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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Battling the chaos. Parliament braces itself against Hurricane Trump.

Mark D'Arcy: The Hillsborough law, social media bans, and hereditary peers. The awkward legislative questions stacking up in Keir Starmer's parliamentary in-tray.

Ruth Fox: And should turning your coat mean calling a by-election. Is it right that MPs can change parties without asking the voters?

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, it's been to put it gently a dizzying week in not just British, but [00:01:00] in world politics with, as you described it just now, Hurricane Trump blowing against all the foundations of the post-war order. Is Britain really gonna still be an ally of the United States if it does go in and seize Greenland?

Ruth Fox: Now there's a deal, possibly.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, there is the concept of a deal of the future of Greenland, apparently. And nobody knows what's gonna happen next because it's entirely possible for this president to wake up and decide to do something completely different to his last announcement and just presented as all part of his art of the deal brilliance.

So what you've got is a situation where there's certainties that have shaped the post-war order for Britain, basically the military alliance with America, NATO, Atlanticism, all those dominant currents in British foreign policy, security policy, nuclear policy have just evaporated. Nobody knows what's gonna happen next with American policy.

Nobody knows whether we're going to be left bobbing in its wake or [00:02:00] totally alienated by it. And so Keir Starmer has to get up in Parliament every week and try and keep things calm. And this week I think the strain was beginning to tell.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. He made, didn't he, the most outspoken statement against Trump, the clearest statement against him, making clear that he was opposed to the tariffs. This was not how you treat allies, that Greenland, it was a matter for the Danish government and the Greenlanders themselves, and I don't think we've seen a British Prime Minister speak out in quite such strong, clear terms against American president for quite a long time. Possibly. It might be possibly Vietnam.

I'm trying to, oh, no, I suppose it's Margaret Thatcher on Grenada, yes, ronald Reagan.

Mark D'Arcy: But that was a blip rather than a long term thing, I think.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So there's that. I did think he missed a trick. I think he should have made what was a press briefing in Downing Street. He should have made that in the House of Commons in the Chamber.

I've banged on a number of times on this podcast about how the Prime Minister should use the bully [00:03:00] pulpit of the dispatch box in the House of Commons. And I think doing it with the backdrop of the Commons, doing it with a sense of unity among MPs backing him, requiring effectively forcing the other party political leaders to roll in behind him and make statements support,

Mark D'Arcy: And most particularly Nigel Farage in Reform, who are in a somewhat awkward position since Nigel Farage is at least in the public mind rather stapled to Donald Trump.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but he was pretty clear this week in his opposition to Trump's approach. So he would've had to essentially have put that on the record in the Chamber of the House of Commons and stood up there in the back of the chamber addressing the house. So I think he missed an opportunity there.

And it's of course a long running issue about making statements to the press rather than to the House. There's also, those kinds of press briefings are very much, they give that sense of emergency. We all remember, of course, from COVID, and I do worry that the more you do of those, when a real emergency, [00:04:00] this was an important matter, this was an urgent foreign policy question, but it wasn't something that required action on behalf of the public, tHe point at which you do that, I do worry that you've diluted the impacts of these briefings a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: And also it is just an irritant for Mr. Speaker and for the House of Commons in general. When such major announcements and reactions to events take place outside the Commons chamber, which is supposed to hear these things first. I'm afraid it's an old story by now, and it's going back for dozens of governments that such announcements have been made in this way, but I feel that's now showbiz and we've explored before all the reasons that happens. But there is also a much longer term issue here. As I said in my opening ramble, the whole edifice of post-war British security is called into question.

When the United States no longer seems like a reliable international partner, that's NATO, that's our nuclear deterrent, which relies on US infrastructure to [00:05:00] work and be maintained, that's our security relationships with the five eyes arrangement, that's the arms we buy in these multi-billion dollar contracts for new fighter aircraft and so forth.

So there's that. That huge relationship there that relies on the United States being reliable, not, for example, deciding that it doesn't like what we might want to do with our defence kit that we bought from them and finding some way to remotely switch it off. So there are all kinds of questions being raised by Donald Trump's sheer unreliability as an international partner that the political parties are gonna have to grapple with, that individual MPs are gonna have to grapple with, because it suggests that we are heading for a quite different security landscape from the one that we've had for what good 80 years now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Could you say at this moment what our foreign policy is?

Mark D'Arcy: We're all keen to guess, aren't we? I mean

Ruth Fox: Does Yvette Cooper have one, or more importantly perhaps, does Keir Starmer have one?

Mark D'Arcy: How do you make a foreign policy in an environment that [00:06:00] changes in the blink of an eye?

Ruth Fox: Mark Carney set out at Davos a way forward. I'm not entirely convinced by some of his argument, but he seems to have led the way initially and met the moment with a speech that impressed quite a lot of people. So we'll have to see what happens. But these questions, again, a lot of it's gonna come back also to the defence budget, the suggestions in the press that there's been a bit of a row behind the scenes with senior defence officials in the various forces who are concerned that they haven't got the money available to essentially back up the direction of travel in the strategic defence review. That the Prime Minister thought it had all been costed into the comprehensive spending review in the budget and so on. Clearly hasn't been. We'll be back to square one, I suspect, with further debates about how you spend more on policy and procurement and so on.

Mark D'Arcy: And does that, for example, mean tax rises? Or does it mean really uncomfortable choices about taking money outta some other budget head to put into defence, [00:07:00] which usually don't go down desperately well with the parliamentary Labour Party, which is seems to be exercising almost a veto over government policy at the moment.

Ruth Fox: And an early question will be, are there any implications that have to be dealt with sooner rather than later? The next budget will now not be till October, November time. So will there have to be things that are picked up in the spring statement, which will turn it into a fiscal event.

Mark D'Arcy: And do we really want to go through another sort of 6, 7, 8 month period of the run up to the next budget in which everything is paralyzed by uncertainty?

Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. And the other point to make about this though is that this is not a time limited problem. In the sense that America being an unreliable international partner is not time limited by the end of the Trump presidency, and their normal service will be resumed with a relatively sane president in the White House. There is a constituency out there that wants Donald Trump or someone like him in the United States, and it is capable of winning presidential [00:08:00] elections. So just suppose you get a Democrat president after the next election, Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, or someone like that, there's nothing to say the president after that won't be, if not Donald Trump himself, then a Trumpoid if you'd like. All that has to happen is that a few swing voters in a few key states get terribly worried about trans kids playing volleyball and badabim you suddenly get someone in there who's prepared to upend the entire security order of the Western world basically as a result of the tantrum.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think even if you get a Democrat restored to the White House, you get a Democrat led Congress after the midterms next year, but particularly after a presidential election, if there were a turnover, the Trump administration has guttered the Pentagon, it has guttered the State Department, many of the key people with whom our officials would've had relationships have gone.

