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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 in this week's pod.

Ruth Fox: Keir Starmer is still standing, but for how much longer?

Mark D'Arcy: Gordon Brown calls for root and branch reform of parliamentary standards, but has he got the right approach?

Ruth Fox: And the loneliness of the rebel. Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan on the punishments and rewards of defying his party whip.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, last week we were in a state of febrile Westminster excitement, saying that the Mandelson affair had inflicted terrible damage on the Prime Minister. And Keir Starmer's position was now [00:01:00] incredibly precarious, and a week on Keir Starmer is still the Prime Minister. So were we panicking? Did we get it wrong or is the damage there and it's just the cracks are slowly spreading through the edifice?

Ruth Fox: I think if we were panicking, I think we're like everybody else in Westminster, at least, in our defence. Everybody else in the parliamentary lobby and in and around the Palace of Westminster was also in something of a bit of a meltdown. There is this sense that you can get overtaken by these events, can't you, and that everybody can lose their head a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. When in danger, fear, or doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Ruth Fox: Yes, rationality goes out the window, but here we are. As I say, he's still here. Very clearly, the absence of an alternative is a problem. Who is the alternative leader? Not at all clear. And in the times when the MPs themselves can't decide that, as we've talked about on previous podcasts, that obviously also is, an issue for them, because they can't determine who's gonna emerge from [00:02:00] whatever the wreckage of a leadership election might be.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not going to be, whatever happens, it's not going to be just a Westminster coup in which a handful of MPs overturn one Prime Minister and seamlessly replace them with another without reference to the party membership. And I think this is one of the things that frightens MPs off a leadership coup is the thought that if they did get rid of Keir Starmer, there would have to be several candidates crisscrossing the country, having debates and so forth. The whole thing would take months culminating in a ballot of the membership. And that would take an awfully long time. And there would be a long period when the government was effectively headless.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We talked last week about the breadth of the Opposition Day humble address motion that Kemi Badenoch had tabled and how broad the demand and request for papers was in that. And I think the more I look at that, the more I astonished I am at its breadth and the degree to which this is just all singing, all dancing.

Mark D'Arcy: It really is.

Ruth Fox: And particularly now, it appears that there may be [00:03:00] some in government who are thinking that because of the nature of the papers or the emails that have come out about the Epstein link, going back to Peter Mandelson's days, not just as ambassador, but his days more in government itself, when he was in the Labour government, some of them thinking that actually the paper trail and so on that has to be dug up is enough, even bigger than what we might have thought.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely gargantuan. And beyond that, this is not purely a matter of what this government chooses to release. Bear in mind this is an international scandal. There are members of Congress in the United States gleefully reading out unredacted versions of the Epstein papers, removing all the sort of black blocks that have covered certain embarrassing names and facts in some of that paperwork.

And this is a scandal that goes into other countries as well. The elites in France, in Slovakia, all sorts of other places are also caught up in the Epstein affair, and they're all having parliamentary investigations and journalists digging diligently away. [00:04:00] So new facts, new embarrassments, could emerge from any number of flanks.

This is not a controllable process now for this government.

Ruth Fox: And, I think the question for Parliament, or particularly for the Labour Party in Parliament, is what the implications of this are. We don't know when the papers are gonna start to emerge. We don't know what the volume is gonna be. We don't know what the sort of drip effect is gonna be and how long that's going to go on for. But potentially quite a long time if it's true that all ministers are gonna have to reveal their WhatsApp messages and their emails. Wes Streeting has already got a jump on everybody else by publishing his.

Mark D'Arcy: Much to the displeasure of the Metropolitan Police, it has to be said.

Ruth Fox: Apparently then, you replicate that across an entire cabinet, junior ministers.

Mark D'Arcy: Several entire cabinets since we're going back into the mists of time here.

Ruth Fox: And it all looks terribly messy, and the potential for basically hidden bombs to go off lleft, right and center is quite large. You then combine that with, what's the impact on [00:05:00] how the party can operate in Parliament?

Who knows, but let's posit a scenario. What if similar to Wes Streeting clearly expressing concerns in his WhatsApp messages with Peter Mandelson about the government's lack of a growth strategy or lack of purpose or a sense of mission about why you should vote Labour, concern clearly about foreign policy in the Palestinian question, what if there are WhatsApps from ministers to Peter Mandelson about the Chagos Islands deal?

Mark D'Arcy: You can imagine that, as you say, there are any number of bombs that might go off from this paper trail, this email trail, this electronic message trail. And they could be very specific ones that derail specific pieces of legislation, notably the Chagos Islands legislation.

But I dare say there are plenty of other things as well that could be seriously disrupted by revelations of what one minister said to another in some WhatsApp group.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so there's that about the legislation. There's also a [00:06:00] question about to what extent has he got control, genuine control over the ministers now in terms of the legislative program?

To what extent are, for example, decisions about policy, about amendments that might be made to legislation, gonna be driven by him, by Downing Street, by the whips and the whipping operation. Or have we now got a group of Labour backbenchers people like for example, Angela Rayner and Meg Hillier who've effectively got a veto over whatever may or may not appear in legislation, and that seems to me to be a pretty unstable way of operating on a medium to long term perspective. You can do that in the short term, but over time, that becomes difficult. So there's all those issues.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that the point about the Cabinet is a particularly important one. Sir Keir Starmer is still Prime Minister because none of the cabinet have broken ranks and maybe the quid pro quo for them not breaking ranks is that cabinet ministers get their head a bit more often. They can do things their way. Even [00:07:00] if the now rather weakened Downing Street machine takes exception to some of their policy ideas, they may not be stoppable. At least the political price of stopping them might be that some of those ministers are no longer quite so ready to support the Prime Minister in his moment of need.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Events have moved on a little bit also in terms of the response, the legislative response around Peter Mandelson and the question of whether he should retain his peerage. He's obviously retired from the House of Lords, but should he retain his title? And the government's position, clearly being, no, he should not. And proposing to legislate to strip that away from him. Darren Jones made a statement in the House on Monday in his role as well, I can't remember his title now in Downing Street.

Mark D'Arcy: Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister.

Ruth Fox: That's it. Is it?

Mark D'Arcy: Rather grand.

Ruth Fox: So he made a statement, which I have to say, I think added a bit more to my confusion rather than any clarity.

Initially it looked like that they were gonna only bring forward one piece of legislation to strip peerages, so ensure peerages can be removed from disgraced [00:08:00] peers. But then when he started asking questions in the House a bit later, I felt he wasn't distinguishing, particularly between the question of the peerage, the title and the place in the House of Lords, and those are separate legislative routes as we discussed last week. So I think I was, I was probably a little bit more confused at the end. But again, you're gonna bring in legislation to strip peerages. Fine. I don't object to that. But let's not pretend that this will then focus only on Lord Mandelson, because

Mark D'Arcy: Plenty of others, aren't there?

