• House Magazine, Ruth Fox and Matthew England, The assisted dying bill: Rushed and lacking scrutiny, or unfairly criticised?

• Modernisation Committee, Access to the House of Commons and its Procedures, Ruth Fox, 10 June 2025

• Speaker's Conference interim report on abuse and intimidation of MPs and election candidates

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

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark d'Arcy. Coming up this week,

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: Indefensible? How the government told Parliament about its Strategic Defence Review

[00:00:32] Mark D'Arcy: The House of Lords versus the Tech Lords - a long running battle over AI and copyright goes into its fourth round this week.

[00:00:39] Ruth Fox: And 96% of MPs say they have personally experienced threatening behaviour since they began working as an MP.

[00:00:46] The Speaker's Conference asks what is to be done?

[00:00:57] Mark D'Arcy: What indeed, but we'll get onto that in just a moment. First of all, Ruth, let's talk about the somewhat chaotic launch of the government's big Strategic Defence Review. Ministers appeared to be live on all channels and indeed all radio programmes as well. Ministers were everywhere. Newspapers had been fully briefed, and then eventually the House of Commons got a chance to have a look at the contents of the Government's big rethink of the UK's defence priorities.

[00:01:22] And Mr. Speaker was not amused.

[00:01:24] Ruth Fox: He wasn't, he was pretty angry. So angry in fact that he called two Urgent Questions. One from the Shadow Leader of the House, Jesse Norman, on why were ministerial statements not being made to the House of Commons, and then another on future of the nuclear deterrent from the Chair of the Defence Committee in advance of the statement that was just about to be made by the Defence Secretary John Healey on ...

[00:01:46] Mark D'Arcy: Which one assumes would've covered that very point. But, uh, but it's, it is one of the few things the Speaker has to make life difficult for governments when they insist on, on doing this. And all Governments do insist, I'm afraid, on making their big announcements in ways that maximise their public impact. And they don't think that making those big announcements just in the House of Commons and then doing a publicity blitz after the event has anything like the same impact with public opinion, which is what they're trying to influence, especially when Governments are in a hard place as, yeah, as this one currently is.

[00:02:16] Ruth Fox: I think that there's some argument to that in terms of the communications and wanting to get out and through the newspaper. But the problem was clearly journalists over the weekend had had sight of it. There were stories trailed in the Sunday papers, which particularly annoyed the Speaker, and then it became clear that journalists had been effectively offered a sort of a lock in reading room to read the report, but some had already previously had it. There was then some suggestions that defence industry personnel, senior officials from defence contractors had had sight of it before MPs. That particularly annoyed the Speaker because he was concerned about things around market sensitivity and so on. And there is a principle at stake, and I think this is why it's possibly different for this announcement than it might be for some other announcements in that what we are talking about is not just any old policy, we're talking about A, the defence of the nation and B billions and billions and billions of pounds.

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