• Sir Jonathan Jones, Institute for Government (15 September 2026), Legislating for the past: What is retrospective legislation and when is it ok?

• Hansard Society (11 September 2026), MPs reject the assisted dying bill: What happened, and what next? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 156

• Hansard Society (7 November 2025), Parliament, the Monarch & the birth of party politics: How did it happen? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 113

• UK Parliament, Representation of the People Bill

• Hansard Society, Private Members' Bills (PMBs)

• Hannah White, Manchester University Press, Held in Contempt: What's wrong with the House of Commons?

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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.

Ruth Fox: And in this special edition today, we're at the political studies powerhouse that is the Queen Mary University of London for a question and answer session with students and their teachers.

Mark D'Arcy: We've probably had more academics from Queen Mary on our podcast than from any other university, a quality kite mark of sorts, I suppose. And in this session, we're joined by Parliament Matters frequent flyer historian, Dr. Robert Saunders.

Ruth Fox: We've also got our private members bill guru and convenor of the excellent parliamentary studies module here, Dr. Daniel Gover.

Mark D'Arcy: And Dr. Cath Haddon, a debutante on this pod, historian and [00:01:00] senior fellow at the Institute for Government, and a former student here, her PhD was supervised by the patriarch of political studies, Professor Peter Hennessy.

We've acquired a relatively new Prime Minister, there's been a midterm change of government and there's a very fluid set of national opinion polls at the moment. So Cath, if I can start with you, how do you think the new Burnham government's going so far? Marks for technical merit and artistic impression?

Cath Haddon: Uh, I'll start with artistic impression because I think this is the thing Burnham supporters, possibly Burnham himself and certainly for the Starmer government who left, was probably the most noticeable over the course of the summer, which was just the sheer presentation of the government. You know, he had much better summer than Keir Starmer had his first when he came in that had both riots, some serious political [00:02:00] issues to deal with, but then also the freebie gates hitting him very early on and hitting ethics and so forth.

Whereas Andy Burnham has done some videos that seem to have gone down very well. And so I think that first period definitely was what his supporters wanted to see from him, setting the agenda, having a political vision, all of those sorts of things that at the tail end in particular were the critique of Keir Starmer and of his government.

I think since then, technical side of it, certainly since Parliament's been back, but just as again, the world starts to encroach, you're seeing the same issues. There's obviously been the accusation of continuity Starmer. I actually probably shouldn't mention it, you know, rival podcast, but I did a podcast series over the summer looking at midterm changes of Prime Minister.

And actually this is something that's extraordinary that midterm changes really have to think about because it's the same government. Oftentimes they were part of that government. It's the same [00:03:00] manifesto. So they have to go for a certain amount of continuity, but obviously the reason why your predecessor left is because people wanted change.

So getting that balance right, I think is something that Burnham is still struggling with, that his party is still starting to think about, that his chancellor in particular is still thinking about, and I think we won't fully know the answer to, has Burnham got some magic answers that the Starmer government didn't have, until we see the Budget and the aftermath of that.

Mark D'Arcy: So Robert, what we're seeing at the moment seems to be a demonstration that people who dismiss communication skills as superficial and not really very important are being proven a little bit wrong at the moment by Andy Burnham, but as Cath says, the crunch is coming and good vibrations will not solve a budget deficit.

Robert Saunders: Yeah, I think communications is an absolutely fundamental part of good government, and I think what we've seen from Andy Burnham is essentially an attempt at a course correction. You identify the things that were wrong with the Starmer operation and you try to put them right. So the case was that [00:04:00] Starmer was too gloomy, that he was too cautious, that he couldn't really connect with the public, and that there wasn't really a sense of direction.

And so what we've seen is an attempt to sound much more optimistic. We've had a much more personable and fluent communication style. And there's been some quite potentially big noises on things like settlements in Israel, talk of a politics of place, talk of turning back 40 years of wrong decisions. So we could say that kind of the boat is in better shape, but the waters that it's sailing through are still phenomenally stormy.

All of the problems that beset the Starmer government around the public finances, around defence spending, around emerging questions like AI and climate change, all of those questions are still there. And what we don't really know yet is how Burnham responds to those. Because another criticism of Keir was that he struggled to make big decisions and struggled to go out and make an argument to the public.

And the question I think for Burnham as a communicator [00:05:00] is, is he willing to move from being a people pleaser to being a persuader? Is he actually willing to go out to the public and say, this is what we need to do on social care and this is what it's gonna cost, this is how we're going to fund defence, and it may be difficult and popular? That remains to be seen.

Mark D'Arcy: And Daniel, Andy Burnham has at his disposal a parliamentary majority beyond the wildest dreams of most of his predecessors. So he could do almost anything he could persuade his MPs to support. So he's got lots of freedom of action in that sense, at least.

I mean, the economy may be a constraint. All sorts of other things may be a constraint, but surely getting stuff through the Commons isn't going to be that much of a problem for him.

Daniel Gover: Yeah. Of, of course all of that was also true for Keir Starmer, and yet

Mark D'Arcy: And look what happened to him.

Daniel Gover: Yeah, well, exactly.

And so, I think what Robert says there is absolutely right, that we're yet to see how the new Prime Minister is going to navigate those sorts of challenges. I mean, so far [00:06:00] I agree with what's been said. He has been able to communicate much better and therefore he's got lots of goodwill from his backbenchers.

So in terms of that very, very large majority that he has, he's in a very strong position. But pretty soon he's gonna have to start making some decisions, which are gonna upset some members of his parliamentary party. And I think the jury is still out really on how that is going to go and whether he's going to be able to chart through those more successfully than Starmer.

Ruth Fox: Cath. One of the features of Andy Burnham's initial approach, when he first became Prime Minister was that he said he was gonna have a different approach to whipping. And there's sort of this tension on the one hand between decentralisation and pushing more decisions and budgets and taxes and so on out to the regional and local level and to strategic mayors and so on.

And then there's this Westminster desire to control the ship, as it were, the ship of state as it goes forward, and obviously the [00:07:00] constraints on the budget. What do you think, if anything, we might see in the coming weeks and months in terms of a different approach to management of the parliamentary majority, given the kind of really humongous questions and challenges that he's got to address?

Cath Haddon: It's a very good question. I mean, I think it kind of goes to what we were saying earlier, that we still don't know when the crunch moments happen how he's going to navigate that. But what we have already seen is an improvement for the parliamentary party on Starmer.

Because certainly in those early months, many of the MPs, so many new MPs, did feel neglected. And I know that's a kind of poor them sort of complaint to put at the feet of MPs, but it is really hard when you are in it, you know, you are new MP, you are being told by the whips what you should go and vote, but you feel like you've got no support on how to navigate it.

You know, what should you be worrying about? What should you spend your [00:08:00] very finite amount of resource, the staff that you've got around you, spend that attention on, to navigate this sort of huge portfolios that MPs are facing. And so it really crept up after a while and we saw that obviously with the welfare rebellion, that it just kind of hit a point at which they'd just lost patience with the government and suddenly found their own voices, found their own sort of caucuses, found their own leaders as it were, because the government haven't been providing that.