Ruth Fox: We've mentioned others. Last week we mentioned Baroness Moan. You could say, even if they're outta the House of Lords, should they retain their peerage titles like Lord Mandelson? We've got several peers who've been to prison no longer in the House of Lords, but have been to prison and now out. Some of them many years ago, Lord Archer of Weston Super Mare, for example. Lord Ahmed. Peers with reputational problems who may or may not be in the House of Lords, who there is an argument for stripping their title, so quite where the limits will [00:09:00] be and who this will be targeted at or who it could be targeted at in the future, we don't know until we get the legislation.

Mark D'Arcy: And it seems to me that there is a danger in trying to combine legislation that removes the titles from Lord Mandelson and legislation for a more general system for controlling this. The Peter Mandelson and Future Noble Malefactors (Defrocking) Bill could get rather complicated, especially because you're muddying the waters by having a specific case, and then a general bill tacked onto it, if that is indeed what they intend to do. I think part of this reflects the fact that even though the House of Lords is half of the legislative process in Parliament, it's remarkable how little most people in the House of Commons actually know about how it works. It's another country from whose bourn no traveler returns as far as the Commons is concerned.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Not quite true actually. A couple of them have. But it is this very strange feature of Westminster life that there is so much ignorance in the Commons about the workings of the Lords and very little inclination to learn much about it [00:10:00] either.

Ruth Fox: One thing that Darren Jones did say is that they are working with members of the House of Lords, the authorities there, to review the Code of Conduct. They want the Conduct Committee to look at this in the Lords. And I think there is a case here, because it seems to me if Peter Mandelson had not voluntarily retired from the House of Lords, the only way he could have been removed from the House of Lords is through the provisions of the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act, which we discussed last week. There's a sort of three stage process for that. And ultimately the entire House would've had to vote in favour of him being expelled, but the House of Lords Commissioner for standards and the Conduct Committee would've had to found him in breach of the House's Code of Conduct.

And I think there's two potential problems. If he had not gone voluntarily, if he'd have put up a fight, if he'd thought reputationally I need to make a stand, and he'd fought the House authorities on this, [00:11:00] the House's Code of Conduct doesn't apply in respect of peers' work whilst they're a minister, and a lot of what was going on was when Peter Mandelson was a minister. So would whatever he was doing whilst he was in the Blair government have been captured by it? He would've been in breach of things like the principles of public life and so on, but specifically, the code only applies to peers in relation to their parliamentary work, not their ministerial work. Now, I've always contended that is a false difference because if you're a peer, as he was, you're put in the House of Lords precisely to do ministerial work.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: It's a really gray area, but it's an area where I think on a technicality he might have had a get out.

Mark D'Arcy: And I think this is a almost a generic problem with the handling of ethics issues in Westminster now. What you have is decaying, sedimentary layers of ethics mechanisms that have been [00:12:00] dropped one on top of the other over the years to address specific problems and specific scandals. And they don't interlock.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: They don't work very well with each other. So you have the Ministerial Code and you have the peers' Code of Conduct, and you have IPSA and you have lots of other bodies, all of which have some sort of locus in the ethics world, and they don't really move in synchronization if you like.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But I think the second area of problem would then have been, Lord Mandelson has been on a leave of absence since January of 2025, so that's when he takes up the ambassadorship. So anything I think that he had said or done that we would recognise as a breach of the principles of public life, or indeed the code, wouldn't be covered because it doesn't cover you if you are a peer on a leave of absence.

So anything that he might have said or done in recent months since he had to step down, since the Epstein papers became public, any perception that he had misled people, [00:13:00] that I don't think will be covered because of saying, again, he was on a leave of absence. So I think there are holes that need to be looked at, so we'll have to see what comes of that.

But as you say, this gap between the ministerial life and parliamentary life also always seems to me is just a false one.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. A distinction with without a difference sometimes I think.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then you talked about sedimentary layers. That brings me onto Gordon Brown. Bless him.

Mark D'Arcy: Very new.

Ruth Fox: So did you see his article in The Guardian?

He says, nothing less than a century defining rebalancing of power and accountability is equal to this moment and the trauma of the victims. And then he comes up with, I worked it out as a sort of seven point plan. He didn't quite put it that way, but this sort of smorgasbord of reform proposals, some of which have been around the block, some of which are a bit new, but none of which have got anything to do with victims as far as I can tell.

They wouldn't address any of those issues and frankly wouldn't do much in terms of rebalancing power, I think in terms of the [00:14:00] Epstein scandal. We were talking last week about plutocrats and the big tech bros who seem to have a untrammeled power to which sort of ordinary politicians and parliaments across the world are struggling to contain them.

Doesn't address any of that. It's all about domestic accountability of politicians. And he says, we must find ways to rebuild trust.

Mark D'Arcy: Because once upon a time, I'm told, maybe it was a mystic era, maybe it was about 15 minutes after the end of the second world war, politicians were apparently trusted.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so I went back to our audit of political engagement. So we started an annual study of public attitudes to politics to Parliament. The first one was published in 2004, so it was in the Blair years, and it came after the 2001 general election, when we had such a low electoral turnout, there was concern about participation and we published that first one actually with the Electoral Commission.

So I went back to look at what it said, because a long running theme of that audit, it ran for [00:15:00] 18 years, is public dissatisfaction with the system of politics, with politicians, with Parliament and so on. 2004, 27% of the British public said they generally trusted politicians. I think in subsequent audits it went down to about 19%.

So one in four, at best, it said, would say that they trusted politicians.

Mark D'Arcy: Now less than one in five.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, there has never been that trust, and if that is the objective, then I just think it's a fool's errand because you're never gonna do it.

Mark D'Arcy: One of my favorite quotes in politics comes from an American politician who addressing his staff one day said, don't worry boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and emerged just as hated as ever.

Ruth Fox: And they did.

Mark D'Arcy: And lo, they did.

Ruth Fox: To be fair, there are a few interesting things in Gordon Brown's article. He wants the independent Anti-corruption Commission to be appointed by Parliament, which is interesting itself in terms of [00:16:00] the role of the Commons and the Lords. He wants a new statutory offence of corruption, which has been recommended by bodies as diverse as the Law Commission and Transparency International. But then he wants things like the new Ethics and Integrity Commission, which has been set up to replace the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was part of Labour's manifesto, he wants that on a statutory basis. I think many people think that's necessary. Fair enough. You'll love this one, Mark. He wants the innovation of citizens juries as promised in Labour's manifesto, so that there's a greater role for the public in deciding and enforcing the rules to be followed by politicians. Hanging and flogging possibly.

Mark D'Arcy: You slightly dread to think what that might mean. Heads on pikes outside Parliament.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think we're possibly exaggerating, but.

Mark D'Arcy: Not very much.

Ruth Fox: But, citizens juries. He has some really quite negative damaging things to say about the House of Lords, and I think he's being a bit unfair.