And a lot of the people who are in [00:09:00] post do not share the same approach and the same values. And now some of those will go with a change in administration and you get the opportunity to bring your own people in 'cause they don't have the permanent civil service like we do. But nonetheless, that causes delays.

Basically that level of churn will have an impact on policy. And you also lose collective institutional memory.

Mark D'Arcy: And in the meantime, the British government and British political parties are gonna have to rethink what Britain's policy looks like. And that's where Parliament comes in this as a sounding board.

The select committees can report on what we should actually have as a defence posture, what we should actually have as a foreign relations posture, who we might want to be making trade deals and indeed military alliances with in the future, what kind of relationships we should be building up across the world in the absence of a reliable America or a consistently reliable America, at any rate. And that's an area where I think MPs aren't used to having to think about stuff. Where they're going to have to.

Ruth Fox: So it puts back into play our relationship [00:10:00] with European Union. There's a lot of debate apparently in Labour circles at the minute about whether we should join a customs union.

Of course, some of that gets mixed up with the idea of a joining the single market. There's a whole vexed debate about dynamic alignment or not, and of course there's suggestions that there's gonna be a new bill in the King's Speech about our relationship with EU and alignment on regulation of goods and so on.

I'm not sure some of the MPs have necessarily engaged too much with the detail of what this would obviously involve.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, there's a difference between, for example, being in the customs union and therefore being inside a tariff wall set by the European Union, and being in the single market and having to accept all sorts of common standards that would make Britain a rule taker.

Incidentally, I do think sometimes the rule taker point is only applied to the EU and possibly we ought to be thinking that we ought to apply it to Donald Trump in America at the moment. Because every now and then when Britain does something America doesn't like, whether it's not wanting chlorinated chicken in the [00:11:00] supermarkets, whether it's Keir Starmer standing up to Donald Trump on Greenland, or whether it's something else like perhaps not wanting the tech Lords to pump more porn and race hatred through our social media, suddenly we get the threat of, oh, America will impose tariffs if we do something they disapprove of.

So to some extent, this trade agreement with the US is being used to make us rule takers, make us subject to decisions taken in the Oval Office.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But we have a choice about whether or not to accept those or how far to negotiate and accept or reject them and the Government, Parliament to some degree, although not as much as I would like, can still agree whether or not to go along with that.

The issue with the customs union is we would have to tear up most, if not all, of our external trade agreements that we've negotiated since Brexit. We would be within, as you say, the EU tariff wall. We'd be accepting whatever deals they do and we wouldn't be in the room. So in any negotiation, there's give and take. There is in any negotiation. You don't always get what, you want. And one of [00:12:00] the rather daft things that we see and have seen too much of in British politics has been this assumption that we can have what we want in the negotiations.

Mark D'Arcy: There isn't another party, the foreigners will just take our dictates.

Ruth Fox: And there isn't anywhere near enough discussion about the trade-offs. And, part of that is the lack of the parliamentary processes and procedures to facilitate that debate about what the trade-offs are, but you, I think, have at least got the ability to exercise your own decision about whether or not to accept those rules or those things.

Mark D'Arcy: But I think there's a rather too black and white view here that either you are entangled with the evil European Union, which is trying to make you do things you don't want to do, or you have a nice straight trade deal with the United States who would never for a moment think of interfering in any domestic political decisions.

And I'm afraid it's just not like that with the Donald in the Oval Office.

Ruth Fox: No, but what you have set out in your treaty agreement, you've agreed, whereas

Mark D'Arcy: You've agreed until the President United States wakes up one morning with a different idea..

Ruth Fox: But then you've got some degree of options about what you then do about that in terms of [00:13:00] whether the United States is in breach or not.

What I'm saying is once you've negotiated it, and given that power away to the European Union to negotiate on your behalf, you're not in the room in the same way. You've got to take whatever they decide.

Mark D'Arcy: This is one of the problems with the rule taker status of being one foot inside the EU.

To be honest, I think that full EU membership would be a better option than being an outside rule taker, which is not to say, I'm saying let's rejoin the EU. What I'm saying is that I think actually full membership at least puts you at that table.

Ruth Fox: But we are where we aren't we.

That ship has sailed.

Mark D'Arcy: Nobody wants to reopen that Pandora's box in Westminster, I'm sure.

Ruth Fox: Let's not.

Mark D'Arcy: I say that nobody wants to, I'm sure the Liberal Democrats do, and maybe the Greens.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But also the other thing to think about in all of this is yes, okay, there may be some people thinking that Customs Union is a better option. But actually I think you might as well roll out the red carpet for Nigel Farage on that score.

Mark D'Arcy: Has the opinion of the country changed? [00:14:00] There are polls that suggest that, but there are polls that suggest lots of things that don't necessarily stick when push comes to shove.

Ruth Fox: And those polls don't show what would happen if you had to accept the single currency or you are accepting free movement again. So we would not be going back on the same terms as before. And once you get into the detail as ever, the devil is there.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, indeed.

Ruth Fox: One area where it's already clear marked that there is tension between us and the United States government because they are deeply enmeshed with the tech bros, the social media and technology companies, is this vexed question of whether we should have a ban on social media for under sixteens. And that has come to the fore in Parliament this week yesterday.

So we are recording this on Thursday. Yesterday, the government lost a vote on an amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, proposing a ban, lost quite heavily 150 to 261, and the government had earlier in the week tried to head this off with an announcement of a consultation on a [00:15:00] social media ban for under sixteens that Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State, had announced. But that clearly wasn't enough to convince their Lordships.

Mark D'Arcy: Some people in the House of Lords treated this with outright contempt, frankly, that they saw this as simply a way of playing for time, hoping that the issue would go away if they just kicked it into the long grass for a while. And, their Lordships have now voted for this ban now. This is a bill that has a couple of days more to go on in report stage, and then a third reading before it comes back to the House of Commons, where MPs would have to vote to accept or reject the amendment that their Lordships have made. So there's a little while for the government to figure out how to deal with this.

I'd be mildly surprised if this was before MPs before the February recess. So we are looking at a few weeks, at least, in the future, so the Government's got a chance to gather itself. But the trouble with this from the Government Whip's point of view, is that actually an awful lot of Labour MPs actually support this idea. And would quite like to do it even if in this instance it's an amendment proposed by Conservative peer.