And I think the Burnham government already has learnt that lesson very well, has put a lot of attention into both who are staffing the whipping offices, into thinking about the political office in Number 10, which is incredibly important and one of the least studied parts of how the whole of government operates, and spending a lot more time thinking about how do we engage these MPs.

I thought one of the really notable thing was like with John Healey, Burnham put out some kind of [00:09:00] send me in all of your thoughts. Any MPs send me your ideas. Everything is welcome. Which obviously he's gonna have to disappoint some of them at some point, as you were just saying.

So I think it's only gonna be when it hits crunch points, the really totemic issues, but it is going to be continuity Starmer in as much as they're gonna have to do some bad things. You know, the budget, they're already playing it down. It's not gonna be sort of good news all round, but there's a limit to how long that goodwill will last.

And I think it's whether or not he can take those MPs on a journey towards dealing with the issues that the country faces, making hard choices when there is no option to make them. Obviously he will also kick the can down the road where he can and whether or not he can take them with them at that point. I don't think, despite all the stuff about HR and so forth, whipping has been a lot more about HR for some years now, but I don't get the impression it's fundamentally changed how they do whipping. So I think [00:10:00] a lot of it was more about the moon music again, of how we wanted to be received by them.

But honestly, it's the same thing as it was 30, 40 years ago. Just go to the tea rooms, meet people, chat to them, hear about their problems, their personal problems, as well as policy issues that they're facing, their constituency issues and stuff like that. It's the same stuff that decades of politicians have been doing, is the basics, that Burnham is doing, that Starmer wasn't,

Mark D'Arcy: I do wonder if you've got a government that's so hemmed in by the economic constraints, it just doesn't have that much money. Is Burnham perhaps going to try and do some sort of master stroke that breaks him out of the trap? Come up with some great fiscal change.

'Cause this is of course what sunk Liz Truss in that short-lived premiership. She tried to borrow to fund tax cuts to get economic growth and get the country growing again, thinking that economic growth would release all these problems, that'd have more money to spend, that'd have more flexibility and kaboom, out she went in a disturbingly short [00:11:00] time. Does that danger lurk around the corner? Andy Burnham, do you think he's eyeing some kind of master stroke?

Robert Saunders: Well, let's hope that that isn't the precedent that he has in mind. I think it's a particular challenge when you're taking over midterm because it's always tempting to imagine that you have a fresh start here you have a new government beginning and you walk through with your plan and your action plan for the first few months actually becoming a Prime Minister midterm is more like jumping out of an aeroplane onto a moving lorry that is crashing down the side of a hill with people shooting at you.

So if we think about Andy Burnham's summer, he actually spent most of his summer on an escalating crisis around early prisoner release, which wasn't at all what he had been expecting to spend his time doing. And that was a hangover of a policy that was passed by the Starmer government, which was itself a response to a policy problem that built up during the previous Conservative government.

So one of the things that makes governing really difficult is that you're just constantly being hit by these meteors. You are constantly being struck by external shocks, and you're doing that [00:12:00] nowadays with a 24 hour media that wants to know immediately what is your policy response to everything.

And of course at the moment, there's a particular problem that you have essentially a chaos agent in the White House. You could literally wake up on any morning and some extraordinary new story has erupted.

So it's really hard, whatever your original plans are to maintain a sort of sense of clarity and direction. And I think governments talk a lot about having a plan. Plans very rarely survive contact with reality.

What you actually need is a set of compass points. You need a fairly clear sense of what are the criteria by which you judge an unexpected situation in front of you. I think it was a weakness of the last government, it wasn't really clear where its compass points were, and again, it remains to be seen. Does Andy Burnham have that clear sense of definition so that when he's walking through this blizzard he can kind of keep going in the direction that he wants to be moving in?

Mark D'Arcy: Daniel?

Daniel Gover: I mean, I think all of that is true, really. There's gonna be some huge challenges over the next, even the next few [00:13:00] months.

And I mean obviously, Burnham has come into office with some very clear ideas of what he wants to do, particularly around devolution. Also actually, I mean, some stuff to do with Parliament that's not really fully fleshed out, but he has some sort of sense of where he wants to get to. But I do think one of the big questions is going to be whether or not he actually has the time, but also the bandwidth, the political capital, in order to be able to actually deliver a lot of that.

Mark D'Arcy: The next question I have for Cath. Perhaps you've got a sense of this. Who do you think is the second in command in this government? I mean, you've got Louise Haigh, who's described as the de facto deputy Prime Minister. You've got the chancellor, John Healey, and a chancellor is normally the sort of second figure in any given government.

You've also got Ed Miliband as foreign secretary, who seems to have a lot of the kind of policy initiative at the moment, and who's second in command.

Cath Haddon: It's a very good question. To be honest, I'm not fully sure right now. And I think partly [00:14:00] that's because certainly Louise Haigh has been endowed with a lot of power for that kind of role.

The sort of First Secretary of State or Deputy Prime Minister or Chancellor of the Dutchy, Lancaster, whatever you call them, there is always a role these days of somebody who is deputising for the Prime Minister, usually in and around the cabinet office. So it's running a lot of the cabinet committees or task forces.

It's sometimes focusing on the domestic issues when the Prime Minister is off doing the foreign policy and so forth. Obviously, there have been many times where that has been the Chancellor, George Osborne, Gordon Brown being the two classic examples at the moment.

I think Healey is very much responding to what the instructions given to him by Burnham. So I don't know that you necessarily see a chancellor who is forging his own identity separate from the Prime Minister, and that's usually when you know that the chancellor is [00:15:00] very empowered in their own right. So I think it's still a question mark as to whether or not. Healey certainly at the moment is probably one of the most powerful ministers, the Chancellor always is, but particularly in these sort of straightened financial circumstances, anything that any other Minister wants to do is dependent on Healey. That creates a huge amount of power.

But certainly Louise Hague, her role has been envisaged as being the sort of second in command, the next most powerful, and I assume she's seeing it that way. So I guess that's gonna be the question mark. As you know, classic, again, cabinet politics is how they all assert themselves in different ways over time and whether or not, again, the things he needs to watch out for, whether or not it turns into destabilising personality politics that affects the quality of his government. So something for Burnham to keep an eye on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Robert, can you you pick that up? I mean, the relationship between Blair and Brown back from 1997 [00:16:00] onwards was occasionally pretty fractious. The relationship between Cameron and Osborne was a much more harmonious one, and if they had fallings out, it was over dinner and it didn't really seep out too much into the general public.

How harmonious, how effective a team do you think we've got now?

Robert Saunders: I think the Cameron Osborne relationship is in some ways quite anomalous because actually most of the time the relationship between Prime Minister and chancellors is quite a difficult one. And it's interesting that prime ministers do sometimes take the decision that they will appoint a weak chancellor or somebody that they think that they can control. And they take seriously the idea that the Prime Minister is in fact the first Lord to the Treasury and will be their own chancellor. But actually the institutional power of the Treasury is so great, that it in a sense makes the occupants. So Gordon Brown made Alistair Darling his chancellor, who was not a weak chancellor, but was very much expected to be dominated by Gordon Brown.