He refers to the fact that the Lords has 15 known [00:17:00] lobbyists and 91 members who are paid for their political advice to form a section of our lawmakers reminds me of the old rotten boroughs. If he's got evidence of 91 members who are paid for their political advice, I think he's gotta tell the Lord's authorities because well

Mark D'Arcy: Paid advocacy's already against the rules.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean there are specific rules in the House of Lords Code of Conduct. Now they may be too narrowly defined.

Mark D'Arcy: I would've thought that the moment when people just tolerated that sort of thing is some way past now. I certainly hope it is.

Ruth Fox: We will see if anything comes of that.

Then there's the sort of talk of, better proposals for declaration of interest. That's also relevant, I think, to the House of Commons as well in terms of how that's put, not just in debate, but in select committees. This was the particularly interesting one, that the government should bring in a fully accountable system for vetting major appointments, including ministerial appointments such as those of Mandelson to allow public scrutiny. He says a minister making executive decisions in the sort of pre-war period when you used to have [00:18:00] by elections once you became a minister, a minister was seen as different from a legislator scrutinising them. It is because we have had since then no satisfactory means of vetting ministerial or other major appointments that mistakes are so easily made.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm not sure how many Prime Ministers, I'm not sure if Gordon Brown as Prime Minister would've liked someone else raising a majestic hand and saying, no, you can't appoint X as a minister, or no, you can't appoint Y as a member of some quango somewhere. I've long believed that Parliament should have a much stronger grip on the quango bureaucracy and should actually have to give its approval to members of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, chairs of the BBC, big industry regulators in Ofwat or Ofcom or anywhere else.

But at the same time, it's such a valuable form of prime ministerial patronage to be able to make these big appointments that it would take quite an effort to wrench it from the grip of any incumbent in Downing Street.

Ruth Fox: But you'll note the one [00:19:00] thing that does not appear in this list, this smorgasbord or indeed in Darren Jones's sort of statements to the House, is the government of the day agreeing to limit or stop peerage appointments to the House of Lords itself.

So they are hell bent on addressing the rules and regulations governing how they can get people out that they don't like. But there's not a lot being said at all, if anything, about we need to have a restraining approach to how we put them in.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And again, we were discussing this last week.

And I think a stronger system of vetting for people who are going to be legislators for life under our current rules is long overdue.

Ruth Fox: And that goes to putting the House of Lords Appointment Commission on a stronger statutory footing. And if the House of Lords Appointment Commission says an appointment is not appropriate, then the Prime Minister shouldn't be able to go ahead.

Mark D'Arcy: Ruth, that's probably a good moment for us to take a break and when we come back we've got an interview with Neil Duncan-Jordan, one of the Labour MPs [00:20:00] who's made a bit of a reputation for himself in the few months he's been in Parliament as something of a serial rebel. We've got his thoughts on rebelling against the party whip, on Keir Starmer's position as party leader and much, much more.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

And we're back. And earlier today, Mark and I popped across to the Westminster eyrie of Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, who's established himself as one of the new Labour intake's usual suspects, a serial rebel against the party whip, who's already twice called for Keir Starmer to step down as Prime Minister and party leader

Mark D'Arcy: Neil Duncan-Jordan, first of all, welcome to the pod. Can I take you back to July 2024? You are the Labour MP for Poole, not exactly noted as a hotbed of socialism. Were you surprised to win?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: In fact, I'm the first ever Labour MP for the constituency in the history of the constituency. I knew that it was gonna be very [00:21:00] close during the campaign. That was quite clear from going out on the doors, talking to people and so on. The incumbent that I beat Sir Robert Syms had been the MP for 27 years, and people just did feel like it was time for something different, a change of some kind, I was the only candidate who could beat him, who could defeat him.

So therefore, I got a lot of people coming to me saying, I don't normally vote Labour, but this time I will give you a chance because I want to see rid of the current MP and you are the best way of doing that. So I'll vote for you.

Mark D'Arcy: And what was it like rocking up to Parliament with 400 other Labour MPs?

Being part of this massive majority, was it as you imagined an MP's life to be?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: Bits of it are totally what I would've expected. The correspondence with constituents, the speaking in the chamber, all of those sorts of things [00:22:00] are what you've seen on tele yourself or you were aware of.

Some of the arcane rules I wasn't aware of so much. Some of the practices, the whipping operation, those sorts of things, I didn't really know what that meant. I knew about it, but I didn't really know what it meant in practice. And also I was hoping as a brand new MP that we would've been able to get our feet under the table before I was falling out with the government.

And it actually only took a few weeks because I was sitting in the gallery when the Chancellor announced she was gonna means test the Winter Fuel Allowance. And I knew instantly I couldn't vote for that. So I'd come in as a brand new MP wanting Labour to succeed, absolutely, and then finding very early on I was on the wrong side of the government and that wasn't what I expected.

Ruth Fox: And so what did you do? You're listening to the speech [00:23:00] in the Commons Gallery. You think, crikey, this is not what I came into the House of Commons for. This is not what my voters in Poole are gonna expect of me. What do you do?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: So I swore quite a lot actually, to my colleagues who were sitting next to me and I said, this is a disaster. And of course when it came to the vote, I abstained and people chastised me for that later on. But I abstained. I was a brand new MP. I didn't really understand, to be perfectly honest, all the ins and outs of the voting system and what it means and so on. And I looked to colleagues who were more senior than me and they were abstaining too. And so rather than vote against the government, I decided to abstain. And I haven't regretted it ever since. I know colleagues who voted for it against their better judgment who voted for it because they were brand new like I was, and they regretted it ever since. So I feel very comfortable with those sort of decisions.

Mark D'Arcy: And what [00:24:00] happened around that? Did you in advance discuss with your whips that you were saying, I'm not gonna vote for this, did you get the knock on the door in the night afterwards?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: I've got a series of letters from the chief whip and I've got them all framed in my office at home. Look the bottom line is, I'd got 19,000 pensioners in Poole who were gonna lose out from the winter fuel allowance being means tested. I got in by 18 votes, not 18,018. If you've got 19,000 electors who you've just upset overnight, almost do the math. Come on. Not only did I feel it was wrong anyway, I've been a great advocate of universalism all my life. So means testing is just not something that I endorsed. But even if you didn't have those views, electorally, it was an absolute disaster.

And of course what happened after that was we couldn't get on the front foot because everything you [00:25:00] proposed and tried to get across to the public came back all the time to the winter fuel allowance on the doorstep. Oh yeah, you might be doing that, but what about a winter fuel allowance? You've taken it off me. You couldn't get beyond that. It just colored everything. And as I was saying earlier, I hadn't expected that to happen quite so quickly.

Ruth Fox: And just in terms of practicalities, then you get a letter from the Chief Whip, but does anything else happen at that stage or are you just on report as it were?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: Yeah, you're on report, definitely. There is a report of your voting pattern and behavior, of course, which will be shared with the national executive when it comes for reselection and all that. So yes, there's a report of your activity. The initial process that I've got with my whip, I've got a very good relationship with my whip, we respect each other, which I think really helps. He's also an older person, so I think we are of a similar mind on a lot of this sort of stuff, [00:26:00] we treat each other like grownups rather than kids, which I really am grateful for.

