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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. Coming up this week,

Ruth Fox: The Chancellor cries on the front bench after Labour MPs wreck her financial strategy.

Mark D'Arcy: The public wants wider Lords reform on the government's plan to get rid of hereditary peers.

We talk to Lord's expert, Meg Russell,

Ruth Fox: And religion collides with politics as an MP is denied holy communion because of his vote for the assisted dying bill.

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, let's talk about Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, and more particularly about the collapse this [00:01:00] week of her financial strategy. The Chancellor was seen shedding tears during Prime Minister's Questions seated next to Keir Starmer, and whatever was behind that set the markets a tremble that the possibility that she might be removed.

But what was really going on, the really big news about this week was not whatever was going on with Rachel Reeves' life, and we were assured that this is a personal matter that wasn't to do with politics. The real big news was the way that Labour MPs basically blew a multi-billion pound hole in her financial calculations.

The savings that she had hoped to get out of personal independence payments and social security cuts were more or less sunk in the Commons. And now she has a real problem.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well, dare I say it, Mark, we saw live this week that Parliament matters. Ouch. And you know, MPs are not lobby fodder. And big rebellion, even when the government filleted its own proposals on the [00:02:00] floor of the House of Commons as was happening in, during the debate itself.

So they'd had concessions last week that they thought had got them over the line and then they've carried on having to fillet it actually as the debate was going on to the point where when the vote actually happened, MPs actually weren't sure exactly what the content of the bill was, nor indeed what savings, if any, were gonna be made or indeed whether the bill was gonna cost more in the long run.

It was an absolute mess, not just a financial strategy shot to pieces. I think the government's authority and that the authority of the Chancellor, the authority of Liz Kendall in charge of Department for Work and Pensions and the authority of the Prime Minister got quite big holes in this week.

Mark D'Arcy: And I think one thing to say here is that the Prime Minister's authority is indivisible, inseparable from the Chancellor's authority. Mm-hmm. When Prime Ministers start having to sack their chancellors, they run into trouble. Ask Liz Truss, her days as Prime Minister were numbered the moment she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng, her handpicked chancellor for implementing the financial strategy [00:03:00] that, uh, she had set.

And that was the most obvious example, but you can look at, uh, plenty of other examples as well. Margaret Thatcher's 10 year began to ebb once she sacked Nigel Lawson. John Major was in deep, deep trouble the moment he was forced to sack Norman Lamont. And so it goes on. There's a long list of governments that get into trouble once 10 and 11 Downing Street are fighting against one another.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, absolutely. And as we're recording, Mark, I gather there is an effort to bolster Rachel Reeves. She's appeared at the launch of the NHS plan, which I don't think was planned. She's made a short speech and Keir Starmer has apparently stressed that they are in lockstep and that her position is safe.

So that of course is no guarantee, because one of the problems that emerges out of not just the events of the week, but the wider commentary around this being the first year anniversary since the general election, is that with the articles we've seen in the press about Keir Starmer and about his first year experience is that, sometimes [00:04:00] what he says is not something that necessarily lasts for long.

A U-turn may be incoming.

Mark D'Arcy: His previous statements have a habit of becoming inoperative as the Nixon White House used to say. And I think that there is an issue here that there have been a series of very, very big missteps by Keir Starmer, almost from the moment he got into government, the whole Sue Gray affair, his island of strangers speech that he had to sort of recant and withdraw from.

You've also had the financial strategy missteps, the winter fuel payment u-turn. Now the personal independence payment u-turn, and all of this is against the background of a state where the books are not balancing as they should at the moment, where the government is borrowing more than anyone's really at all comfortable with, at a rate higher than anyone can really in the long term afford, is desperately trying to find a way to cut spending while simultaneously having to find more money for, amongst other things the defence of the realm. Yeah. So there's a huge financial squeeze going on here.

Ruth Fox: And just going back to that point you say about the island of [00:05:00] strangers and this speech, I mean, one of the things that's come out of this week is this article by Tom Baldwin, who's a journalist who's quite close to Keir.

And in that Keir has very openly and honestly said, I regret that speech. I regret that phrase and I didn't really read the speech properly and I just wondered what your reaction was because one level, you can see it as a very human insight to the pressures of being Prime Minister.