Mark D'Arcy: And then wasn't.

Robert Saunders: Absolutely. That you then actually find, you have a Chancellor in place who you can't sack, who is in a sense known to be at odds with you in certain ways, [00:17:00] and therefore becomes the centre of resistance. So we don't know how a Healey Chancellorship will play out. I guess maybe the other thing that's worth saying is that if we ask the question of who was second in command under Keir Starmer, we might well have said Morgan McSweeney. If we'd asked it of Boris Johnson, we might well have said Dominic Cummings. Even in the Blair era, we would have to be talking about people like Alistair Campbell and Jonathan Powell. And what's interesting I think about the current government is that it doesn't have a, at least a very publicly visible, sort of guru behind the scenes.

And in that sense it perhaps marks a kind of rolling back of a recent trend in British politics in which actually the most important person in government other than the Prime Minister is outside the cabinet.

Cath Haddon: But in a way that's often when they're most powerful. I'm thinking more of Jonathan Powell, who again wouldn't have seen himself as very powerful as chief of staff, but was quietly very effective.

Same with Ed Llewellyn. So I think with James Purnell, you know, the current chief of staff, it could be that he is incredibly [00:18:00] powerful, but he has learned the lesson from Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney and has decided to keep himself as far from the limelight and being the source or the focus of those stories as much as possible.

So it could be that he is the real power behind or maybe it's just Burnham all along. Maybe Burnham is his own powerhouse and everyone else is just part of his team.

Ruth Fox: Cath. What about the Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo? Because I mean, this has been a vexed job in recent years. She has come in, she's apparently got a desk in Downing Street, which is unusual. She's been a presence in Number 10 North in Manchester. She's been seen out and about. You're obviously at the Institute for Government, close to the Civil Service, have a lot of contact with them. How do you think her role is emerging in this government and the working relationship with people like James Purnell and Andy Burnham sort of behind the scenes and are the civil service feeling that, you know, they've got a greater sense of direction of travel than they had [00:19:00] under the Starmer administration?

Cath Haddon: I'm gonna say on the civil service as a whole, I mean, there are so many civil servants it's always hard to say something like that because most of them will be looking for direction from their permanent secretaries, DGs, and particularly from their ministers. But, where I think it really does matter is just about a combination of the trust, the relationship between ministers and the civil service that really is created at the top of the organisation.

You know, gossip around the civil service is rife. So if there's any sense of a poor relationship between a cabinet secretary and the Prime Minister that then adds to sense of mistrust amongst civil service and ministers. Going to Antonia Romeo, she would've put a lot of effort into making sure that that relationship was good.

Again, this goes back decades. This is nothing new. Cabinet secretaries know that the good working relationship with the Prime Minister is incredibly important to [00:20:00] that. The other thing though that she has done is, certainly in her early stages, obviously again, it's potentially long way to go before we start to see the fruits of it, but she has put a lot more emphasis again on reform of the civil service.

So longstanding issues that multiple governments have raised, multiple political parties, have raised, the Institute for Government has raised, but we never seem to have been able to tackle. And you know, these were all in Keir Starmer speeches, tepid bath, rewiring the state, all of that sort of stuff.

She's still got to live up to that, but she certainly put a lot of emphasis on that. So I think similar to Burnham, she's probably brought a lot more hope back to the civil service and a lot more energy, which is incredibly important. But there's still, again, all of those foundational aspects of improving things have still got to be worked through.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose it's worth saying that Andy Burnham is our second Prime Minister who's been a big city mayor, Boris Johnson being the first of course. Is there any evidence for the idea that being a big city mayor somehow gives you [00:21:00] more preparation for the top job that you've been the top board in your own little universe for a while. You've learned how to set up a team, you've learned how to do the kind of leadership things that you don't necessarily do as a Cabinet Minister when it may well be that you're being almost tele operated from Downing Street.

Robert Saunders: It's a really interesting question, and I think it's a fairly novel problem or opportunity in that this is a reasonably new thing.

We've been talking a lot recently about how one difficulty with British governments is that it's very difficult to get executive experience because political careers are now so short. Rishi Sunak went from being a brand new backbencher to being a former Prime Minister in the space of nine years. By that stage of Margaret Thatcher's career, I think she was shadow Minister for Fuel and Power or something like that.

So, given that political careers are now so short, how do you learn to be a good Minister? How do you learn to be an executive decision maker? Now, it may be that actually things like city mayors become the place in which people learn. I think we might say [00:22:00] that perhaps sort of executive direction wasn't Boris Johnson's strong point.

We will find out what kind of skills Andy Burnham has developed as mayor of Greater Manchester. But yeah, I think also as a way in which you build up a national profile that gives you the power to stand for the leadership, this is now gonna become a new route to the top.

Mark D'Arcy: Daniel.

Daniel Gover: I mean, I think, just to add to that, I would say for those of us who study parliaments and legislatures, one of the functions that they perform in our political systems, or at least has been, is socialisation.

It is teaching people how to be political leaders. It's one of the functions that we see them perform in all sorts of different countries. And it may well be that actually mayoralties and other similar offices are going to provide an alternative route towards that goal. I mean, I do think they're different.

So I do think there are some different skills, maybe more executive focused skills that are developed, but actually they are losing something there as well because prime ministers [00:23:00] also need to be able to command a majority in Parliament and that brings different skills with it.

Maybe also if this is going to be an alternative route, I think we would also need to think a little bit more about how this would come about because obviously in the case of Burnham, yes, he was able to go from being mayor to becoming an MP and then very quickly afterwards Prime Minister. But it wasn't a very straightforward process really. You know, I think if that's something that we want to encourage, then maybe there are some changes that would need to be made to the system in order to facilitate that.

Mark D'Arcy: It certainly wasn't particularly elegant. Well, in any case, we are getting some questions through now on Slido, so I think, probably the moment has come to start asking some of those questions of our panel.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, Mark. So, Robert mentioned earlier that prime ministers can be put off course by meteors, constantly being hit by meteors. And this week we've had a financial meteor hit Westminster and taken up a lot of the oxygen this week. So [00:24:00] first question is, given the recent controversy over some eye wateringly large donations to Reform UK, is it time that Britain overhauls its campaign finance rules and if so, how?

So just a small topic to start us off. Robert, I know from your social media feed, you've had some thoughts this week, so do you wanna kick us off?

Robert Saunders: Yeah, I do think this really is a meteor strike that we shouldn't play down a significance of this. And it's important that we separate it from what we think of the particular party to whom money is being given.

What happened over the weekend was that two billionaire individuals gave to one party more money than the total spend of all political parties put together at the 2024 general election. We've never really seen this kind of thing before. We're talking about two individuals who have largely lived outside the UK, who have not been subject to the rules and laws of the UK, have not had to pay most of the taxes of the UK, have suddenly transformed one party into the richest party, not just in Britain today, but in British history.[00:25:00]

So we are potentially entering a new phase of politics here because billionaires don't hand out money just for fun. If they're handing over this money, it's because they think it works. They think that this money makes it materially more likely that the party they support will win a general election. So we have to decide, are we happy to move into a world in which you are only competitive as a national political party if you can acquire the support of billionaires because British politics has always been uneven, but this is a different order of magnitudes. These are not the sort of sums that you can match by member subscriptions or by union fees. You are gonna have to look to extraordinarily wealthy people to do this. Now we can decide that we want to do that, but I think we would be very unwise to do that.