And the initial thing is you tell your whip, look, I've got reservations about this. I'm not gonna be able to vote for it. And then there might be some sort of pressure or whatever. That particular time I had a phone call from the Secretary of State. So before the vote, I had Liz Kendall on the phone. She was the Secretary of State at that time, saying, we've gotta do this, the economy, et cetera, et cetera. And I didn't buy any of those arguments. And I told her that pleasantly, but I just told her I wasn't gonna go for that. And then there wasn't anything else. And then on the day I just stayed in the chamber. I didn't vote in the Aye lobby or the No lobby. I just stayed where I was with a number of colleagues.

And then the letter follows after that to say, you didn't vote with the government, et cetera, et cetera. But there's no sort of follow up. And there wasn't really any recriminations apart from, this may be disputed by the party, but I think my voting record on [00:27:00] that issue then prevented me from getting onto the Work and Pensions select committee, which I wanted to get onto.

And I've stood about five times for that committee now, and I haven't been successful in any of those occasions despite having 20 years of experience in the pensions field and having been a trade union official as well. So work and pensions, I can cover both of those issues. Some people might say that's a conspiracy theory or I'm being paranoid, but knowing how this place works, come on. I'm pretty certain that would be the reason why I didn't get on.

Mark D'Arcy: And what about in your constituency? You talk a lot about what you hear from people on the doorstep. It sounds like with a majority of 18 you're in semi-permanent campaign mode anyway. What was the reaction there? Did people even notice?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: Oh yeah. The bar in my constituency was pretty low. So anything a new MP was going to do locally was going to get noticed. [00:28:00] Even turning up to the local school and doing an assembly hadn't been done for years and years, so you were really low hanging fruit. My predecessor didn't really use social media to communicate so that's another area that I exploited, and all of a sudden you are everywhere and you look like you are considerably busier than the previous incumbent used to be. So it was noticed. My activities are noticed, because I tell people about them. That's one of the things. But also that people were quite taken by the fact that, wow, I've got an MP who's doing things, who's speaking in the chamber, somebody said to me in the first year, six months, I'd spoken more than the previous incumbent had done in all of that time. So it wasn't difficult to try and mark yourself out as active, different speaking up for your constituents, which I've done a lot of, and it does get noticed.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm interested in that because it's often [00:29:00] suggested, certainly by the whips to MPs who are thinking about rebelling that you won't get any credit for rebelling, you'll just make the government look bad and that brings you down.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: There is an argument that I've heard many ministers put forward is that we rise and fall together. Of course, if the Labour Party succeeds, we all succeed. And if the Labour Party falls, then we all lose our seats. There is an element of truth in that. I absolutely do get that argument, but when I was suspended, I became even more popular in Poole than when I'd been a Labour MP.

Why? Because the Labour government was so unpopular and standing up against that did give me certainly in the constituency a standing that I hadn't got before. And one of the things that came over very strongly is that people liked an MP who was going to speak their mind and say things that may have got been unpopular, may have got them into trouble, but at least they were convinced that you were there [00:30:00] trying to do the right thing rather than just agreeing to everything.

Ruth Fox: Let's talk about that. So you abstained on the winter fuel decision, but then some months later you vote against the government, you are actually suspended from the parliamentary Labour party. How did that all come about?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: So that was largely because I was, and had been for some time organising a series of briefings every fortnight for MPs to get across what the changes were going to mean for disabled people and their families.

So I'd got all of the regular charities that you would know Scope MS in to talk about how it was gonna affect their members. I was briefing MPs every two weeks. We were really ramping up the organising and it was the organising that got me suspended more than the voting against the government. It was organising against the government. But of course I've been a trade union organiser for most of my working. Life. So that was natural for me to organise people, [00:31:00] to get them in the same space, to get them on the same page. And I was told that was the reason why I was suspended.

Ruth Fox: Who tells you? Your whip? And what then follows from that? How do you find out?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: Yeah, you go and see the Chief Whip and he tells you, regrettably Neil, I'm gonna have to do this. And they then tell you you've been suspended. What was quite interesting is that there were four of us suspended at the same time. Obviously going in at different times during the day, but we were all suspended broadly at the same time.

And of course, what happens immediately then is the phone just explodes because all the media want to talk to you about what's happened to you. All of your colleagues want to give you their support, and their thoughts about what's happened to you. I decided that what I would do is I would put a statement out and then I didn't do any other interviews.

Because I thought, if that's what I wanna say, that should do the talking and therefore we draw [00:32:00] a line under it to a certain extent. I wasn't out to make a massive argument about it. There was a policy I didn't agree with. I voted against it. I tried to get others to vote against it. I was suspended for doing that.

And I said in my statement, I knew there'd be consequences and I'm quite happy to take those consequences, but I still think I did the right thing.

Mark D'Arcy: Are you now one of the usual suspects? Do the whips look at you funny now? Are you treated differently?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: I don't think I'm treated differently. I've got, I've actually got quite good relations with MPs across the spectrum of the party.

I'm not in any group within the PLP, although I have clearly acted in a way that might define you in a certain sense as being on the left, which I do regard myself as being. But I have been able, during my 18 months here to have good personal relationships, friendships with people across the political spectrum, within the Labour Party.

I think that's important because at the end of [00:33:00] the day, the party benefits, in my view, from having talent, from wherever it comes. And I think one of the weaknesses that we've seen in this government so far is that it's only drawn talent from a very small pool. And in fact, I think it should be drawing talent from a wider group of MPs.

Ruth Fox: And what practical impact does it then have on you as a parliamentarian and a legislator and a scrutineer at Westminster? You said you suspect you haven't gotten onto the Work and Pensions committee. That's one thing. But what impact does it have on your Westminster work and then does it affect you in your constituency?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: In terms of Westminster work, you can't go to any PLP meetings, of course, because you're suspended from the PLP. So you couldn't go to those. Any of the departmental PLP meetings, you can't go to those either. So if I wanted to go to the Work and Pensions one, I couldn't go to that. That was a problem because the Timms review, I was very keen on, it was part and parcel of what the whole rebellion was about. And I couldn't go and then go to the PLP where he was speaking because I wasn't [00:34:00] allowed to. So there were problems there.

Mark D'Arcy: This was Steven Timms former minister who's leading Labour's review on basically how to get the benefit bill down.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: So I've met Steven subsequently, but at that time it was a bit tricky.

So that's the first thing. In terms of speaking in the chamber and all those sorts of things, it doesn't make any real difference. Some people said, oh, you've gotta sit somewhere else. Like on the other side, you don't have to sit on the other side of the benches, you can still sit on the Labour benches. You're still a Labour member, as we discussed earlier. So that was really a Westminster issue.