And he was giving the speech at the launch of the immigration white paper. That was the morning after his home or his former home that he's now renting out, because now he's in Downing Street, had been firebombed and I think his sister-in-law lives there. So although they're renting it out, it's to a family member.

It had been firebombed the night before. So obviously there'd been police involvement and that must have been quite stressful. But nonetheless, you know, basically admitting, that you delivered a speech produced by your speech writers that you didn't properly read does raise questions about his judgment about whether he should have said it, but [00:06:00] also questions about what was he doing.

And you've got to cope with these pressures as Prime Minister.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed, and you are right. Keir Starmer is deeply involved in attempts to stop World War III happening in any of the half dozen possible ways it might happen right at the moment. And there's had to be zooming back and forth from various international summits and all that travel must take it out of you.

And then you've got to go and face the House of Commons. Incidentally, I thought Kemi Badenoch's complaint that he was dodging PMQs was one of the most vacuous things I've ever heard from anybody. And what a piece of nonsense. Really. You're gonna empty chair with Britain at the G7 or a NATO summit at a time like this, Gordon Bennett.

Anyway, but leaving that aside, you have to start wondering why the Prime Minister has a staff who put into his mouth words with which it later emerges he's deeply uncomfortable. Yes. That's an interesting question of itself. Are people around him foisting a strategy on him that he doesn't really want but didn't spot in time.

Ruth Fox: Or hasn't, you know, isn't standing up to,

Mark D'Arcy: Or isn't standing up to, or whatever. That's certainly one point of it.

But the second point is a Prime Minister has to be able to [00:07:00] compartmentalise and multitask because that's the job. One minute you're addressing the House of Commons over some deeply divisive political question. The next minute you're hobnobbing with world leaders. The next minute you're out there negotiating with your cabinet colleagues in incredibly difficult budget negotiations.

And on it goes. And that's the next four or five years of his life. And at the moment, his ability to cope with this seems to be questionable.

Ruth Fox: Yeah and I think that's, if you look back historically, that's what marks the prime ministers who stand out from those who struggle. I mean, this is sort of the Gordon Brown problem, wasn't it?

Back in 2007 or 2008 when he took over from Tony Blair, you know, he thought he was a better politician. He'd coped very well with the pressures of being Chancellor of the Exchequer. And he thought taking over as Prime Minister was gonna be a bit of a cakewalk and discovered that actually it's a whole new set of pressures and a whole new set of problems compared to being Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Now he was obviously doing that towards the end of a very long period in office when people were tired and, um, a bit worn out. This is a different scenario, but yeah, that ability to cope with the [00:08:00] pressures. But thinking Mark, about sort of our angle on this, looking at this from a parliamentary perspective, and one of the themes of this podcast has been since the election and since Labour's got such a very big majority, has been how does the government handle parliamentary management, management of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the pros and cons of such a big majority. And I was,

Mark D'Arcy: I do wonder actually if the sheer size of the majority is in several different ways part of the problem here, first of all, maybe just make them complacent.

We can contain 30 or 40 malcontents who are gonna vote against the government on almost any given issue. Fine with the numbers they've got in the Commons chamber, that's not a problem. But what seems to have happened here is that's just run way out of control. Yeah. And it's far more than the usual suspects here.

This is a third of your troops. Yeah. Running amuck here. And that's a far more serious problem. And one of the issues you've got to think of here is, is the Downing Street operation sufficiently working with the parliamentary troops to try and stall this kind of thing.

Ruth Fox: I [00:09:00] don't think so, and I I haven't thought so since the start.

Again, this has not suddenly happened in the last few weeks over this single issue. This has been a building problem since the start of the Parliament again

Mark D'Arcy: And again and again. Yeah. All sorts of different issues. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Since the start of the Parliament, there have been these stories that backbenchers are distant from the front bench, the prime minister's never seen in Westminster.

And of course, you know, it turns out he's only voted what, seven times. I think two of those on the assisted dying bill. So five times he's voted otherwise over the course of a year. Now, as you say, you know, he's got international responsibilities. He's had to spend an awful lot of time away at summits and so on.

But then that's where the advisors have got to come up with a strategy to create opportunities for him to engage with his back benches. The area that I think is not looked at much is, is the role of the parliamentary private secretaries, the PPS. And if you think back to the Blair years, you think back to Margaret Thatcher, they had pretty powerful PPS operations.