Mark D'Arcy: Kaf.

Cath Haddon: So what's really interesting about this, I mean firstly it's worth saying the government already are doing something about this. There is legislation currently in the House of Lords that would've actually addressed this particular issue. The problem is it's not been passed yet. It's not been enacted yet. And it was [00:26:00] going to be applied retrospectively, probably to have covered the particular case of these two, depending on exactly when they came back to the UK.

But that's kind of by the by now, because now it is a question for the Labour Party to decide whether or not they want to take on looking like it's a political act to put that legislation through in the way that they talked about doing back in March, back in June when they put out their plans.

More than that is whether they want to go further. And now they've even got the unions talking about, do you want to actually cap donations as a whole? So that goes to the question of do we need to do anything more fundamental than the government is doing? And what I find fascinating about this is for years we've talked about could we change the way in which we fund our political parties?

Should we adopt what some other countries do and have more public funding? And the answer has always been, we can't because the Conservatives try to do it, then Labour will do this [00:27:00] and that. And the two main parties have been sort of locked in this mutually assured destruction that if either one tackled the other source of revenue, then you know, come back to bite them when they got out of office and the others got in and now you've got a third party who's making more than either of them and it's kind of galvanised everyone into thinking about it.

So it's sort of broken through that, that kind of impasse that the two main parties have got into. So in that way, at least it has provoked this debate. But I just think the government are going to have to be very careful that it doesn't look like they are just attacking their political opponents. Because even if they think they're not doing that, even if everyone here thinks they're not doing that, if Reform can argue that that's what it looks like, then that is in itself sort of winning the argument for Reform more than perhaps the Labour Party would want to. So they have to think about how to do this in an even handed way and take out of the equation who the political party are. And make sure that they're doing whatever they do in the public [00:28:00] interest.

Mark D'Arcy: Ruth.

Ruth Fox: I think there's also a matter of principle here about how we handle legislation. Retrospective legislation is a rule of law issue. It's used, has been used more recently, in areas like immigration legislation, and as much as I really dislike this arms race now for political donations and the trajectory it may be headed on, I'm really very uncomfortable with retrospective legislation to fix a problem that frankly the government could have fixed two years ago when it came into office. Imagine the scenario if you had a Conservative or a Reform led government where they start applying things retrospectively and the kinds of chaos that can ensue. Because once political parties and governments get into the habit of doing something and the precedents are there, then it's open for other political parties in office to do it.

And I think we also need to think about political spend as kind of the two dimensions. There's national party spend and there's sort of local and regional party spend. And it's not just [00:29:00] therefore about donations, it's also about how much they can spend each year outside the election period.

And one of the difficulties we've got is it's so very difficult to understand the rules and regulations around this stuff when so much of it is defined in relation to a general election date, a prospective general election date that we do not know when it will be. When we had Fixed Term Parliament Act, and you could work out, admittedly you look at the 2017 election, 2019, you know, what value was there, but at least from a planning perspective as a party manager, you could look at a schedule and work out how your spend over the course of a Parliament might look. It's very much more difficult now.

So I think a lot of the regulations are just frankly a mess. But I don't think retrospective legislation is the way to fix it.

Mark D'Arcy: Daniel?

Daniel Gover: I mean, I think all of the points around how this would be presented I think are very important. Actually already we have heard Reform saying, well they could take similar actions against trade union funding, [00:30:00] for example.

It is worth just saying, although this is described as retrospective, I mean it is retrospective from the point at which the legislation would be passed, it's not retrospective from the point at which it was announced. The government announced that it would do this and that it would apply from that point in March and then again in July.

And I think it is also worth saying that this is not just about whether it's retrospective, it's also about whether or not a government should be able to target the likely funding sources of an alternative party. So even if you took the fact that it's retrospective out of it, you still have that question as to what is the appropriate mechanism for deciding these things.

Should it just be for a government with its majority to be able to change the rules or should we expect that there should be some sort of prior process perhaps involving some sort of cross party commission? Obviously that raises all sorts of practical questions about how likely it is to be able to reach agreement.[00:31:00]

In this case, there was an independent review by a former senior civil servant. Is that the sort of process that we should expect? Do we want more or less than that? So I think there are all sorts of questions that this raises, but I, going back to that central point, I do think the key question in terms of how this will have its effect is how is this understood by people?

And I think it is interesting that the fact that it's retrospective in certain respects is central to how this is being framed in a lot of the media coverage.

Mark D'Arcy: I think Robert identified one of the central issues here, which is we are getting to a point where incredibly rich people can dig into their petty cash and buy a political party if we're not careful, it's already happening in America.

It's worth saying though, that even in America, in some of the primary contests that have been happening in the last few weeks, the best funded person with the largest war chest has often not won. And the simple fact of getting money from particular sources has been strung around [00:32:00] their neck like a rotting albatross. So money is not absolutely decisive.

On the other hand, when you're talking about the kind of sums that Robert's been alluding to, 70 million quid plunked into the hands of one party, it's hard to imagine that isn't gonna have a pretty considerable effect. I mean there are various reasons why party leaders like this sort of thing. Tony Blair had a guy called Lord Levy who was his big fundraiser in the run up to the 1997 general election and beyond. And the great advantage of getting big donations to what was then New Labour was that it meant that the big trade unions couldn't jerk his chain as much as they wanted to. So leaders often have motives for not wanting to change the system, but I think most people in British politics are now thinking they do have a gigantic motive to change the system.

And I'd like to see them reconfigure it to one that focused on parties having to get large numbers of modest donations rather than simply going to one person who then filled their carrier bag for the cash and off they went and they didn't have to worry about anybody else. Robert, you're nodding vigorously there.[00:33:00]

Robert Saunders: I'm nodding vigorously. I mean, I think all of the points that have been made about caution are absolutely right that we are choosing between bad options here and the best time to act on this would've been several years ago rather than now. But I also think that we sometimes worry too much in our politics about how things look.

And there is a danger that we've lost our confidence in actually going out and making arguments and trying to persuade people. And I don't think it is an argument that is unwinnable to say to the public that fantastically rich people should not be able to buy our politics.

And I sort of approach this as a kind of historian of democracy. And in my more pompous moments, I would say that the great story of democratic history is of a long struggle to subject extreme wealth and power to popular control to institutions and laws that we have made, and we have elected.

Only a few centuries ago, most countries in the world were governed by the richest people in them. It is an extraordinary democratic achievement that we have changed that. And if we're actually going back to a world in which you can simply only compete in [00:34:00] democratic politics, if you have billionaires on your side, that is a rolling back actually of a key achievement of democratic history.

Mark D'Arcy: And on that cheery note, let's take another question.