Ruth Fox: That's [00:16:00] potentially the get out for the Government, isn't it? That you might be able to persuade their forces not to vote for a Conservative led amendment and to give Kemi Badenoch a win on the Conservative benches, but to adopt the government's approach, which yes may take a bit longer because they've got this three month consultation and then they would have to implement it either through regulations or primary legislation themselves.

In the statement this week, clearly one of the concerns that MPs had on the Labour benches was what's the timing of this in terms of if legislation is needed, how will it go forward? Because many of the bills for the King's Speech whenever the new session starts in the early summer and many of those bills will already have been agreed.

But we know it's not beyond the realms of possibility for the Government to put in a separate bill if it needs to. I suspect they can probably do this through regulations.

But the other side of this, and it came through in the Lord's debate, is that a lot of people are saying, why do we need to be legislating for this? We've just had the Online Safety Bill. Why are the regulations and the powers in that not being used? Isn't [00:17:00] Ofcom the regulator that's in charge of implementation of so much of this legislation? Isn't it a bit asleep at the wheel? Those are my words. But, a bit too laid back about all of this.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, there are people who will argue that a blanket ban like that is the wrong way to go anyway. And that maybe younger people should have some ability to dip their toes into the world of social media before being exposed to the full spectrum, the full horrible spectrum sometimes, of what's available on it at the age of 16. Maybe a bit of training would be the way to go.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean in the Lords of course, Baroness Kidron, who is somebody who's campaigned on this for a very long time, got a background in media, she has made clear that she doesn't support the amendment because she thinks the Online Safety Act is the way to go. That the powers are there, that they've had extensive legislative process around it, that they have pre legislative scrutiny and what needs to happen is they get on and implement it. And it's also a view shared by some of the campaigners who think that in [00:18:00] practice it's just not implementable.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. It sounds attractive and simple. But in detail it doesn't work, is the claim.

Ruth Fox: But of course we've got the example in Australia. And this is, I think partly why the government wants a consultation on it, because they want to look at how Australia has dealt with it in the first few months following its implementation of the ban.

And to see whether what sounds good on the face of the tin actually works.

Mark D'Arcy: Advance Australia fair.

Ruth Fox: So there's real tensions and it did strike me, if you remember, Mark, just before Christmas, Keir Starmer appeared before the Liaison Committee, and complained about the fact that so often when the government, he wants action in Downing Street, they pull on the levers of power and he complained about the fact at the end of these was a consultation.

And here we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Badabim. Now they're holding a consultation, they're springing to action and they've launched a consultation. Here we are. I think there could be some frustration with this, and frankly, the legislative tools may already be there in the form of the Online Safety Act, which has [00:19:00] already got the backs up of some of the tech lords who are some of, as we were just saying, Donald Trump's most prominent and moneyed supporters.

And you can just imagine if this spreads through, perhaps not just the UK, but other European countries as well, that suddenly they're taking a bit of a financial hit because they're not allowed to pump pornography and race hatred into people's homes. Spookily enough, we have an objection to that. You can just imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or other figures storming into the Oval Office and demanding that Donald Trump pull the trade deal.

Or take some other action to coerce us back into allowing that all in the name of free speech. But on the other hand, free speech was what Elon Musk used to justify grok being able to do this horrible thing about nudifying photographs.

And that didn't work.

Ruth Fox: It's a sticky wicket to be on, to be arguing and opposing measures to crack down on essentially pornography in front of children and abusive images and so on. That's a difficult position to hold and remember they've got shareholders.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, of course.

Ruth Fox: [00:20:00] And shareholders are parents.

But it's worth perhaps just fleshing out Lord Nash's amendment. Because it is he in the House of Lords, Conservative peer, who's brought this proposal forward that's gonna bring it to a head in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill. He had a, I thought a quite a powerful line, we have reached an inflection point, we face nothing short of a societal catastrophe, caused by the fact that so many of our children are addicted to social media. So his proposal is to raise the age limit for access to social media to 16, to require social media companies to put in place effective age assurance systems. So at the moment, they have to do it I think for 13, but it's regarded as a not particularly effective measure. And direct the chief medical officer to prepare and publish advice to parents and carers on the use of social media by children.

So in effect, to launch a major public awareness campaign and they'd have 12 months to implement all of this. So it's a fairly short timetable. The interesting thing on the vote was that the government, there were 150 peers turned [00:21:00] out on the government side, there were a few crossbenches voted with them and so on, but the Labour Party has got 230 Peers in the House of Lords.

So there are a lot of Labour peers that did not turn out in that vote. And that's a feature that we're seeing quite regularly.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that they've got a problem with this precisely because an awful lot of people support it. And it's the kind of measure that a lot of concerned parents will think is absolutely necessary and it will speak to them.

So if Labour want to do something along these lines, they've probably either got to be able to do it through the powers available to them, as we were saying in the Online Safety Act, or they've gotta have a Bill in the King's speech and they've got to fast track that. Otherwise, I think Labour MPs who will doubtless in due course be asked to vote this down in a 45 minute ping-pong session in the Commons, will be saying to their whips, I'm gonna be paying a price for voting against this. This is gonna be used in evidence against me. What's our answer to that? And it better be a convincing answer 'cause it's well worth noting that a lot of Labour MPs elected in [00:22:00] 2024 are already behaving as if they think they're gonna be out at the next general election.

Ruth Fox: One term and gone.

Mark D'Arcy: One term and gone.

And that in a way is quite emboldening for some of them. They might as well live a brief, glorious, brave life rather than cower behind the whips instructions.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: So I don't think that the parliamentary Labour Party for all its huge numbers is that controllable by the government at the moment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, one of those MPs may well be my own MP, Josh Dean, the MP for Hertford and Stortford, who, I think I've said before in the podcast, I nearly fell off my chair when I realized that Labour had won Hertford and Stortford, which has always been a dyed in the wool Conservative constituency in my lifetime, and Josh was raising, I think an important point in this debate as well. How does all of this issue around a social media ban from under sixteens fit alongside votes at 16? What is the direction of travel? What's the consistency of policy? Can you really go into a general election campaign where so much of it is now, a [00:23:00] lot of digital campaigning. We saw the last general election, there's a lot of it going on, but it's not yet been pivotal in terms of the outcome, but it feels like we might be heading in that direction.

But a lot of campaigning is going online. A lot of the parties are spending a lot of money on digital campaigning. Are we really saying in the run up to that at 16 that young people can't have access and shouldn't see any of it? In which case, how are we gonna do public education campaigns, how are we gonna do general election engagement with young people in the runup to it?

So some important questions that have got to be resolved, and presumably Liz Kendall may hope that these come through in the consultation.