Mm-hmm. [00:10:00] They had politicians of longstanding incredible political antennae. Somebody with the sort of personal standing to be able to go into the Prime Minister's office and talk truth to power and say, you know what, Tony, you need to do X, Y, and Z, or that's wrong. Or, you know, you need to,

Mark D'Arcy: I don't think anyone dared to address Margaret Thatcher as Margaret. At least the PPS level. But Margaret Thatcher's PPS, for a large chunk of her time in power was Ian Gow, who was described as the most powerful man in the government. Legendarily effective operator with, as you say, fabulous political antenna who could spot problems coming. There's a very entertaining section in the Alan Clark diaries where he talks about the possibility that he might succeed Ian Gow and become the parliamentary private secretary, even though he was a minister, give up ministerial office in a shot, he thought, and he was musing on the kind of costume changes.

He'd wear a dark suit for part of the day and then move into a lighter suit in the evening, or was it the other way round? I forget. But the [00:11:00] point was that it was an incredibly powerful. Position to be in possibly more important than many cabinet ministers because it was the direct link, the umbilical called between the Prime Minister and, and the parliamentary party who sustained her.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And in the Blair years, and I declare an interest here, the PPS for Tony Blair in his first term was Bruce Grocott, who's a former chair of the Hansard Society. Actually, my former boss, appointed me as Director of the Society, MP for many, many years. Very experienced, but he's regarded as having a brilliant political antennae.

And you read Alistair Campbell's diaries and time after time after time, even on things on which they disagreed politically because Bruce was not entirely aligned with the Blair Right. Agenda. So he could talk to troops on the soft left and engage with them in ways that some of the Blair right modernisers couldn't. But he could go into Blair and basically, you know, talk truth to power to him, to Alistair Campbell, to the Chief of Staff, Jonathan [00:12:00] Powell, and be respected and listened to.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed. And I think it's in incredibly important that Prime Ministers are not surrounded by a kind of Amen chorus of people who believe exactly the same things as they do.

There have to be other voices, there have to be other perspectives. And a sensible prime minister or political leader of any kind really needs to build a structure around them that compensates for their own weaknesses, their ideological blind spots, whatever it is. And, for Starmer, I mean, one of the problems is, I don't want this to sound too dismissal, sarcastic, but I sometimes feel he's got so many weaknesses as Prime Minister that maybe he needs some more elaborate structure than anybody else to kind of work around.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. This is not to be dismissive of the two MPs that are his PPSs. because he's got two. One is a longer serving MP Liz Twist, and the other is a new MP, Chris Ward, who actually used to work for him, I think, which again may be part of the problem too close, too much of a sort of comfort blanket. You need somebody to engage with that new generation of MPs, but maybe not somebody who's previously worked with you.

Mark D'Arcy: I almost wonder if you need an old [00:13:00] lag. Yeah. Someone who was a minister of state somewhere in the Blair years, who's been round the block a bit. Because I mean the other thing to say about Starmer is he's gone from naught to prime minister in 10 years flat.

Ruth Fox: Well, this is the whole, if you remember way back when, I guess it must be nearly a year ago when we talked to Professor Philip Cowley about parliamentary management in the aftermath of the King's Speech, when, if you remember the John McDonnells and others rebelled on the SNP amendment then and lost the whip.

And we talked through the pros and cons of that and, you know, one of the, sort of the discussions we had was about precisely that issue.

Mark D'Arcy: And I do think having someone who can be seen by your potential rebels as an honest broker, someone who's going to feed your faults and your perspectives into the central machine and have them listen to, and that's the critical bit have them listen to, is someone who's very necessary to any Prime Minister.

You are not leading a sort of army of Cybermen who all do exactly as your programming tells them to. You are leading people who need to be persuaded even when you've got [00:14:00] a majority as vast as this government. As we've just discovered. That majority doesn't insulate you when you're trying to drag them to do something they really, really, really don't like the look of.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think that then brings into question, are there people in Downing Street who have sufficient understanding of Parliament? And one of the questions I'd have is whether some of the people surrounding him are, again, too close is, is it all a little bit too comfy, cozy, and a little bit incestuous?

So the political director, for example, who's the line of engagement between number 10, the person who's supposed to directly engage with the parliamentary Labour party on behalf of number 10, that is Claire Reynolds, who used to work for Labour Women's Network, but she's married to the cabinet minister Johnny Reynolds.