Ruth Fox: Well, we're talking about Reform and one of the questions has been about the five party system. What is the longevity of the five party system? Will Burnham's success bring it to an abrupt end?

Cath Haddon: I tell this so, anyone who knows me is gonna be annoyed that I'm yet again saying it. But back in 2019, I can remember when Boris Johnson newly in government, I think it was around the party conference, there was lots of talk around, gosh, he's doing so well, he is gonna be here for 10 years.

And I vividly remember saying to people, hang on, wait a second. Look back at history. Because those sort of moments that we have where it seems like the trajectory we are on is the trajectory that we are gonna get and we take it to the, you know, [00:35:00] wherever that journey to and then nope, events happen and as we've just been discussing things hit you from sideways, it reverts.

I mean the other thing is I always sort of say like, we live in this world as if the two party norm, it's been around for a long time. Certainly the Labour Conservative in all of our lifetimes, all of our parents' lifetimes before that, again, 19th century different parties, but still two party. But there have been plenty of times in our history where actually that's fractured. Parties have fractured. There have been sometimes three parties, sort of three way splits at general elections. What we don't have, and I don't think yet we either have the political system that allows it, the electoral system that allows it, but I don't think also we have the sort of public interest is moving towards a system where you have so many parties.

I don't know if anyone saw, it was doing the rounds on my feed this morning, the Swedish elections and there was [00:36:00] this fantastic video, Rob Ford was tweeting about it, of the exit poll where it was almost like Eurovision contest where they went round all the different parties as they announced what percentage they thought they would get.

And it just shows how many different parties there are in European politics compared to we are talking about five and going, oh my god. So I still think that there is a kind of reversion to the two main parties that we're seeing slightly coming back in the polls, we're seeing slightly coming back in some of the sentiments around the polls and particularly stuff that was out today about whether Conservative voters would be happy enough with a Conservative Reform, partnership, coalition, whatever it might be. And so you're still seeing some of that gravitational force back to that.

Now I'm not here sitting here saying like, you know, oh the next election. I do think there's a good chance that the next election leads to well it's certainly gonna be a much smaller majority, but there's a good chance that there's no overall majority and a complete mess.

You know, I think that's always a [00:37:00] risk for the UK because we're not very good at navigating that. But I don't fully subscribe to this kind of like we are now forever more in a different system than we ever have been. Again, I just think history just shows that actually, sometimes we go through these sort of ebbs and flows, but there's still a very deep seated cultural norm around who are the safe parties to vote for in a general election.

That I think plays a big part,

Mark D'Arcy: Daniel.

Daniel Gover: I agree with a lot of that, and particularly the point that it's very difficult for us to say with any real confidence how this is gonna be looking in five years time, 10 years time. I mean, I remember if you go back to sort of pre Corbyn, people talked about the end of the two party system and then it seemed to reemerge and then it seems to reverse again.

So it is very difficult to predict. I think one thing that I would say though, and this relates to Parliament, I think Parliament is actually not very well equipped at dealing with this sort of [00:38:00] situation. That's not actually just about who are the MPs, although it is clearly a very important factor. It's also about is Parliament able to represent the diversity of opinion that exists even if it's simply among voters and that doesn't get translated into large parliamentary parties.

For example, we currently have a situation where the Conservative Party in the Commons is not that much larger than the Liberal Democrats and we also have some very significant and certainly politically significant smaller parliamentary parties that are polling very, very strongly, particularly Reform.

And the existing structures within Parliament don't really allow for that to be very easily expressed. Opposition days, for example, most of them go to the official opposition. Three of them in principle go to the second largest opposition party. Sometimes they have in the past been shared out. But I mean I think the point is that smaller parties are not very well [00:39:00] served by those existing rules and we maybe need to rethink some of that as well, irrespective of whether in fact we do end up with a break in the party system.

Ruth Fox: Talking of smaller parties.

We've had another question linking into this. So Robert, do you think a loss at the Holborn and St Panceas by-election for Zack Polanski will be a significant signal for the Green Party to change their leadership?

Robert Saunders: I would be very surprised if the Green Party changed their leadership. I think Zack Polanski's position in the Green Party is unassailable at the moment, but there has been a bit of a sense of a loss of steam.

I think over the last few months that the Polanski leadership clearly gave enormous new energy to the Green Party. It brought in a lot of new members. It was able to capitalise very successfully on a sense of disappointment among many left-leaning voters with the Labour government. And it's kind of been hit by a number of different directions.

One is the sense that Andy Burnham has obviously drawn some of those voters back to the Labour Party, is perhaps trying harder than Keir [00:40:00] Starmer did to project the Labour Party as a vehicle for those kind of voters. I think perhaps Polanski himself has come under a little bit more scrutiny, and that's a new experience for him. I don't mean that in a kind of personally critical sense, but politicians have to learn how to face a different level of scrutiny when they reach leadership roles. It's a seat that historically Labour probably ought to win. But yes, if Zack Polanski doesn't win it, it'll be another kind of check, but I don't think it puts his leadership in doubt

Mark D'Arcy: I tend to under agree with that.

I think there are a couple of scenarios here about what could happen with the party system. One is that it somehow clicks back into two party mode and you get a lot of tactical voting so that voters broadly on the left, whether they're Liberal Democrat or Green, end up voting for Labour in a seat that might otherwise be taken by the Tories or Reform.

Voters on the other side of the political divide, Reform and Tories, will maybe will just look at the figures and decide who's best qualified to take on the left in their particular seat. So you may get, if you'd like, [00:41:00] a kind of do it yourself, self-assembly, two party system reasserting itself.

But otherwise look out because our existing electoral system is less of an electoral system and more of a fruit machine. Under these circumstances, you could have someone getting an absolutely towering majority on some ludicrously small proportion of the vote. And the reason I know that is because it's already happened.

Keir Starmer's total dominance at the last election when he won a massive majority for Labour was on a third of the vote. You could quite easily see a Prime Minister after the next election whose party by basically a fluke of the existing electoral system, had total dominance in the Commons chamber on less than 30% of the vote with so many people squabbling for different paths of votes.

It just depends how it plays out. One of the interesting questions is how much tactical voting will there be? How many people may go for this kind of self-assembly two party system? And you may also find that you start needing political leaders who have the skill to kind of float along on a [00:42:00] rather unstable coalition of supporting parties.

There's a fabulous book out there called The Rage of Party about politics in the 18th century, which describes how Robert Harley managed to be Prime Minister for an awfully long time by juggling different groups. So if one fell off his parliamentary coalition, and it would've been a very loose Parliamentary coalition, he could usually manage to recruit another, usually by the most blatant corruption you could imagine.

But it may well be that we need political leaders who can ride those kind of tides. Oh look, the Greens have dropped out of my coalition, but maybe I can rope in some Scottish National Party MPs to support me kind of manoeuvres, if you were a Prime Minister of the left. Oh look, I've lost restore, but maybe the Ulster unionists might choose to support me.

Those kind of manoeuvres may become a lot more commonplace. And that's all great fun inside SW1, but there are a couple of questions about what it looks like to the voters and whether it actually manages to generate good governance that are worth addressing as well.