Mark D'Arcy: And not least, of course, there are also questions about enforceability. Can tech savvy young people use their virtual personal networks, et cetera, to get round the ban, to finesse it, steal mommy and daddy's passwords.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. even I can manage a VPN, so I'm pretty sure most teenagers can crack it quite easily.

Mark D'Arcy: Quite. When in doubt ask a teenager to solve your tech worries.

Ruth Fox: That's usually my [00:24:00] approach. Mark, should we take a quick break and come back and discuss some of the other of the government's legislative headaches that are stacking up in Keir Starmer's in-tray?

There are quite a number. But before we go, listeners, one for you. If you're enjoying the podcast, as ever, can you please help us spread the word, forward the information onto your friends, your family, your work colleagues in particular. They can find Parliament matters for free on all the usual podcast platforms, Apple, Spotify, we're also on YouTube, a growing audience there.

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See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And, Ruth, as we were saying, there's quite a few things piling up in Starmer's parliamentary in-tray, if you like. Difficult legislative conundrums of different kinds.

For a start, this week in the Commons began with the government pulling the report stage consideration of the Hillsborough Law, the Public Authorities (Accountability) Bill, which is designed to impose a duty of candour on officials who are talking to public inquiries and official investigations into various kinds of disaster, so that they are required to tell the truth and in trouble if they don't, they have to give the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth or face, possibly, considerable consequences if they don't. And that was shaped, of course, by a whole series of scandals where officials had turned out to be less than candid. Hillsborough being just one of the examples.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and we talked about this quite [00:26:00] a bit on the podcast last week, so this Public Office (Accountability) Bill. It was due to be considered back in the Commons earlier this week, on Monday. And on Monday it got pulled.

Let's be clear, the bill has not been pulled, they pulled the consideration of the next stage. So there's report stage and third reading, and they'll look to reschedule that. Of course, it was the second time in two weeks that it had been pulled and rescheduled. So we await.

Mark D'Arcy: Not a good sign.

Ruth Fox: No, we await what happens. Essentially, as I understand it, there's a bit of a standoff with the security services who are concerned about the implications of this.

And basically the government has not been able to agree on the wording of how the duty of candour applies to the security services, not been able to agree on the wording with the campaigners, with the families of groups like the Hillsborough campaign and the Manchester Arena bombings, so who knows what happens if they can't agree on wording? What do you then do? It's very clear that some of the campaigns around this in Parliament on the Labour benches, Ian Byrne the Labour MP [00:27:00] from Liverpool foremost among them, are not going to settle for anything that they regard as a sort of watering down on the original proposal.

Mark D'Arcy: And it would be quite a thing for the government to actually just drop this bill altogether. This was a signature promise. This was one of the big ticket items that they were offering to the electorate. Which had Keir Starmer personally signed up to it. So it's a very difficult thing for them to drop this.

But the alternative is that they possibly face an amendment they don't like being forced on them. And then what? So the government's between a rock and a hard place at the moment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, absolutely. And we talked last week about what does this tell us about how policy making, policy development is done prior to legislation landing in the House of Commons.

But here we are. Another one we talked about last week, Mark, is the Chagos Islands Bill. There were a few interesting developments, and we've had a listeners' question about that. So I think that's possibly worth exploring.

So we said that peers had amended the Chagos Islands bill and were sending it back to the House of Commons with some quite big changes to it that they wanted the Commons to consider.

[00:28:00] One to require the House of Commons to approve expenditure in relation to the treaty, to have regular five year reviews to negotiate an amendment to the treaty, so payments to Mauritius could cease in the event of military use of the base being impossible. And one particularly about a referendum for the Chagossian community about whether their rights to resettlement in decision making had been adequately guaranteed.

Now interestingly, what happened is that the deputy speaker ruled that three of the six amendments that peers had sent back engaged what's called House of Commons financial privilege. And so not only couldn't be voted on, they couldn't be debated either.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And financial privilege of the House of Commons is basically MPs' assertion that they not peers control the strings.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: That they can vote to spend money or impose taxes and peers just have to rubber stamp their decisions and don't get a voice in that side of the operation. And that's a principle that's been running for hundreds [00:29:00] of years now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And it's fundamental to how Parliament operates in terms of financial matters.

So it's, I suppose, what you call the special right of the House of Commons to decide public taxes and public spending, to assert their right as the elected house. Now it's quite common for, at the start of the debate for, at this stage, for amendments to be formally identified by the speakers when Lords amendments come forward as to whether or not they engaged financial privilege and therefore whether they've got to be effectively set aside and discounted.

One of the big ones, obviously, this idea of conducting a referendum of the Chagossian community clearly had financial implications. There was another one about laying before the House of Commons for its approval an estimate of the expenditure that was anticipated to be incurred. Basically, the deputy speaker said, these engaged financial privilege, but then there was a second element, which was that Standing Orders also require the speaker to declare if he's satisfied that a Lord's amendment imposes a charge on the public [00:30:00] revenue and is not covered by a money resolution.

Mark D'Arcy: And so you get into quite a tangle there. And the slight difficulty here is that quite a lot of Lord's amendments that get passed, all sorts of bills have some level of financial implication about them.

And the Commons kind of overlooks that. But on this particular one, they've decided financial privilege. It's a bit like playing your joker.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that's often a point of contention between the two Houses, 'cause the Lords feel that it's quite constraining and there's sometimes a bit of disagreement about whether or not it really is engaged, financial privilege is engaged, or whether the money resolution stretches as far as it does to allow the Lords' provisions or not.

And essentially the speaker certified that it, in this case, it didn't. And they need a new money resolution and they're not gonna get one.

Mark D'Arcy: And so in practical terms, what happens here is that the message the Commons sends back to the House of Lords about these amendments is that the Commons does not accept these amendments because they engage financial privilege. Now go away. I [00:31:00] added the last bit myself.

Ruth Fox: Shall I give you the official line? So the message that will be sent back from the Commons to the Lords is in relation to two of the amendments is because the Lords amendments would involve a charge on the public funds and the Commons do not offer any further reason, trusting that this reason may be deemed sufficient

Mark D'Arcy: Pleasing 17th century turn of phrase there, but yeah, but that's the joker they played.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then another one in relation to one of the amendments was because the Lord's amendment would affect the Commons arrangements for authorizing expenditure.

So essentially the House of Lords making provisions that would affect how the House of Commons would deal with expenditure. And basically saying, that's none of your business, that's for us to deal with. So similarly, we trust that no further reason is needed, and we trust that this will be deemed sufficient.