In terms of the constituency, it had a positive impact in the sense that I became more popular, as I'd said earlier, with the general public. It had a negative impact in that my. Constituency Labour Party was frozen out of lots of its access to membership lists and other sort of internal Labour party systems. And that seemed to be unfair because I was the one who was suspended, not my Labour party. They hadn't done anything wrong, inverted commas, I don't think I had done either, but I understand the [00:35:00] argument. So there was a negativity to that. It did take time to sort that out. They did get that back, even though I was still suspended, but it was a considerable period of time.

Ruth Fox: One of the things we talk about on the podcast is the way in which government manages its backbenchers, but also how governments can utilise the knowledge and the experience that comes up through constituencies and your role as a constituency MP. You wrote an article recently for House Magazine in which you talk about this and the way in which the government could really do a much, much better job of drawing on that expertise and that experience. Can you tell us about that?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It's quite clear to me that we could have avoided as a government, a number of the U-turns and mistakes that we've made in the first 18 months had we road tested some of those ideas and policies with a backbench committee of some kind. And the trouble with having [00:36:00] groups that the leadership supports getting onto select committees and all the rest of it, is that they're not gonna be the ones who challenge, are they? They're the ones that are supportive of what you're doing.

We could have avoided things like winter fuel, if that had come to a mixed bag of backbenchers and it had been floated across the table and said, what do you think of this? How do you think this is gonna play? They would've then got a really good steer about, oh yeah, I'm not sure that's gonna go down particularly well, I've got a lot of older people in my constituency, or whatever the argument might have been. Of course we didn't do that.

So what we've had is policy announcement is made. You are then told you've got a row behind it. You've had no opportunity to influence it before it's been announced. Then when you do try and influence, you're seen as rebellious or difficult. That's got to change. That whole process has got to change.

We are going to need a system whereby policies like [00:37:00] jury trials, ID cards, winter fuel, changes to the PIP, they're all run past a group of MPs, not from the people who are gonna just tell you how good it is, but from a range of MPs who are gonna give it to you straight. We need that to then avoid having to keep changing further down the line.

Had we had that in place, that sort of mechanism, I do sincerely believe we could have avoided some of the pitfalls we've fallen into.

Mark D'Arcy: What this suggests to me is that ministers weren't very prepared for the jobs that they were gonna do in government when Labour did win. But I'm also thinking that maybe Labour MPs weren't very prepared for some of the inverted commas difficult decisions that would inevitably be coming at them.

I always thought that the government was going to have to try and find ways to cut the social security bill in some manner or another. But no pitch rolling was done about that at all. Anywhere along the way. Or am I wrong?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It wasn't in the manifesto, and that was one of the reasons why I was also angry about the fact [00:38:00] that we were being asked to introduce 5 billion pounds worth of cuts to PIP when nobody had previously said anything about that. Winter fuel was another example that hadn't appeared in the manifesto. Neither of jury trials, neither of ID cards. So a lot of these things are coming out of the blue now.

You could argue politicians should be ready to deal with things that come unexpectedly before them and so on. Yeah, okay, I get that. But then there should be a proper process through which we debate, discuss, consider where we're gonna land on that, and the Mandelson affair is a really good example of this.

I'll just give you this personal critique of how we got to where we got to. I was in the chamber when the Conservatives put forward their motion on the Mandelson affair and the government tabled an amendment to that motion. Some colleagues were just happy that had done it, [00:39:00] that had done the job. As the debate went on, it was quite clear senior Labour MPs getting up, senior Conservative MPs getting up saying that amendment needs to change, it needs to talk about the Intelligence and Security Committee, it needs to give Parliament a role in scrutinising the papers and so on.

I listened to that debate. I didn't take part in the debate. I was in for the debate. I wanted to listen to the arguments as a new MP. I wanted to see, because some of this is technical, of course, procedural, I wanted to listen to what it was. It didn't take me very long to realize that the senior MPs on both sides were right about that. We were gonna have to change it. Said to my whip, this is gonna have to change, otherwise I'm not voting for this. And eventually I got the message back, we are working on it. And then I said to him at the end, we got to where we needed to be, but the damage was already done.

If we'd boxed clever at the beginning, we wouldn't have put that amendment down. [00:40:00] We would've put down the one we finally put down and we could have avoided all of that theater. And hoo-ha, that went on for three or four hours that afternoon. Quite high drama really, when you think about it. And that was all created because we got it wrong at the beginning. We were prepared to change, which is good, but really, shouldn't we have got that right the first time round?

Ruth Fox: And on the broader policy questions, you mentioned earlier that there are these PLP departmental committees, so these are by department, work and pensions, as you say, looking at issues and engaging with the ministerial team and so on. So that's part of the, the umbilical court between the minister and the parliamentary Labour party.

But the fact that these issues aren't being pitch rolled suggests that those departmental committees aren't working either.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It depends. I've been to the ones that I'm interested in. I haven't been to all of them, so I can't, absolutely can't, say about all of them. Often it's this old question [00:41:00] of I hear what you're saying, which is often a response that you get. That doesn't mean they're gonna do anything about it.

So you could argue it's a forum to air your views. Is it practical in that sense? Does it fulfill that criteria? You could say yes, it does, because anyone can go along, any backbencher, you can go along in the Labour Party. And so I'm not very happy about this minister, X, Y, Z but that never seems to change anything.

And welfare, let me go back to welfare, because this is a really good example. What changed the narrative on the welfare cuts was the rebellion. For months, me and others had been saying, this isn't gonna fly, you're gonna have to do something differently. No no, this is it. This is what we've gotta do. So there'd been an exchange, plenty of exchanges. It hadn't moved a dial at all. However, on the day of the vote, if you were there and you remember watching it, bits and pieces of paper flying around, people running in, running out, I [00:42:00] told the chief whip when he suspended me, this is not the way to make social policy in this country. You do not make social policy on the hoof at the dispatch box with an hour to go before the vote. So it was quite illustrative of how bad that got. We'd had meetings, we'd told them what we thought, nobody listened. We get to the day of the vote. There's quite a large scale rebellion, actually, 50 plus is pretty strong in that sense, and that's what starts to bring about a policy change, which we'd been asking for.

So it just shows you that, backbenchers do have power, absolutely, but actually that could be exercised in a more practical, less confrontational way if we were engaged properly sooner.

Mark D'Arcy: Which brings us to the Prime Minister's leadership style. Now you have now twice called for Sir Keir Starmer to step down as Prime Minister, for Labour to presumably then elect a new leader.

What's your thinking on that? Why?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: Two or three months ago when I made [00:43:00] that first call, it was due largely to looking at the polling that was around at the time and also talking to people on the doorstep in Poole and they would say to me, I might vote Labour but I won't vote Labour if the PM is still the leader at that time.

He's deeply unpopular, I think more unpopular than Liz Truss on some polling, and so I came to the conclusion that if the single individual is the reason why Labour is not going to win again, then really shouldn't the party consider removing that individual and getting somebody else.