Ruth Fox: Well, we've got quite a few questions coming in digitally, but before I go to any of those, some quite high [00:43:00] fibre parliamentary questions, is there anybody here in the audience in front of us who has not submitted their question electronically and wants to ask a question? Now's your chance. Okay, gentleman at the back there with the cap on.

Question: As politicians nowadays are very sort of following the Mamdanification of social media, the use of it to promote their legislation, their ideas, do you think this means the end of days for traditional legacy media or do you think that will always be existing in our political system?

Ruth Fox: Mark, you're a former journalist. Legacy media. One for you.

Mark D'Arcy: I'd like to say recovering journalist really, but in some ways I think the tipping point may already have come.

Thinking back to the 2017 general election, it is a slightly weird general election in a lot of ways. It's a snap election called by Theresa May 'cause she couldn't get her Brexit deal through the House of Commons. At the onset it looked like she was going to get a Margaret Thatcher style mega majority for the Conservatives and then that [00:44:00] just evaporated away.

Now all through this period, the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was being carpet bombed by the press. Corbyn will eat your children kind of stories all over the place and it bounced off him. And that was largely because there was a very canny but below the radar social media campaign going on. And more and more people was picking up that despite the furious onslaught in the Sun and the Mail and the Express, Jeremy Corbyn's election rallies were turning into these kind of rockstar level events.

So I think it is now possible for politicians to go over the heads of the legacy media. And that means that the legacy media has got to behave in a different way. At the moment, you don't see much sign of that. I mean, the coverage of Andy Burnham in certain newspapers is, well, extraordinary, the level of venom directed at him, but it's kind of undirected venom. They don't quite know how to get a handle on him. They haven't found yet an [00:45:00] effective means of attack. And Burnham may have the social media smarts to actually diffuse that.

Anyway, the Mamdanification in your phrase there, so yeah, I'd rather agree with that. I think the legacy media is gonna have to do things a bit more cannily and with a bit more respect to what the public can see from other places apart from their own pages.

Cath Haddon: I'm fine with it in, it's the context in which it's used, but in this case, I would reject the concept of legacy media, because again, you look back at history, this has always happened. Thatcher, her era, brought in cameras into the House of Parliament. Lots of people didn't want to do that 'cause they were worried about the impact that would have on debates. Would people just be performing for the cameras?

Ruth Fox: Oh, surely not.

Cath Haddon: MPs are all doing it for their little clips, and they all know that. You know, they're trying to get their little social media clips out there. Harold Wilson, not quite Jack Kennedy, but supposedly his ability on television made a big difference against Alec Douglas Home.[00:46:00]

You know, you can go back to the origins of manifesto's, pamphlets, sort of soap boxes, newspapers. There's any era that you wanna look in British politics, they've had to adjust to the media of their age, and the ones who've succeeded have been the ones who've learned the new way to communicate with the voting public.

And I think we are going through an incredibly rapid, incredibly massive, incredibly impactful change around how we're all communicating with each other. Digital media, all the rest of it. But we've been here before, just different medium.

Robert Saunders: And sometimes new media actually animate old forms of politics. So Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, there was quite a lot of ridicule early on that it was a lot of travelling around the country, holding meetings in tents and in market squares, and wasn't this sort of dreadfully 1920s.

What his team had realised was that actually you would get the local TV station to turn up and you would be on the local news that night, and people would see excited crowds, and then you [00:47:00] could clip that and put it on social media.

In the same way alongside the kind of TikTok Revolution, which has made political messaging very short, we've also seen a podcast boom, which has made political messaging very long, and a wonderful thing that. Actually there was a period in which the kind of hour long interview of all the politicians had vanished. All you got was the 10 minutes on the Today programme. Suddenly actually Zack Polanski on the Rest is Politics being questioned for an hour. President Trump going on a podcast for three hours. That longer form of political discussion has actually been reanimated by new kinds of technology.

Daniel Gover: I mean, I think all of that is true. I think the one thing that I am slightly nervous about though, is with established media outlets that have got an incentive to provide balance, however we understand balance to ensure that there is an opportunity for fact checking, for confirming what people say one way or the other.

I mean, I wouldn't want to [00:48:00] lose that because we are moving into a world where you can now simply subscribe to viewpoints that you already agree with, with little requirement for you to hear an alternative perspective or for those claims to be contested in some way. And I think that's the danger I think of moving down that route.

Mark D'Arcy: Completely agree with that. Back in the days when I used to work with student journalists, one of the first pieces of advice to give them was, for heaven's sake, read outside your bubble. Don't just look for the newspaper, newsfeed, that you agree with. Go and look at opinions for people who differ with you about fairly fundamental issues.

There is, as Robert said, there's a quality problem too. I mean, any folk can call themselves a citizen journalist and set up a blog or a podcast or whatever. And it's very easy for people to assume that just because someone's speaking on a podcast or in a blog, they're giving you the total truth. And it's almost easier to assume that if it isn't the mainstream media, because they're not animated by the mainstream media's [00:49:00] alleged evil biases. But they may well have the evil biases of their own.

Ruth Fox: I'm gonna go to Daniel for this next question that's been submitted. So, Daniel, do you think Parliament goes on recess too often?

Daniel Gover: I don't know about too often. I mean, I think it's worth saying when the Commons goes on recess, MPs are often in their constituencies and we do tend to see constituency work as an important, valuable component of what MPs do.

I mean, obviously there is no standard job description of an MP and it is contested. Some people think that this is stuff that MPs really ought not to be doing, that they should focus on scrutiny, legislation and so on. However, I do think the way in which our political system's developed this is an expectation that people have of their MPs.

If we expect them to do constituency work, then I think having recesses is an important part of that. I think one thing that I do think is that when the Commons [00:50:00] is in recess, that it should be much more straightforward for MPs to reconvene. Because at the moment, in fact, the government really has a veto over this that only they can initiate this.

So I think when the Commons is in recess, it should be much easier for them to get out of recess if they need to due to some particular crisis that is emerging.

Ruth Fox: I should say there are current and former Parliamentary clerks listening to this, no doubt, and I'm starting to feel a little twitchy because the parliamentary nerd in me has to say that the proper name for a recess is a periodic adjournment.

And all our students in front of us who are doing Daniel's parliamentary studies course will no doubt learn why in the course of the next few years.

Daniel Gover: Well, that is even too nerdy for my Parliamentary studies, I have to say.

Mark D'Arcy: We've finally achieved our ultimate dream of being too nerdy for you.

Ruth Fox: Here's a question about the balance between national sort of strategic questions and [00:51:00] then local constituency responsibilities for MPs. So would it be difficult for Burnham to persuade MPs to build more data centres in the UK given very few constituents want one nearby? Mark, do you wanna pitch up on that first?

Mark D'Arcy: One of my Parliamentary bug bears is the phrase, yes, this is the right project, but in the wrong place with the clear implication that it ought to be inflicted on those terrible people over there somewhere. And it's not just data centres, it's new housing, it's reservoirs, it's roads, it's railways. I spent a disturbing amount of my life at the BBC covering HS2, and once spent an entire day with the HS2 bill committee going through rural Warwickshire and all these sort of Miss Marple esque kind of little villages that were going to have a huge railway driven past them.