So that's typically the language that is used. There's nothing unusual there. So the Commons reasons go back to the Lords and what do the Lords do? The Lords [00:32:00] companion says that where the Commons disagrees to a Lords amendment because of financial privilege, the Lords do not insist on their amendment, but they can offer an amendment in lieu.

Mark D'Arcy: So they can come up with some slightly different version creative of the same proposition. Shift a comma here or there.

Ruth Fox: I think it might require more than a comma, I think. I think it might require some creative thinking around how you impose requirements on the government that perhaps don't involve money.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I suspect there are people in the House of Lords who will want to keep this rolling a little bit longer? Partly because every time you have a go round on this bill, it's a little bit more political pain inflicted on the Government and the Conservatives certainly will want to do that as well as being in principle, as they are now at any rate, opposed to this bill.

Of course they've been saying we've always been against this bill when actually the Chagas deals started, its gestation at least, under the last Conservative government and the bulk of the negotiations over it took place under the last Conservative government. They're saying now that they wouldn't have come up with this deal and the final deal reached is not one they [00:33:00] approve of, but all the same, it is quite possible for the Labour Party to retort when faced with sort of root and branch opposition from the Conservatives, you've started this process.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And also, of course, those who are opposed to it will feel somewhat emboldened by Donald Trump's statements this week. Even if, similarly, he also endorsed it not so long ago, but has now changed tack. So again, they'll see how much longer can we keep this going?

How much more can we inflict in terms of pain and is there any prospect that we can keep it going back and forth to get to the end of the session?

Mark D'Arcy: That's quite a tall order to come up with lots of different propositions to keep this ball in the air, so to speak, between the two Houses for such a long time.

Yep. And also you get the phenomenon that peers eventually tire of defying the will of the Commons, think that they've pushed this as far as it's going, it's clearly the will of the elected house that this should go through, even though we think it's a complete mistake. And so support for that would tend to ebb away in normal Lords politics.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Mark, we've had a question from a listener about the Chagos Bill and what we [00:34:00] discussed last week that I think it's worth unpacking just to do a bit of a reverse ferret. What was the issues we discussed last week? So this was the vote at third reading where we talked about the fact that their Lordships had got themselves into a bit of a tangle because they'd voted for a motion that essentially passed the bill, but regretted that they were doing so.

And then there'd been a second vote after that having won the motion. And they all got themselves very confused and started voting against it when in fact they should have been voting for it. And the deputy speaker had to put the motion several times in order for them to align themselves in the way that they should have been voting. And it was all a bit messy.

Mark D'Arcy: The spectacle of the deputy speaker putting the question till they get the right result is quite amusing.

Ruth Fox: And it was quite difficult, I think, for people well, clearly within the House of Lords, to understand what was going on. It was much more difficult for people outside the House of Lords looking on who'd got an interest in this to understand what was going on.

And one of our listeners, anonymous sadly, so I don't know who it is, [00:35:00] said I was a bit surprised by your description of the confusion over the passing of the Chagos bill in the Lords. Isn't there a procedural problem caused by asking the bill's opponents to vote on their second preference, a symbolic regret motion, before they get a shot at their first preference, voting the bill down entirely. How were people who would rather the bill didn't pass and wanted to regret it if it did supposed to vote?

Mark D'Arcy: I think this runs afoul of Lords' etiquette, which is basically, first of all, if you are going to vote down a bill, you don't just vote nay. You put down an amendment to the motion and often you will then add a reason. And if you don't do it that way, it's deemed to be, gasp, sharp intake of breath here, discourteous.

Ruth Fox: So Mark, I consulted my own procedural guru at the Hansard Society, Matthew England, our researcher who follows the Lords quite closely, he said if a peer wishes to oppose a bill at third reading, then their opposition should be to the question that the bill [00:36:00] do now pass rather than to the proceeding motion that the bill be now read a third time. So essentially, once you get to the end of the process at third reading, there's two votes, there's one on whether to give it a third reading, and there's one on whether for the bill to pass. Now, when a peer wants to oppose the bill at the passage stage, so they want to reject it, the convention is that they have got to give notice of their intention by tabling a fatal amendment. So changing the wording of the motion, that this house declines to allow the bill to pass, potentially by adding reasons at the end to explain why. Simply voting against the do now pass motion is considered discourteous to the House. It's not formally, what's the word, impermissible. Now, if someone had tabled a fatal motion last week and the option was there to them, they didn't, peers only tabled a regret motion, which was non-fatal.

Mark D'Arcy: So there's actually after the third reading, which is normally the end of things of the Commons, there's actually a two stage process in the Lords. The Bill [00:37:00] we've read it three times, then it's a pass. So that's why all that.

Ruth Fox: So if someone had tabled a fatal motion, so you could have had a regret motion from those who are not very happy with the bill, don't like it, but think the Commons has voted for it, we signed the treaty, it's gotta go ahead. Those opponents who are really hard line about this and do not want the treaty, an agreement to go through, could have had a fatal motion. For some reason they didn't table one.

Now you've gotta ask yourself why that is, but they didn't. But had they done, so if we'd had both a fatal and a non-fatal motion tabled at the same time, the normal practice is for the fatal motion to be decided first.

So if there was a majority in the House to reject the bill, for it not to pass, that would've happened. And our listeners' concerns about not getting their first preference would've been addressed. Only if that fatal motion is rejected, would you then get to the next vote on the lower level of regret [00:38:00] motion.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh, I see. So you don't get a chance to say, no, we don't like this bill very much, so we regret it, and then a few minutes later, you get a chance to actually kill it.

Ruth Fox: You do it the other way.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it's the other way around.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So by not tabling the fatal motion, the peers precluded the possibility of rejecting it.

So those campaigners who are really annoyed about this and are angry about it need to ask themselves why it was that none of their supporters in the House of Lords tabled that motion because they could've done so.

Mark D'Arcy: And maybe they need to pop out and reread the companion to the Standing Orders, which is the guide to all of this kind of thing.

Staying with the House of Lords, Ruth, a minor mystery is beginning to manifest itself, which is what has happened to the bill to remove the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, which seems to have gone into some kind of strange legislative limbo since it was last seen, I think last September.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So this, listeners, is the bill to, as you say, to abolish the hereditary peers at the end of this [00:39:00] session.

If the bill goes through, they would leave at the end of the session, not at the end of the Parliament. There were Lords amendments, as you say, in September. I think it was the 4th of September was the last time we had a stage on the bill, so those amendments have got to go to the Commons for consideration and they have not yet appeared.