And then you've got the Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, who's married to an MP, who is the PPS for Rachel Reeves as a chancellor. So one, it begs the question, given all these networks, how did they not see it coming? And two, if they didn't, then there's something quite [00:15:00] seriously wrong in terms of how the operation is working.

But then I think there's a bigger question, which is there's nobody in Downing Street who really understands how Parliament works. And some of the stories that were coming out that journalists were reporting that at one point they were contemplating putting down their own reasoned amendment to challenge Meg Hillier's reasoned amendment until somebody told them, well, hang on guys.

You know, you do know that kills the bill. And then stories of advisors behind the scenes saying, well, it's only 85 rebels. We've got a majority of 160 odd. Do the maths. This, of course, is a government led by somebody who said, when he was in opposition, he was asked the question, where would you prefer to be Davos or Westminster?

And he said, Davos, which has always struck me as just the, the oddest situation, particularly for a Labour leader to say, this is not a man who really has much time for Westminster. And the problem is he has to.

Mark D'Arcy: He has to govern through Westminster and one of the tests forthcoming for this is whatever follow up there is [00:16:00] to the failure of the attempt to cut personal independence payments, the government is going to have to find some money somewhere and some is probably going to have to come out of the social security system.

So I suspect at some point there will be a follow-up legislation that Labour MPs will not be comfortable with. Will they be able to make a better fist of it next time around or have we now got to the point where it is simply too politically radioactive to even make the attempt, the bond markets will take note if that is the conclusion that emerges by osmosis out of the government.

Now, if the government can't make painful cuts, the only other option they've got to play with is putting up taxes

Ruth Fox: Just before we finish, uh, this part of our discussion, Mark, I wanted to ask you your thoughts on one aspect of this, which ties some of the bits together, which is that the suggestion among MPs that they have not had any contact with Keir, that they've never met him, that he doesn't know their name.

There was an interesting post on social media by Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He said, there are [00:17:00] over 400 Labour MPs, being Prime Minister is just about the biggest, most important and time consuming job there is. Am I the only one who finds complaints the Prime Minister hasn't spoken to me and doesn't know my name a little childish entitled, self-obsessed, and I just thought in the context of what we're discussing, that's kind of a quite a neat encapsulation of the huge pressures of being Prime Minister, but also this need to manage the parliamentary party. Are they being a bit self-obsessed or actually no, is it fair to think that the Prime Minister has at least met every member of the parliamentary Labour party a year in.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, you would hope that they would've met them at some point, if only on the campaign trail of visits to constituencies and so forth in the past. But the idea that the Prime Minister can spend the time individually massaging 400 plus egos is obviously impossible.

What a Prime Minister can do, and which previous Prime ministers have done is have events where 10, 20, 30 people come. Maybe a Downing Street Garden barbecue or something like that. David Cameron used to do that sort of thing in [00:18:00] groups.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, from memory, I think Tony Blair did the same.

Because I think again, political director, I think it was Jan Royal at that time, now, Baroness Royal, she was his political director and she basically, I think, went in and told him, you are gonna have to sit and meet these groups of MPs. And I think they, they did have them in regional groups.

Mark D'Arcy: But however you slice it, it is necessary.

There is one lesson that emerges from having such a vast rebellion in your back bench MPs, is that you are going to have to devote some time prime minister to parliamentary management, to glad handing, to listening to concerns, to doing a sort of Sybil Fawlty oh I know to the concerns of Labour MPs, but also actually, genuinely listening, genuinely reacting, genuinely taking on board. Part of the problem I think Labour MPs have in some cases with the government is that they feel it's a sort of tight right little clique at the top, and that tight right little clique includes people who've been promoted straight to ministerial office on arrival as a newly elected MP over the heads of some of the old lags who did [00:19:00] the hard yards in opposition.

Ruth Fox: Who funnily enough managed to sign the reasoned amendment.

Mark D'Arcy: And spookily enough. And there are people with very wounded egos that they didn't get the ministerial job they thought they were going to get out there. And that's certainly at least an undercurrent in the big rebellion we've just had. But Keir Starmer cannot afford to ignore these guys. He's got to keep his show on the road, a firmer hand on the steering wheel is needed.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I think it's important to say, I don't think that's self-indulgent on the part of MPs and sort of the way that Paul Johnson was suggesting.