I mean, apart from expecting a sharp-eyed old lady to dart out and solve a quick murder amongst the bill committee, there was the slight oddness that [00:52:00] everyone was constantly listening to the objections of this and almost the advantages of building large infrastructure in this country almost seemed to get lost in the wash.

There was a very influential Conservative MP called Cheryl Gillan, who alas died untimely, who managed to get the Government to essentially tunnel under her constituency, which was part of the HS2 route by applying lots and lots of political pressure. And this is one of the reasons why infrastructure is a real problem in Britain.

We don't build enough of it. We don't build it quickly enough and we don't build it cheaply enough because it's already mired in absolutely vast bureaucratic processes where you have to conduct endless assessments about the welfare of the greater crested newt. So there is going to be a problem here when people want to build data centres.

Maybe you have to say to the people providing data centres, well, you also have to provide a reservoir to get all the water for it and see if you can get that through the planning process. But it is the eternal problem of British infrastructure and it's not purely limited to data centres. Robert?

Robert Saunders: Well [00:53:00] actually this takes us back to the discussion about Andy Burnham because if we're looking for kind of compass points, I called it earlier, that guide Burnham, it is the idea of devolution. And so there is of course a tension here between wanting to devolve power out to localities and wanting to achieve national political objectives.

And part of the problem here, I think is the way that we've traditionally set up those questions. So traditionally we think of them as national government wants things to happen, local communities try to stop them. And that's going to be very difficult to manage if we are actually devolving power more to localities.

So perhaps we have to actually change the question and say, okay, how do we persuade local communities to want critical infrastructure? It may not be data centres, it might be things like wind farms or green technology of some kind. And there has actually been a certain amount of work done. And how do you get communities to vote for wind farms or to vote for new infrastructure? What do you offer them in return? How would you give them a sense that actually their voices are being heard? [00:54:00] Because our system is often set up that citizens' voice only applies as a veto. We mobilise citizens to stop things from happening. How do we actually mobilise them to say, well, we would like this under these circumstances, or we would like it here but not here. How do we actually give people some agency in that decision making?

Cath Haddon: Just to build on what Rob was just saying, one of the fundamental questions, if Burnham's premiership is to end up being about what he wants it to be about. So devolution being his big agenda, one of the fundamental questions that he's gonna have to face is this trade off between giving more power, as you're saying, direct to constituents versus lifting the country up.

You can't have good growth in every postcode and also devolve because devolving power means giving different parts of the country the choice about how they progress, what they do, what they focus on. You know, giving mayors the power to be able to decide, maybe even do they want to give some of [00:55:00] the money back? Do they want tax rebates rather than just taking the money from central government? And one of the most telling things that Burnham said early on in his premiership, in fact I think it was even before he was in, it, was one of those very early speeches, was he, you know, made lots of noises about the different ways in which he was gonna pass power on. And he said, but I'm gonna get the exact phrase wrong, but it was basically, it's my way or the highway. And he sort of, you know, said, that's not up for negotiation.

So this is the really interesting question, does he want a very centralised exercise of the power that he has where he thinks he's got the right ideas about how to improve the country? Or does he really want to devolve power as many prime ministers have said that they want to do? But then when faced with the policy problems that the government has, don't. I think that's again, another question that we are still waiting to see the answer to.

Ruth Fox: Well, this week we saw the leaders in [00:56:00] Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland sort of indicating their support for a campaign to leave the union.

So we've got a question about how disruptive will this new alliance for independence from the UK be? Do we see a Brexit part two in our future? New opportunity mark for us to be commentating on BBC Parliament. Or could it somehow be beneficial for the UK? Robert.

Robert Saunders: Yeah. I think there are very deep, long-term strains in the union, and that's partly because a lot of the things that used to hold the union together don't obviously anymore.

It's commonly said that the union was kind of built around the empire. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's perhaps more true to say that in the 20th century you might work in Scotland or in Wales, but you work for British Gas, you work for British Coal. There's a whole set of nationalised industries. The sense of a kind of British national project is much more tangible and much more visible than it is today.

I'm very much supportive of devolution, but in some ways, the way that we've set devolution [00:57:00] up incentivizes, particularly national governments, to take credit for the things that are going well and to blame the centre for the things that are not, and that you kind of institutionalise an opposition to the union itself.

And there's been less thought to thinking about how if what we want is a union with strong devolved governments within them, how do we strengthen the union side too?

Cath Haddon: Again, I think it's a huge issue. I mean, we saw with, you know, some of Burnham's early comments and indeed last week at Prime Minister's Questions about the union that it's not quite a blind spot, but he's not as strong on that as he is about sort of English devolution and a few missteps there in terms of phrases he's used or misidentifying MPs in the Commons, things like that.

So I do think it's an area where he needs to put focus, because again, we talked about multi-party politics there. What we don't talk about is the multi-party governments that we currently have in the uk and that is [00:58:00] very new territory and not just in the other nations, but also amongst all of the mayors.

So we've got a huge range of parties currently in power in different parts of the UK and are all trying to represent the interests of their voters, but also the areas they represent. And that is leading to very different perspectives on what binds us all together. So I think it's kind of valid to be bringing those questions up.

Obviously central government needs an answer. The UK needs an answer to be able to sort of address that. It can't just be about the process of how you might go about getting into these debates, particularly about whether or not referendums happen, you know, Barnet consequentials, all of these sorts of things.

Just we have to again think about how to confront those sorts of questions head on and really be thinking about the whole context of devolution across the whole of the United Kingdom.

Mark D'Arcy: I suggest [00:59:00] one real pressure point could come if the arithmetic of the Commons changes to the extent that some of the nationalist parties suddenly have the decisive vote.

It happened briefly during Theresa May's reign after the 2017 election when she lost her majority and she was dependent on the Democratic Unionist Party's 10 votes in the Commons to get her legislation through. And every time there was a difficult issue in the House of Commons, another small town in Northern Ireland got a bypass.

Cath Haddon: No. I mean, it also goes to Daniel's point earlier on, about the way in which the House of Commons in particular, well both Houses really, but the House of Commons in particular is not set up for the smaller parties. So is it giving them the voice that they want? And this isn't just about the sort of English Votes for English Laws and all of those sorts of debates.

It is about the sort of day to day of how the House of Commons operates. And, and again, when, if we're talking about smaller parties, it's not just the greens reform, the Lib des who aren't really that much smaller a party at the moment. [01:00:00] It's also about all of the other territorial parties that are currently in our system.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, one of the problems is we haven't got a process for reviewing the rules of the House of Commons. Where there's a review of Standing Orders, it's ad hoc and more often than not is driven by the government, not the House itself. And we need a process for that. Next question, Daniel, for you.

If you could choose the topic of the next Speakers' Conference, what would it be?

Daniel Gover: Oh, well...

Ruth Fox: Private members' bills per chance.

Daniel Gover: Absolutely.

Ruth Fox: We should probably explain what a Speakers' Conference is first for some of our listeners. We do have an international audience who may not be familiar with it.