Now the interesting question is it's not as if the Commons has not got time to consider them, the House of Commons agenda has been relatively light for a few weeks, the House has been rising early, I've had MPs complaining about it to me saying, we keep coming back to Westminster and we are rising at one day last week, four o'clock-ish, five o'clock, another day. So it's not as if they couldn't find time to do it. So there must be a political reason why they haven't, I suspect.

One of the problems is settling a position on the amendments and timing it in such a way that it's not used by [00:40:00] peers who are opposed to the removal of the hereditaries, not used as a tool in the House of Lords to create further problems with the government's legislative program.

So I suspect this is a deliberate delaying tactic so that they deal with it once the other Lords legislation that's complicated and that would peers might want to amend. Once that's outta the way and then they'll come to this later.

Mark D'Arcy: So this is essentially, they're just holding back something that they know will be an irritant.

Ruth Fox: More than an irritant I think.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Quite, but in that case, they're playing a slightly dangerous game because again, the Lords might decide to keep the ball in the air, keep batting back amendments, not least 'cause some of them have a direct personal interest in keeping their seats in the upper house for a little bit longer.

And what happens if that bill doesn't manage to get concluded and passed by the time we get to the end of the parliamentary session, Parliament's prorogued, then presumably it's Parliament Act territory and it all happens in the next session.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, you do start to wonder whether if you get into that territory quite late into the session and you're looking at [00:41:00] extensive ping-pong, whether the government will have to look at concessions, one of the concessions might be that they leave at the end of the Parliament, not at the end of the session.

There is a sort of view that throwing them out in May, not least actually 'cause there's some practical considerations here, it will have an impact on committees, you'll have committee churn, committee memberships will be affected, lots of implications for how the House operates, some of the governance committees in the House have got hereditaries on them, I think there's some hereditaries in deputy speakership.

Mark D'Arcy: But, none of them are insuperable.

Ruth Fox: None of them are insuperable. But there is a view that actually it would be better if they're going, that they go at the end of the Parliament rather than the end of the session. And it's not so harsh.

And that works better for the hereditaries and it works better for the operation of the House. Pick your poison, but

Mark D'Arcy: This is one of the few pieces of red meat that the government's got that it can actually throw to its backbenchers at the moment. They're finally getting rid of the hereditaries, something the Labour movement has wanted for hundreds of years.

And so to water that down again, [00:42:00] there's a perception out there that every time Keir Starmer does this sort of thing, he looks weaker and weaker. And this is just another instance in which the fire breathers on his backbenches may feel he's let them down again.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. That could well be the case. That could well be the case.

Mark D'Arcy: With that, Ruth, should we take another break and when we come back, maybe we'll talk about the vexed question of what happens when an MP switches party? Should their voters get a say.

Ruth Fox: Defectors.

Mark D'Arcy: Don't you just love them?

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

Ruth Fox: Mark, we're back and this week we've had another defection. So remember last week our plans for the podcast were upended when Robert Jenrick announced unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly, that he was ditching the Conservative Party for Reform.

And now Andrew Rosindell has defected to Reform as well. Also on the Conservative front bench, shadow foreign office minister, he's gone apparently over Chagos, which is rather odd given that he took a rather different view on Chagos some months ago, but he has [00:43:00] left. The MP for Romford, which all of course raises now the question of whether or not MPs who ditch their parties and go to another party, cross the floor of the House to another party, whether they should have to face a by-election.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, the old convention is that Members of Parliament are elected as individuals, not as party delegates, but all the same, if you are a voter in a constituency and you've elected a guy who was wearing a rosette of one color and then year and a half later, the color of their rosette changes and you are not asked about it and you might not approve of it, as voters, you have no say. It is not a grounds under the current recall rules, for example, you can't just get up a recall petition and force the MP to fight a by-election, it's entirely the decision of the individual MP whether or not they, as it were, validate their change of party by going back to their voters. They can sit it out.

Now, the recent ish history has a number of [00:44:00] examples. Back when Douglas Carswell and then Mark Reckless defected from the Conservative benches to UKIP during the coalition years, both of them stood down and said that they would fight by elections and both of them subsequently won their by elections in Clacton for Douglas Carswell, obviously that's now Nigel Farage, and in Rochester for Mark Reckless. They both won those by elections quite convincingly.

I have a strong memory of Douglas Caswell putting out a very strong statement when he switched parties that he had to take this decision back to, as he put it, his employers. The voters of Clacton. And he did.

You look back a little further to the days when the Labour Party had its split and the SDP, the Social Democratic Party, was formed in the early eighties, roughly a 10th of sitting Labour MPs and one Conservative MP switched parties to the new SDP. Only one of those held a by-election, so you had all sorts of people switching parties. The David Owens, the Bill Rogers, changing their party [00:45:00] colors, but only one of the MPs, Bruce Douglas Mann, in the then South London seat of Mitcham and Morden, actually held a by-election. And he lost.

Now, there are those who say that they would've been in a far better position even if some of them had lost, if most of them had held by elections and held onto their seats because it was used in evidence against them that they changed parties without reference to their voters.

But all the same, it is a decision purely under existing conventions for the individual MP to take.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. this is an inheritance of the Edmund Burke 18th century philosophy of MPs are representatives, not delegates.

Mark D'Arcy: They owe their constituents their judgments, not their obedience, I think is the phrase or something similar to that.

Ruth Fox: And this sort of argument that we actually, when we go into the ballot box, we put our cross against the name of a candidate and the party label is on there. The party logo is on there. But you're actually choosing a named individual. you can go back and forth on this, can't you? There are good arguments in each direction.

There are very few MPs that have got the public profile to [00:46:00] carry a seat on their own without the party banner. But they are representatives, they're not delegates. That's the nature is we were a representative democracy. I said earlier, this is about MPs crossing the floor, but actually it's not crossing the floor anymore really, is it? It's jumping benches from one side to the other.

Mark D'Arcy: It's switching from one section to another in the opposition bench, in fact.

Ruth Fox: So we need to change our language because of course, back in the day, it used to be that you might switch from the government to the opposition bench, or you might go from government or opposition to the Liberal Democrats. But now there's an awful lot more movement in different directions.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a chance to do a dizzying variety of choices. You could go from Conservative to Reform. You could go from Conservative to Lib Dem or Jeremy Corbyn's nascent party from the Labour Party, as indeed Zarah Sultana did earlier in this Parliament. In none of those cases, do you absolutely have to go to your constituents. Some people may feel it's a matter of honor. Bruce Douglas Mann, who I mentioned in the early eighties, said he had to fight a by-election because he'd given an explicit promise that's what he would do if he did change parties. So there you are.