Mark D'Arcy: They want to be listened to.

Ruth Fox: They want to be listened to, who knew?? But they're not lobby fodder and they can be an important early warning system.

We've talked about that on the podcast again before. And, and I think when we talked to Sam Freedman about his book, and we talked about that you know, MPs they get the early messaging when things are going wrong on the ground, but also MPs are a constitutional requirement. They're not a party bauble.

They are the elected members, not the officials, not the advisors, the MPs and they constitutionally have to [00:20:00] authorise the government's program. And the Prime Minister doesn't really exist, the government doesn't exist without the support of the parliamentary Labour party in the Commons.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And a very bad sign in all this was an anonymous quote floating out from allegedly someone in Downing Street to the effect that, uh, just because a few MPs had stood on a few doorsteps while Keir Starmer was getting them elected, it doesn't make them JFK.

Ruth Fox: I don't think anybody's JFK in this saga.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, well indeed. But I think the emerging point from is if people are gonna be that dismissive of them, maybe they haven't got round to the idea yet, that they can't just issue their orders, have everyone click their heels and march over whatever precipice the government has directed them towards.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And also that it wasn't just Keir Starmer's strengths that won the election, but you could argue it was Rishi Sunak's weaknesses and more importantly, the weaknesses of the Conservative Party. It was a landslide, but it was very shallow.

Mark D'Arcy: A mile wide in parliamentary terms, but an inch deep in electoral terms.

And with that, Ruth, shall we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's take a quick break and, uh, see you in a minute and we'll be talking [00:21:00] to Professor Meg Russell about House of Lords reform. See you in a minute. Bye.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth we're back. And while all the fun and games was unfolding in the House of Commons this week, the Lords were busy debating the bill to remove the last remaining hereditary peers from the upper House. And just as they were doing so the Constitution Unit at University College London published new polling saying the public want the government to go much further and much faster down this path.

Not only removing the hereditaries, but also limiting the Prime Minister's right to nominate new peers and reducing the overall size of the admittedly rather large House of Lords. Interesting point here. This is an issue that's been floating around for centuries. The first attempt to cap the size of the House of Lords was way back in 1719.

That was before we had Prime Ministers. I think the Earl of Sunderland was the First Lord of the Treasury. Robert Walpole was several years from taking office as the first recognised Prime Minister. So, ancient political history there. Well, anyway, Ruth, you and I have been [00:22:00] speaking down the line to Meg Russell, director of the Constitution Unit, and I asked her about the opinion polling that they'd conducted.

Meg Russell: There were some very, very interesting results. I have to confess, that we didn't ask about all aspects of Lords reform. So sometimes people ask about, you know, bringing in elections and so on. We have done a bit of that in the past, but here we were trying to focus really on some of the issues that have come up in amendments in the Lords debates on the bill, and we were using in part questions that we have used before.

So we conducted a poll in 2022 where we asked people about their views on election and appointment, and we found that the public was rather split down the middle on that question, but was very, very united when asked about the appointments system for the House of Lords. So we repeated some of those questions and extended them and we found that there's incredibly high support for reform to the appointment system, particularly to trim the powers [00:23:00] of the Prime Minister to put in as many peers as he or she wants, and also to reduce the size of the House.

And obviously these two things are connected. So if you ask the public, do they believe that the Prime Minister should be able to decide how many new members are appointed each year with no limit on the size of the chamber, which of course is the case now, or whether the Prime Minister should be limited to appointing no more new members each year than the number who leave the chamber so that its size doesn't grow.

79% of people agree the Prime Minister's appointment should be limited against only 4% who believe that they should be unlimited with the rest are saying don't know or can't decide. So effectively if you take the people who express a preference on that, it's about 95% of the public who would prefer limited prime ministerial appointments and a limited size of the House.

So that was our most striking, that was our sort of most overwhelmingly supported [00:24:00] question. We asked about the removal of the hereditary peers, which is obviously what's going on in this bill and 60% of the public supported removal of the hereditary peers. So it's got clear majority support and perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a party split on that.

On the other things where the support for change is overwhelming, there's not even any point looking at the party split, really, it's across all of the parties, this overwhelming support on removal of the hereditaries you've got very large majorities of Labour and liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform UK voters from the 2024 election who want the hereditaries removed.

