they have no confidence in the Council of Ministers, a statutory mechanism is triggered. It stops being a political process and becomes a legal process. The Chief Minister goes out of office and there is a new round of appointment of a new Chief Minister. The motion that's happening tomorrow is a non-statutory motion. So some people are kind of asking what is the point of having a non-statutory motion because this is specifically in the Chief Minister rather than in the Council of Ministers as a whole? Yes, well, we can find a number of different precedents for these sort of non-statutory motions of no confidence. So groups of individuals, for instance, the entire Manx utilities authority, there was a vote of no confidence in them, individual ministers, that hasn't as far as I'm aware, been a non-statutory vote of no confidence in the Chief Minister before, but there's probably been some times when they were on the cards. So I suppose what's interesting is, given you've got this mechanism to make it binding through the statutory route, why go for a non-statutory one which is only political? And I think there's a couple of different differences. One of them is quite iniquity. One of the issues is the number of people you need to pass it. So for the statutory, no confidence vote, you have to have 13, even if not all MHKs are present, whereas for the non-statutory route, it simply needs a majority of the MHKs who are present and voting. So that might be an issue. Another one is that when you go the statutory route, as soon as the motion is passed, statute says exactly what happens. There's a time frame for the new election. It tells you what happens to the Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers and everybody goes out of government and it becomes a legal rather than a political process. So it may be that if you wanted a bit more room for post-vote negotiation and discussion about the future, you may not want to trigger the statutory mechanism. I suppose the third thing that struck me is the wording is slightly curious because the actual appointment process, so after general election, when the key sit down to a point of government, they appoint the Chief Minister and the Chief Minister then appoints the Council of Ministers. But when they are removing them, they pass a vote in their confidence in the Council of Ministers as a whole. So one possibility is that if you were actually quite happy with many of the members of the Council of Ministers but unhappy with the ultimate leadership, you may not wish to pass a vote a motion against the entire Council of Ministers. So it may be that it's actually to make it a more focused and specific criticism. Another possibility is if you feel that some ministers may vote in support of your motion against the Chief Minister but would not vote an emotion criticizing themselves as part of the Council of Ministers, that might be another reason. So from the Chief Minister's perspective then, this of course it is not binding, he does not have to do anything with that vote but I suppose it does make his position questionable. Yes, because it's non-statchy, it doesn't trigger a change of government but realistically a Chief Minister who had 30 MHKs indicate they did not have confidence in them would have to think about their position very seriously. So one possibility is they might resign. Another possibility is that they would negotiate and discuss with some of those who voted against them what exactly the criticism was. So because it's non-statchy there's actually room for them to discuss you know is a particular change that would make a difference to your confidence in me for instance. If neither of those happened, so if 13 MHKs had voted no confidence in the Chief Minister, they had not made any attempt to reduce that number and they had not themselves resigned, I think it's quite probable a statutory vote would follow. Now we understand as well from speaking to some of the political members that there's actually an effort to try and make this a secret ballot and is that something that's ever discussed with these kinds of votes as well and what kind of impact that has? Secret ballots used to be part of the the Minx constitutional system. The most prominent example I think is the appointment of members of the Legislative Council. They are appointed by the Keys and up until quite recently that was by Secret Ballot and that may have been one of the reasons that at some points in the early 2000s it would take a vast number of votes to fill a vacancy because people were able to manage their relationships with possible future MLCs by assuring them of their support and then not delivering. So you find a number of sort of explicit references in debates about, you know, I would like to thank the 13 people who voted for me as well as 15 who said they would. So the thing about the Secret Ballot and what was occasionally favoured by people was it's a way of handling ongoing relationships rather than have them disrupted by your not voting for somebody. The reason why they moved out of popularity for the MLCs and I think actually it's applicable to this vote is in a representative democracy. We should know how our representatives vote. So there really shouldn't be secret votes by MHKs on constitutional matters such as the Confidence otherwise and the Chief Minister. So I think it's quite unusual to take that step backwards into a secret ballot. My understanding is that the current standing orders of the Harris Keys require an open ballot. They can be suspended but that in itself would require a special majority of 16 MHKs. So that's a lot of MHKs would need to want to take this secret and I think that in itself would be interesting because obviously that vote would be open. Let us say that nine MHKs voted for it to be a secret ballot and then nine people voted against Chief Minister. There would be no, definitely a way of connecting those two but I would have thought the BFF chance Chief Minister would join the dots. So I don't think it's desirable and I think it's probably quite unlikely. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio Newscast. You are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider. So our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