So let's start there and then you can tell us what you think it should be.

Daniel Gover: Okay. So do you wanna explain?

Ruth Fox: No, you can explain.

Daniel Gover: I'm not sure I know the formal definition. I mean, this is an investigation that's chaired by the Speaker, been about how many in the past, about seven.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, seven or eight. They tend to be on sort of electoral matters historically, although the more recent ones have been about violence [01:01:00] against candidates and threats made to MPs was the most recent one in 2024. And then previous to that, we had one on the role of women in Parliament and minority representation.

But essentially they're under the auspices of the Speaker, but they operate like a select committee.

Daniel Gover: Yes. I mean, actually in truth, I'm not sure that the Speakers' Conference is necessarily the best route for what I'm about to talk about, but, I do think that private members' bills is what people in Parliament should be thinking about. One of the areas of reform, I mean.

Actually I think it's interesting if you look at things that Andy Burnham wrote before he became Prime Minister, certainly in his book with Steve Rotheram, there's a chapter about Parliament and how Parliament needs to be strong. It needs to be the driving force of decision making.

Part of his argument is that the parties and through the whipping system have taken this power away from MPs and actually MPs should be able to decide things. You know, if that is the [01:02:00] criticism that is gonna be made, well, private members bills, these are pieces of legislation that are put forward by individual MPs rather than by the government.

They would seem to fit that goal pretty well. We've just had the case of the assisted dying bill, which was voted down by MPs, and that has really highlighted this as a mechanism that can be used to change the law, but also to start a debate about a particular issue. I do think it's worth saying though, that it was a very particular type of issue, and actually there are lots of these bills that are put forward by MPs, a lot of the ones that pass are actually really government bills in all but name, but there is a minority of them and actually probably a larger minority than people sometimes assume that genuinely were proposals from individual MPs, sometimes members of the House of Lords as well, that make it onto the statute book.

What they all have in common is they are things that the [01:03:00] government wouldn't legislate on or at least not legislate on now. And it seems to me a pretty good idea to be encouraging those sorts of issues being brought onto Parliament's agenda. And if I just give an example here, so we think about the assisted dying bill, which has been highly polarising and I imagine lots of MPs might not want to see too many of those sorts of issues on Parliament's agenda and on the Commons agenda.

But there are also other cases. So for example, in the last couple of years, the Rare Cancers Bill, which was a genuinely independent bill that was put forward by a backbench Labour MP following a campaign that responded to a relatively small narrow issue, but nonetheless meaningful. And you know, it seems to me that we should be encouraging more of that sort of thing.

But the problem is the way in which the rules work at the moment effectively, it discourages those sorts of bills being brought forward. And instead you get these government handout bills that are just government [01:04:00] bills in all but name.

Ruth Fox: Okay. We've got time for one very quick question to all our panellists.

So Mark, earlier you mentioned George Ower's book Rage of Party that you recommend, and then we had George on the podcast a while ago to talk about it. If you could recommend one book to students who are studying Parliament, what would you suggest? And I'm gonna come to you first 'cause you and I did a recent episode about our reading lists.

You don't have to recommend my book on reform of delegated legislation. I'll let you off the hook. You can come up with something else. So I'll start with you and then we'll work our way around.

Mark D'Arcy: I like political diaries and while in many ways they're now rather dated, I'd commend to you the Alan Clark diaries.

Alan Clark was a medium-sized Conservative Minister in the Margaret Thatcher and John Major years, who wrote an incredibly candid account, wasn't completely unexpurgated because there are all sorts of stuff about his what we delicately call his personal life that were blurred a [01:05:00] bit. But it was a fairly unexpurgated account of his political manoeuvrings, his parliamentary life, how outside distractions impinged, how he tried to manoeuvre within his own party.

And just to tip you on a book that is coming up, which we are going to be talking about on this podcast at some point in October, there is a book called No Way to Run a Country by a guy called Johnny Mercer, who was the Veterans Minister under Boris Johnson. And then under Rishi Sunak.

He was almost a single issue MP, really. He came into Parliament explicitly as a military veteran to try and sort out veterans care and along the way had some quite astonishing encounters with various senior politicians as he tried to get them to sign up to a better standard of care and treatment for veterans. It's a stunning book. It has some fabulous anecdotes.

It's devastating about Liz Truss. It's devastating about Boris Johnson. It's devastating about a lot of his parliamentary colleagues. It is due to be serialised in the Times I gather. And, we've got [01:06:00] an interview with Johnny that we'll be running sometime next month.

Ruth Fox: Robert.

Robert Saunders: So I'm tempted to go in a similar vein for Rory Stewart's book.

I've forgotten what it's called, but it's a bit of a challenge to people like me who really have a strong sense that I'd like our political system to be founded on Parliament. I'd like you know us to take Parliament more seriously. Because it's the story of somebody who goes into Parliament with incredibly high ideals, want to be a legislator and discovers he has no idea what he's voting on. Most of the time that he doesn't understand most of the legislation that's put in front of him, that the whole thing runs like a kind of dormitory in a public school novel. So it's a kind of depressing book.

But for something cheerier, I'd recommend the novels of Anthony Trollop, the Victorian novelist, who is an absolutely brilliant chronicler of the sort of social life around Parliament in the 19th century with lots of thinly disguised characters from Victorian politics.

Ruth Fox: So I think Rory's book is Politics on the Edge.

Robert Saunders: That's the one, yes.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, Cath?

Cath Haddon: To recommend [01:07:00] the book of my colleague Hannah White, Held in contempt: What's wrong with the House of Commons? Which you definitely should read. But given where I am today and I was taken for a trip down memory lane on the second floor of Arts One earlier, I have to recommend Peter Hennessy's book Whitehall because one of my biggest bug bears, and one of the things I spent most of my career doing, is getting people in Parliament to better understand the executive and the civil service and getting civil servants to better understand Parliament. So I think if you are studying Parliament, you should also really make sure that you understand the executive.

What the hell is it that Parliament is there to scrutinise?

Daniel Gover: Well, I actually was going to suggest Hannah White's book, which is great. I went back and reread it recently and has lots of ideas of things that should change with Parliament in various different ways. Actually, another book, if I can have a second one I do recommend Jess Phillips's book about the life of an MP. It's full of [01:08:00] colour and I think gives a very human account of what it is to be an MP today.

Ruth Fox: There you have it. Reading list for you students. So I think that's all we've got time for. Can I ask everybody to thank our panellists, our speakers, and to all of you in the audience for coming?

Hope you've enjoyed it.

And listeners at home. If you're enjoying the podcast, remember to subscribe on your podcast app if this is the first time you've listened in. And, if you've not already rated and reviewed the podcast on Apple or Spotify, please do so. You can also get the podcast captioned on YouTube. Mark mentioned earlier that we've got our next episode coming up with Johnny Mercer about his new book. No Way to Run a Country. So that'll be coming up during the recess in a couple of weeks. Look out for that in your podcast feed. And with that Mark, I'll see you soon.

Mark D'Arcy: Goodbye.[01:09:00]

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 @HansardSociety.