The [00:47:00] difficulties you get into though with requiring a by-election in those kind of circumstances is that it could, if it's pitched in the wrong way, give the party machines a lot more power over their Members of Parliament. So if you lost your party label and then had to fight a by-election, that would create quite a lever that could be used by your party whips over you. Not only would you lose the party whip and be outside the party machine, you potentially lose your job as well as a Member of Parliament if you had a disagreement with the party and it threw you out rather than you leaving. So I think this would have to be cast in the way of an MP explicitly changing parties rather than simply being extruded from their own party and having to sit as an independent.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. These issues are gonna get debated. I'm pretty certain because there's a e-petition down at the moment. And it's got, when I looked at it last night, it's got just under 87,000 signatures. So it'll need to get past the hundred thousand barrier to be guaranteed a debate in the Commons. It's [00:48:00] gotta get there by early March to be eligible. So I'm pretty sure at the rate of signatures at the moment that it's gonna get there. That petition was created by Barry McElhinney who says basically by-elections should be called automatically when MPs defect to another party. So the defection rather than the throwing out by their party.

And he says when an MP decides they want to defect to another party, a by-election should be automatically triggered to allow the constituents the opportunity to have their democratic right to agree or not with their elected official. Regardless of political views, I believe you vote for both the individual candidates and their stance on issues and the more general direction of policies of the party they stand for.

When an MP decides they no longer wish to be a member of the party they stood for when you voted for them, the electorate should have the opportunity to also change their mind by voting in a by-election.

Mark D'Arcy: It doesn't seem an unreasonable view, does it? That careful phraseology in that petition is on the right lines.

I think bear in mind that there are a number of MPs who've lost the party whip [00:49:00] over disciplinary issues. There's quite a phalanx of independents who are waiting to see whether they get readmitted. Sometimes it's for ethical complaints against them. Sometimes it's 'cause they defied the party whip on something.

But I come back to a remarkable event a few years ago in Parliament where a Conservative called Anthony Magnall presented a Ten Minute Rule Bill saying that MPs who changed their colours should have to face a by-election. And Anthony Magnall was the MP for Totness in Devon, and his predecessor had been Sarah Wollaston. Sarah Wollaston was chair of the Health Select Committee, a GP who'd become an MP, we've had her on this podcast talking with Steve Brine, if you remember, a few months back now. She first of all left the Conservative Party over Brexit and joined the short-lived Independent Group. And when that imploded, as it eventually did, she ended up running as a Liberal Democrat. So she actually changed party twice.

During that Parliament, Anthony Magnall won the seat off her, [00:50:00] and put down this Ten Minute Rule Bill saying that this sort of thing shouldn't be allowed in future. There should be a requirement for a by-election. He was opposed in remarkable terms by Steve Baker, Conservative MP at the time, who we've also had on this podcast, and Steve

Ruth Fox: We get all the best people.

Mark D'Arcy: Steve Baker's argument was that this would be a huge infringement on the ability of MPs to take an independent stand against their party machine if necessary. You had some spectacular phrase about reserving the right to burn down his own party if it betrayed its principles. Not quite have got that quite exactly right, but it was along those lines.

And I think this is an area where you do need to be careful about because sometimes parties can try and push MPs to do things that their conscience absolutely rejects and there needs to be a bit of space within which it's possible to A, do that and b, still keep in Parliament while doing it.

Ruth Fox: Can you imagine what would've happened to Winston Churchill?

He starts as a Conservative, joins the Liberal Party, ends up [00:51:00] leaving the Liberal Party, runs as an independent constitutionalist, but ends up in a Conservative cabinet and then eventually wraps back to the Conservatives fully.

Mark D'Arcy: And is a royal thorn in the flesh of the Conservative Party for some years over appeasement in the mid 1930s.

Ruth Fox: So that voice of dissent and that feeling that the parties and the issues have moved away from you rather than you from them is quite an important one. But interestingly, looking at the e-petition data as I did last night, guess which of the three constituencies have got the highest number of signatories on the petition?

Mark D'Arcy: Let me take a wild stab in the dark and suggest that Newark, Robert Jenrick's seat is one of them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. East Wilshire, Danny Kruger, also defected to Reform a few weeks ago. And Romford, Mr Rosindell's seat.

Mark D'Arcy: There you have it. And speaking of by elections, Ruth,

Ruth Fox: Breaking news.

Mark D'Arcy: Breaking news, as we started to record this podcast today. Yes, because Andrew Gwynne, the MP for Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, has announced [00:52:00] his intention to leave the House of Commons. In fact, he's taken the steps necessary to resign from the Commons, having concluded all sorts of negotiations around leaving because of illness.

And that opens up a very intriguing prospect indeed, because this is a seat in Greater Manchester. And one of Keir Starmer's biggest internal critics is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, a former Health Secretary amongst other things, who's not been in the Commons for a while. This provides him with a route to return to the Commons. And if he returns to the Commons, there'll be a bit of an ulterior motive there, you might say.

Ruth Fox: Surely not?

Mark D'Arcy: In that he would be returning, presumably, in order to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party, so he could take Labour in a different direction as party leader and indeed Prime Minister.

Ruth Fox: Gorton and Denton, particularly for our listeners who are not familiar with the constituency map, it's a seat in, adjacent to Manchester in the northwest of England, got a 13,400 majority at the last election. So in normal times,

Mark D'Arcy: Which [00:53:00] these aren't.

Ruth Fox: You'd say it should be a Labour safe seat.

But interestingly, Reform came second, they got 14% of the vote last time, but the Green Party would just behind them in third, on 13%. So it could be quite an interesting one. And even with Andy Burnham at the helm, he's obviously the king of the north, he's, clearly got a personal vote in the northwest, not a guaranteed shoe in, I would say.

Mark D'Arcy: I don't think anywhere is at the moment. I don't think there are safe seats anymore. Certainly not in by elections. By elections have frequently produced quite seismic results in the past, but in the current political scenario, yeah, with so many parties competing in so many different places, as you say, it's certainly not a shoe in.

It's also not a shoe in that Andy Burnham is automatically gonna be the Labour candidate. First of all, you have to be selected by the local party with the oversight of Labour's National Executive Committee. And to do that, the National Executive Committee has to give explicit permission for sitting mayors and indeed police and crime commissioners [00:54:00] to step down from their office and run to be MPs.

So if Sir Keir Starmer wanted to block a potential challenger, he could get the National Executive Committee to veto Andy Burnham being the candidate there in the first place. And he couldn't stop him running as an independent or something like that. But that would be such a decisive blow with the Labour Party that it doesn't really then leave him in a position to challenge for the leadership.