And that's not done because I dislike the Prime Minister personally. I don't actually know the Prime Minister. I couldn't tell you much about him. I've met him once in my time as an MP, so it isn't personal. It's absolutely about the polling and where Labour sits, so that was the first time I mentioned the fact that the PM [00:44:00] should go. The second time was to do with the Mandelson affair, but only in the context that was the latest of a number of errors that had been made by Number 10.

I didn't just call for the PM to go. I called for the whole number 10 operation to go, and we should start again. And my view is we need to renew our offer to the British public. They were calling for change. We haven't yet delivered enough of that change, and we need a refresh. And part of that refresh, in my view, was needing to get a new leader.

Mark D'Arcy: And did that attract a knock on the door in the night from the whips?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It did not.

Mark D'Arcy: No reaction at all.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: No reaction at all. Now that might have been, when my whip hears this program, he probably will give me a tug, but it might have been because things moved pretty quickly. I wasn't the only one. And then Anas Sarwar [00:45:00] appeared, and then that took the focus away from people like me and onto somebody else. So whether we've moved on from that now, I don't know, but I'm always willing to take a call from my whip.

Ruth Fox: Do you get any sense from the public of why he's so deeply unpopular? This idea that he's more unpopular than Liz Truss I find fascinating because he may be a disappointment, but it seems to me that he hasn't done as badly as Liz Truss, and yet there really does seem to be this very personal antipathy to him. Do you get any sense of understanding why?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: There probably will be books written about this in future years, won't there? About how leaders connect or don't connect with the people that they're trying to assist or lead or govern, or however you want to look at it. I think there is a formality to the Prime Minister, which on one level was sold as he's a serious professional career public servant, doing good work and so on and so forth. In some respects [00:46:00] boring and that was what the country wanted. They didn't want the Johnson years, again, the chaos. They wanted steady as she goes and so on.

The trouble with that argument is that within a few weeks, that was all ripped up with the winter fuel allowance decision. So I'm not quite sure who was responsible for that, whether it was Morgan McSweeney or I don't know who it was, but that was a massive error of judgment. A few weeks in to a brand new Labour government after 14 years of austerity, the world at our feet and we tore it up. And that has continued on a number of issues.

And that's the problem. You can make a mistake and you can say I'm sorry. And I get that from a personal point of view. Of course I get that. But how many times do you have to keep saying sorry before somebody says, do you know what? I think it's probably time that somebody else had a go because you've made a few mistakes along the way. [00:47:00] We've forgiven you of course. But really, can we keep going through that?

Mark D'Arcy: Do you have a view on who the somebody else might be?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: I wanted Andy Burnham to be allowed to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. I was extremely disappointed that he was kept off. I actually think some of the reasons for keeping him off were pretty spurious, to be perfectly honest.

Again, when you look at the polling, I think we would've almost certainly won the by-election if Andy Burnham had stood. I'm not quite sure now whether that will be the case without him. I am going up to the constituency with colleagues to go and help out as part of the campaign. I think that's important that MPs do that, but that would've been an obvious choice, I think.

And actually, if you think about it, how different would this discussion we are having today be if he had been the candidate given the last couple of weeks that the Prime Minister has had and that [00:48:00] he won the by-election and then he came in. I think the PLP would be in a completely different place.

Mark D'Arcy: Okay. We've got a timeline ahead of us now. A couple of weeks time there will be the Gorton and Denton by-election. And beyond that, there's the local elections, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd elections. So there's quite a big set of electoral tests in the next few weeks. Is that the moment that Labour MPs get panicked into changing leaders?

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It might be. I've looked at some of the latest polling. I lose my seat to Reform and come third behind the Tories and Reform. We are down in the southwest from something like 24 to two Labour MPs left, and I'm not one of them. Nationally, we're on 68 seats. That's an existential crisis.

Now I know what people say. It's not a real poll. The real poll is the election, et cetera. It's the old line that people use. And I get that. [00:49:00] But if it's an indicator of where we are, then we are really struggling. My personal view is that I'm not coming back. I'm not gonna get back in as an MP when the next election is on. Some colleagues won't either. So on that basis, our job is to stop Reform from winning. Whether that means just reducing the number of seats that they get. So they don't have an overall majority or somehow having a hung Parliament or whatever. But at the moment, we are nowhere near being returned as the government at all. 68 seats is a wipe out.

So I think we've got to do whatever we can now to build trust and confidence from the British public back into the Labour Party and the Labour government. And if that means needing someone else at the helm, then I think that has to be the imperative because the most important thing [00:50:00] is to make sure that we don't have an ultra right wing government taking over from us the next time.

Mark D'Arcy: Panic stations essentially.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: I'm not a panicker by nature and I'm optimistic by nature as well, so I wouldn't describe it in that way. We've gotta be serious about what we need to do and what you need to do to get where you need to be.

And I think that means setting out a program, setting out a program of what the Labour government needs to do now in the next period, next two and a half years, three years, that we've got left to win back the trust of the British people.

Mark D'Arcy: Neil Duncan-Jordan, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Neil Duncan-Jordan: It's been a real pleasure.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Neil.

And Mark, we're back and I thought we should just perhaps briefly touch on where we are with the assisted dying bill because there've been a few developments, not a lot of progress made in the House last week when it was debated on the Friday. Few extra groups have been debated.

Mark D'Arcy: The slow motion [00:51:00] crawl continues. Yeah, I think they got through three and a half groups of amendments at their last sitting on a Friday, so there is no sense of any kind of acceleration, so they can reach the end of committee stage and get down to the business of actually attempting to amend the bill. And so what I think you've quite clearly got now is a conscious go slow designed to make sure the bill doesn't get out of committee and that it therefore falls at the end of the session.

And then it's a matter of whether or not the government and individual MPs as well have the energy to have another go at this, or whether perhaps the political will behind it has now faded away.

Ruth Fox: I think it's fair to say that in my inbox there are a number of peers who are opposed to this bill who are lobbying me quite heavily that this is not a go slow and this is not a filibuster, and that they are taking the responsible approach to scrutiny, to detailed scrutiny and trying to get genuine questions asked and answered. So there is clearly a division of opinion. Some people clearly think it's a filibuster. Others clearly don't.

Mark D'Arcy: Both things can be [00:52:00] true at once. I've no doubt that there are very real points being made in these debates and that very real issues around the detail of the bill are being discussed at considerable length, but at the same time, the pace of this is so slow that it's very hard not to regard it as a filibuster.

And if all you wanted to do was make constructive changes to the bill, surely you would want to get to the report stage where such changes might well be made, where you might get them voted through by peers. But no, this is going at a very slow pace. Now, to be sure people say this is to expose the terrible flaws in this awful bill, but I think most of the people doing the talking are not people who think this bill can be made better. They think this bill should be stopped.

