Labour politicians and activists have spent the last few days merrily confusing motions of no confidence and dissolution, as I discussed on Thursday.

Many have stuck to the easily disproven claim that the coalition government proposes a 55% threshold for a vote of no confidence. It doesn’t: a vote of no confidence requires 50%+1 MP now and will continue to do so.

The other line of attack has been to suggest that 50% of MPs can currently vote to dissolve parliament.

Those who’ve taken the trouble to check their facts at least don’t claim that MPs can actually vote to dissolve parliament. That power rests with the monarch, under advice from the Prime Minister. Rather they claim that, since dissolution always follows a successful vote of no confidence, the change in effect removes the ability of 50% + 1 MP to force a dissolution.

So it is true? Does a dissolution of parliament always follow a vote of no confidence?

No, it doesn’t. And it’s perhaps something Labour activists with an eye for history might have remembered, since the first Labour Prime Minister came to power in just such a situation.

The Conservatives won the General Election of 1923, with 38% of the vote. Labour came second with 30.7% and the Liberals came third (stop me if this is sounding at all familiar).

Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader, became Prime Minister but lost a vote of no-confidence. Was there a dissolution of parliament? No. Instead, Ramsay Macdonald became Prime Minister of the first ever Labour administration. He clearly hadn’t won the election, but in this country we elect a parliament, not a government.

Since then we’ve had only two successful motions of no-confidence – to oust Ramsay Macdonald and James Callaghan. In both cases the Prime Minister chose to seek a dissolution of parliament, but it was the choice of the PM. It would have been perfectly constitutional for them to stand down without dissolving parliament and give another party leader the chance to form a government, and they might have done if such an outcome had seemed possible.

So let’s say a vote of no confidence is passed and the Government falls. The Prime Minister will no longer have the power to seek a dissolution of parliament, since that power will for the first time rest with MPs.

Would it still happen? Of course it would. If no government could be formed, why would anyone disagree? The PM who would otherwise have dissolved parliament would surely support it, as would the opposition who’d just brought down the government.

Let’s wrap up.

Does this change allow a government to cling on if opposed by a majority of MPs? No. Just as today, the government falls if it loses a vote of no confidence. It’s possible that a different party might then form a government as Ramsay Macdonald did, but probably more likely that MPs from all parties would vote to dissolve parliament – something they’re unable to do at the moment.

And we shouldn’t forget that Labour were very happy to require two-thirds of MSPs to vote to dissolve the Scottish parliament, and that the whole point of the higher threshold is precisely to prevent the Prime Minister engineering a dissolution for party political benefit.