So if he wants to be the Labour candidate, he has to do so by Sir Keir Starmer's permission. There's a political cost if you're Keir Starmer, to vetoing the candidacy of a potential rival. It does make you look a little bit weak and a little bit timorous.

Ruth Fox: Yes. there's some suggestions that it could be blocked by, for example, introducing an all women shortlist.

Of course, Labour abandoned those at the last general election, because the number of women candidates had reached a certain required level, but there's some suggestion that they might be able to introduce some going forward in the future, but that decision has not been taken. And it would look very hard, I would say, to many women.

Mark D'Arcy: The most transparent ploy here at this [00:55:00] point.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I don't think that would be helpful. So you let him run? He's back in Parliament. It's not a guaranteed shoeing that he's got the support to unseat Keir Starmer as we've talked about on the podcast before, he's run for the leadership previously and frankly crashed and burned. And he didn't do very well last September.

Mark D'Arcy: At one point when he ran for the leadership, this was in 2015 in the leadership election, that Jeremy Corbyn ultimately wanted to become leader of the Labour Party, he was at one point considered to be a shoe in, he had a lot of heavyweight union support, he had a lot of MP support. Actually, I went through the list of his MP supporters, a while ago, and some interesting names, there's a certain Keir Starmer who was a newly arrived Labour MP in 2015. Angela Rayner, Lucy Powell, now the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Nick Thomas Symonds, another big Keir Starmer ally was an Andy Burnham supporter in those dog days of 2015 when the Labour leadership was open and he seemed like the man who was gonna get it. So there may be people who've rather [00:56:00] changed their mind on him since. But bear in mind, this is a former Health Secretary, a former Culture Secretary, an experienced minister from the Blair Brown years, who's then gone off to run a big city. So he's got executive experience and policy portfolio that goes with him that he could bring into use here. So it may be that he can attract support and position himself as an alternative leader with a different agenda who would change course for Labour and maybe rescue some of the Labour MPs who are thinking to themselves I've only got one term.

Ruth Fox: So in terms of the timetable, this is unclear at the moment, but we have to assume, I think that they would want the by-election to take place on the same day as the local elections on the 7th of May, because otherwise you're talking about an awful lot more money to have to run the election separately on a separate day.

Mark D'Arcy: And if you have bad news in the local elections, that probably affects your campaign to retain the seat if you're fighting it later on in the by-election.

Ruth Fox: So yeah, the whips ultimately will decide, they'll be the ones to move the writ and I'd imagine we'd [00:57:00] know that fairly soon in the next week or so.

Mark D'Arcy: Pretty rapidly I think.

And presumably there'd also have to be a by-election to elect a new mayor of Manchester. Yeah,

Ruth Fox: I don't know. I don't know what we'd have to look at the timetable on that. Perhaps revisit that in the future. And again, who would be the Labour candidate for that? It was put to me after the last Labour government reshuffle when Lucy Powell was sacked, that it was not inconceivable that she might run to be mayor, she's got Manchester central seat, she could run for mayor and Andy Burnham would switch to west and that would be another by-election. And of course, since then, she then did run for deputy leader. So I think many people thought that was probably not on the cards, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility, 'cause I don't think the deputy leader necessarily needs to be in Westminster, particularly as she's not got a cabinet position.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, there's another big left of center figure with Manchester connections who might be interested in fighting the ensuing by-election as well, and that is Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens. Now, rumor had it that he would be targeting a seat possibly in Greater London as a way of getting into the Commons, probably [00:58:00] at the next general election, but he's from Greater Manchester, and I think the thought of a gladiatorial clash between Zack Polanski and Andy Burnham might be rather too dramatic for him to be able to resist.

We'll have to wait and see whether that actually comes to pass. But, and it's pure speculation on my part really, but my, that would be an interesting by-election.

Ruth Fox: It would, although those risks aren't there for a party leader to take it by-election, possibly not win it, but if he did win it, have to bear all the burden of the parliamentary work on top of being a constituency MP and party leader.

Mark D'Arcy: But it's an I think almost an irresistible temptation up to a point. It's an advantage not to be burdened by Commons work, but if you are bucking for a place in government after the next election, eventually you have to be there. And it's also a very dramatic way of raising the political stakes and underlying the fact that the green party's suddenly there as quite a significant political force.

So watch this space because, usually when you have a by-election, there's a one big figure [00:59:00] maybe seeking to return to the House of Commons. Roy Jenkins in Glasgow Hillhead all those years ago, for example. This time you'd have a gladiatorial clash between two of them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, possibly. And who the Reform candidate would be interesting.

But of course the risk of having two big gladiatorial figures on the left is you split the vote and then what. So we will see.

Mark D'Arcy: But the outcome of all this musical chairs in Manchester would be Labour having potentially a viable challenger to Sir Keir Starmer arrive in the Commons, which would be, I think, a little bit destabilizing.

To put it gently, the financial markets don't like the look of this. Andy Burnham has been saying that he doesn't believe that the British government should be in hock to the financial markets to the extent it is, but the financial markets should

Ruth Fox: Have their revenge.

Mark D'Arcy: That is to tremble at the prospect of him potentially becoming Prime Minister a few steps down the road.

Ruth Fox: But all it would portend is that if you were to do this, if you were to get in, you're then looking at immediately after the local elections, weeks of instability, weeks of questioning what's gonna happen next. [01:00:00] If you then do have a contest, you're looking at several months of instability whilst a decision is made by the Labour Party. You're losing time.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. And this Labour government's term is ticking away as we speak, but the general expectation is that these local elections are gonna be pretty horrible for the Labour Party, particularly in Scotland and Wales, but pretty much elsewhere, maybe awful in London as well. And that might just set off total panic.

Bear in mind that a lot of Labour MPs are gonna be spending a lot of time on the electoral frontline knocking on doors and talking to voters, and possibly having a rather rough ride when they do, so there is the possibility that they come back convinced that a change is necessary. And it's the least worst option, even with all that instability that you talk about.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Mark, I think we should always end our podcasts at the minute with a warning to listeners, things may have changed by the time you start listening to this.

Mark D'Arcy: Who knows what Donald Trump may have decided to do in the time we've been recording this podcast.

Ruth Fox: It used to be the case that we could do our planning and our [01:01:00] prep and could rely on the agenda sticking through the course of the podcast recording, but we can't even do that now.

So that tells you something about the chaos of the times we're living in. I think that's probably all we've got time for this week, and come back next week and find out what's happened.

Mark D'Arcy: Who knows what it will be.

Ruth Fox: See you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at HansardSociety.

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