Ruth Fox: There's that happening in the Lords Chamber itself. But we are also seeing in the last week some, if you like, rear guard action from supporters of the bill in the House of Commons who are getting increasingly anxious that the bill is not gonna come back to them. And it's therefore not gonna hit the statute book before the session ends. [00:53:00] And a group of them have started a new All Party Parliamentary Group, as you do, for House of Lords Reform, pressing for the government to take action to get House of Lords procedures changed such that you can stop this kind of go slow and stop a relatively small group of peers opposing legislation like this, which has been backed by the Commons, but also wanting wider reform and putting it on a more democratic basis, which seems to me problematic.

Mark D'Arcy: That'll stop the right to life lobby in its tracks, I'm sure. Forgive me, I don't mean to sound unduly sarcastic, but this is what happens every time the House of Lords does something that the House of Commons doesn't like. There's an outbreak of sabre rattling about how it's time to clip their Lordship's wings, it's time to restrict the procedures of the house.

I can remember Tom Strathclyde, Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative leader in the House of Lords a few years back, wanting a review of the powers of the Lords because it was becoming increasingly awkward to the [00:54:00] coalition government and subsequently David Cameron's government. And, lo and behold, nothing happened. And the reason nothing happens is that it is fantastically complicated, fraught, and difficult, for Parliament to clip the wings of the House of Lords and restrict its powers beyond what's already there in the Parliament Acts. And if you're gonna do that, you're going to have to invest a fantastic amount of parliamentary time and political capital in order to make those changes and most of the general public out there don't care.

Ruth Fox: No, it's not the top of the list of priorities. And given what we talked about earlier in the podcast, the range of problems that the government's facing, you hardly think that they want to add this to the list. But it also seems a strange response to my mind, to those who want to bolster the House of Commons, an elected House of Lords is not an obvious solution to that problem. If your concern is that the elected House is being ignored by the unelected house, it's not clear to me.

Mark D'Arcy: I know. Make it elected. That way they won't stand up to us.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. [00:55:00] the argument is, the elected House will be more likely to be responsive to the position of the elected Commons. Not necessarily. They'd have their own mandate. They'd have their own mandate, most likely on a different timetable and with a different electorate. And probably with a different electoral system. So it just seems to me that you increase the chance that they actually, rather than just standing up to the government of the day on a private member's bill, they're more likely to stand up to them on government legislation as well.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. And then you're maybe heading for American style gridlock. Imagine you get a Labour government elected by a landslide. Two years later that government's terribly unpopular and the public decides to vote for a load of non-Labour Lords or senators or whatever they become in an elected House, who then decide that they've got a mandate to go and block the policies of the unpopular Labour government. You can just imagine that cycle repeating endlessly and it's not a recipe for getting stuff done.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So I think it's probably headed nowhere. The assisted dying bill, we will have to see where they end up. Whether there is support in the start of the [00:56:00] next session to bring it back and to Parliament Act it, we've talked about that on previous podcasts. Let's not repeat it, but again, that is another problem that you add to the very long list of Keir Starmer's challenges.

Mark D'Arcy: Meanwhile though, if we are talking about procedural changes to the workings of Parliament and the House of Commons Procedure Committee has been coming up with some new ideas to refine its procedures on issues like the holding of internal elections for posts like deputy speakers and chairs of select committees, but also on the way the chamber's run on whether there should be call lists so that MPs would know when they were due to speak in a given debate.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Should we start with call lists first. I should say for transparency purposes, I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee on this issue, was one of a small number of people outside the House who did and I think it's fair to say the Procedure Committee's recommendations on call list is, no, let's not do anything further, don't go there, don't go there, pretty much my recommendation as well, so I'm glad that they're endorsing that position. There was a statement [00:57:00] in the House earlier this week by the, I think, it's the liberal Democrat MP Lee Dillon, who's a member of the committee, who had sort of 10 minutes to lay out the committee's arguments and the reason they took up this inquiry was that so many of the new MPs had raised it, I think particularly with the Modernisation Committee.

Mark D'Arcy: The central problem here is that if you are a relatively junior MP and don't have a fixed place in the debate, you're not the opposition spokesperson, you're not the government minister, you're not the third party spokesperson, you don't have a fixed lot to give your view in a debate.

And so you are basically there waiting for whoever's in the chair to decide, I know I'll call that person over there, and you could be sitting there for hours on end and in the end, not even be called at the end of the debate. So you wasted an awful lot of your time in the view of the individual MP by just sitting in that debate.

Of course you can make interventions, get up and pose shortish questions to other speakers, but it's not the same and it's not as much fun. And MPs, from a time management point of view, [00:58:00] absolutely hate having to commit hours upon hours to attending a debate with no guarantee of the payoff of even getting their name in hand.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and if you remember when we spoke to the Green MP Ellie Chowns earlier this year, that was one of the things that she expressed frustration with, that you spent a long time in the House and you don't get called and if you do get called, your speaking time might be cut considerably. So you might go in with a six minute speech and you end up being able to deliver about 90 seconds or two minutes.

There were also concerns expressed to the Modernisation Committee that MPs who've got illnesses or disabilities of some kind, having to spend very long hours in the chamber, not being able to go out and get food and drink or medication

Mark D'Arcy: On not particularly comfortable benches the while.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So there are some very practical issues and certainly when I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee, I said I thought that there were other ways in which those could be addressed. For example, MPs who need medication could make that the Speaker aware of that. And you could use something like what's known as the Reasons Room, which we've talked about on a [00:59:00] previous podcasts.

Mark D'Arcy: A little sort of cubby hole area behind the Speaker's chair. Now the reason I suspect that this has not gone forward as a proposal, having a call list, is simply that it would completely transform the nature of Commons debates.

If you haven't got loads of people sitting there eagerly hoping that they're going to put in their five penneth, you change it into something where people will come in for an interval perhaps before they're due to speak and then leave shortly after they finish speaking. And they're not then taking part in a kind of collective effort. They're simply reading their own words into a record and perhaps not responding to what's been said earlier in the debate.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I thought it was interesting when we spoke earlier in the podcast and Neil Duncan-Jordan who said that, in some of the debates, he just goes in and sits and listens to the arguments and

Mark D'Arcy: That's very retro.

Ruth Fox: Very retro. And that is what you want. You want that, but you also want people to engage in a debate and for it to be more free flowing. So when he gave his statement to the House earlier this week, Lee Dillon said yes, one of the issues is about how the debates [01:00:00] flow, what impact that would have, concerns about it reducing spontaneity and looking at how things operated during the pandemic, when they had to have call lists, and it was just quite dead.

Mark D'Arcy: The chamber was absolutely dead. I remember watching endless debates in that and it was just not the same. There was no sense that someone had said something unexpected in the early phase of the debate that could be picked up by a later speaker.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The other thing that they picked up, and which I made a point of making to the committee is that the reasons why MPs say they want call list are actually quite varied. Therefore this idea that call lists can be a sort of a one hit solution to all the problems isn't really realistic. Do you want them to introduce more accessibility, more work-life balance? Do you want to address speaking opportunities? Do you want to improve the general flow of business? It's not necessarily gonna help with all of those.

And then you've gotta consider the trade-offs. They've looked at how other legislatures use them. They've looked at how the House of Lords use them. But again, make the point that every [01:01:00] Parliament has its own culture and simply dropping procedural rules from another Parliament like Australia into the Commons isn't gonna work. Similarly, dropping House of Lords rules into the Commons and vice versa, doesn't work in the same way either. And I think a big concern is that you would be really reducing the discretion of the Speaker and the Deputy Speakers in terms of choosing who speaks when, how long and their control, if you like, over the flow of debate.

Mark D'Arcy: That is certainly one of the sanctions that the chair has, is that if someone's behaving badly and heckling a lot in the debate, the Speaker or Deputy Speaker gets up and says, if the honorable gentleman is hoping to get called, he better behave better than that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: And people do take notice of that because they genuinely want to have their speeches too.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And of course the other thing is to remember is that call lists couldn't apply to all types of business, right? You can apply it to a second reading debate, you could apply it to a third reading, very different, difficult to apply in committee or report.

And this is [01:02:00] one of the other challenges, is you look at the flow of business and, how much time is allocated to different types of business on different days. The House of Commons rose yesterday, Tuesday, 4:30 in the afternoon.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Which is pretty extraordinary. And it's been doing that on a reasonably regular basis.

Mark D'Arcy: It's certainly par for a pre-holiday week when the business is light and MPs are almost encouraged to go away early if they fancy.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But still. So that's one of the issues and one of the things that the Procedure Committee has said is, although we are not recommending call lists at this moment in time, we do think there is work that needs to be done.

And the Modernisation Committee has indicated that it's looking at this or will look at this, into the parliamentary timetable and what types of business are scheduled when, how long things like ministerial questions and urgent questions are taking up and so on. So I think that's an area that in the coming months will become possibly into greater focus, but at the moment, the Procedure Committee says no.

Mark D'Arcy: So the frustrations of new members about the way debates are conducted will [01:03:00] not be addressed quite yet.

Ruth Fox: And it'll be interesting to see what the response of Members is. Because I suspect some of them will not be terribly happy. But there wasn't much time for responses to the committee statement in the House of Commons this week.

Mark D'Arcy: But that wasn't the only thing the Procedure Committee's been delivering on. They've also been working on rules for the election of deputy speakers and select committee chairs and incremental tweaks here and there, but really not very much. One of the things about these elections is it's not so much true of deputy speakers, I don't think, but certainly when select committee chair elections are going on, there was a stage where you were absolutely swamped with election literature. It was like living in a Lib Dem target ward, gross tonnage of paperwork that was swirling around in the coffee bars and the canteens of Parliament was just extraordinary.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, you heard these stories about MPs opening their door in the morning in their office and there was piles of paper surrounding them.

If you remember, Cat Smith, of course, ran on a [01:04:00] ticket, to be chair of the Procedure Committee, specifically saying she would prevent another select committee chair silly season. So this is her plan to prevent that. So essentially what her committee has recommended is that there should be a campaign period of 14 days or less for select committee chairs during which the production of printed campaign materials, so printed, not digital, but printed campaign materials will be prohibited. So none of that rubbish.

Mark D'Arcy: No more leaflet drifts accumulating in remote corners of Portcullis House.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so those are the sort of the primary changes and then the sort of recommendations about altering the timings of things in terms of these elections.

But, fundamentally, that's the main reform. And then on Deputy Speaker elections, essentially they want to have a little bit more time so that new MPs can get to know who the Deputy Speaker candidates are so that they're more familiar with the candidates.

And looking at the [01:05:00] nomination and campaigning process and the voting system, they're broadly happy with that, but they think that, there should be a little bit longer so that the candidates are more familiar to the electorate.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed and recent practice has been that it's open to the Speaker to appoint temporary people to chair debates in the Commons because the Speaker can't possibly do all of it.

So there isn't a feeling that, you know, you're gonna wear out the speaker unless we're pretty sharpish to appoint Deputy Speakers at the beginning of a new Parliament. And there is some value, I think, in giving people just a little more time, given the vast turnover in recent elections, there aren't really all that many real veteran MPs in the Commons anymore.

And the new intake probably don't have much idea what the Speaker actually does still. That's what the Deputy Speakers actually do. So giving them a little more time to marinate in Commons culture and absorb the atmosphere and figure out what those people do and what sorts of people you might like to have at doing it is quite a useful [01:06:00] tweak to the way the system works.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and they're not specifying a time, they're basically leaving it to the discretion of the Speaker under Standing Orders and saying that, the Speaker should decide what sort of the appropriate time should be and if necessary, to change the usual timetable. So incremental reform. Not unimportant, but

Mark D'Arcy: What do we want? Incremental reform. When do we want it? When the time is right.

Ruth Fox: When the time is right, the start of the Parliament. So that's two of the Procedure Committee's reports. We're expecting another one that I think will be interesting, which is their position on electronic voting. We don't know when that's coming, but it was launched around the time of the call lists inquiry, so probably not far off.

Mark D'Arcy: There's also another new MP gripe that the voting process in the Commons really does take quite a lot of time. And where you've got, for example, a Report Stage of a bill with lots and lots of votes on different amendments, you can be traipsing through the lobbies for what seems like hours upon end. So I can see that again, they might think electronic voting there would save them an awful lot of time [01:07:00] and be better for their time management and meeting the other demands that MPs face now.

Ruth Fox: Mark, I think that's probably all we've got time for this week, particularly as my throat may be about to give out. Listeners, apologies if the quality of sound is not quite what it normally is.

Mark D'Arcy: Gargle with port.

Ruth Fox: Apparently Parliament's going into a short recess for a week, so Mark, you and I taking a short break.

Mark D'Arcy: But we have listeners got a special treat for you next week.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, we've got a conversation with the author Nan Sloane, whose new biography of the first woman cabinet minister Margaret Bondfield is out next week.

Mark D'Arcy: A fascinating discussion. An almost forgotten figure now. Everybody knows who the first woman MP to take her seat was, Nancy Astor. But Margaret Bondfield seems almost anonymous these days and there are reasons why she's perhaps become a bit of an unperson in Labour history, even in feminist history.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so that's a fascinating conversation. Look out for that in your podcast feed. And then Mark and I will be back the following week, a day later than normal. We'll be in your [01:08:00] podcast feed on Saturday the 28th of February for normal parliamentary podding, and we're delaying a little bit, so that we can capture some of the latest on the assisted dying bill, but also the forthcoming by-election.

Mark D'Arcy: In Denton and Gordon.

So join us then.

Ruth Fox: In the meantime, have a good break and see you in a couple of weeks.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

Intro: 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 Hansard Society.

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