But Conservative voters from 2024 were more split on that. So 42% thinking they should go and 43% thinking all or some of them should stay. That's why you get only 60% majority overall across the population. But then I think our most interesting, in a way, question was when we put [00:25:00] these two things together and offered people four options. You can either remove the hereditaries and do nothing else. You can remove the hereditaries and limit the Prime Minister's appointment power. You can limit the Prime Minister's appointment power and leave the hereditaries where they are. Or you can do nothing. The Do nothing option was definitely the least popular at 1%, and it may not be much comfort to Conservatives that among Conservative voters, it was literally 0%, I assume that's a rounding thing. And there were a few who believed that because this was a poll of 2,200 and something voters by YouGov. But the second most unpopular option is what the Government is doing, which is removing the hereditary peers and not doing anything about the number of prime ministerial appointments and the size of the House. That was supported by 3%, including consistently 3% of Labour voters, as well as 3% of Conservative voters.

The thing that the [00:26:00] largest group wanted was to do both, was to remove the hereditary peers and place the limit on Prime Ministerial appointments, and thereby the size of the House, which was supported by 56%. And then you've got a remaining 22% who tilt towards the Conservatives who think the hereditary peers should remain, but there should be limits put on the Prime Minister and the size of the House.

So overall, that's 78% of people who want limits on prime ministerial appointments. It's very interesting the public are very consistent in this poll and hardly anybody is satisfied by just taking out the hereditary peers.

Mark D'Arcy: But is there any indication in your poll of how much the public really care about this?

How high up the richter scale of public concerns House of Lords reform is? Because the usual answer that's given on these occasions is not very high at all. They're much bigger issues for people to worry about than constitutional reform.

Meg Russell: Well, Mark, I'm sure that's true. We don't ask that on the poll, but I wouldn't deny that, you know, if you're asking people about the state of the health service or the [00:27:00] state of the economy or you know,

Mark D'Arcy: That's the stuff people vote on

Meg Russell: The state of global politics in this heat wave, climate change or whatever it might be, they're probably not gonna put Lords reform top, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant.

And I think in particular, I mean, I've been concerned about the rising size of the House for many years. For essentially for two decades. I realised that I wrote my first piece on how unlimited prime ministerial appointments could drive the size of the chamber up and up and up back in 2003. We could see this almost as soon as the last Labour reform had happened, that the size of the chamber was creeping upwards and there was a risk that it would continue to do so.

I published something in 2015 saying, if we're not careful, if we don't get a grip on this, we could be at 2000 peers. And that's the point at which the House, I mean, the House was concerned about it themselves. You know, they had already been agitating on this. And indeed, I published something in 2011, which was signed by a number of senior figures, including a former [00:28:00] Labour leader in the chamber, a former Conservative Lord Chancellor, and somebody who went on to become Lord Speaker subsequently saying, it's got to stop.

We need a moratorium on appointments. And one of the reasons for that, obviously some people are concerned about the working of the House of Lords and you know, the fact that there are more and more people trying to get into debates and you have to make shorter speeches and you know, the library is crowded and all those kind of things.

That's a more arguable point, and that's for people in the House to decide the importance of that. But what is absolutely unarguable is the damage that it has done and continues to do to the image of the House of Lords. It's become this kind of figure of fun, the bloated, oversized House of Lords, they would put out these peerage lists in August when all the politicians and half the political journalists had gone on holiday.

And then there would be just little me doing interviews saying what the impact of this was and how, you know, it was ridiculous that we're putting more people in, again, deliberately in August, in order, and [00:29:00] sometimes it happened at Christmas as well, deliberately when there was no opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny.

So there are no controls on these prime ministerial appointments, and we're now at nearly 200 bigger in the House of Lords than we were when the last reform happened under Labour in 1999. So it's not at the top of the public's list of priorities, but it's very visible. Every time this happens, it's all over the newspapers and the newspapers are poking fun at the Lords and saying it's ridiculous and a waste of money, and that makes the House of Lords weaker.

It makes it harder for the House of Lords to be taken seriously on policy to press its points and it damages the image of Parliament overall, in my view, and therefore politics overall. And we should all care about that.

Mark D'Arcy: And against this background, their Lordships have actually been debating the bill to remove the hereditary peers.

So do you get the impression that Lordships, as they debate this, are actually mindful of what's happening to their public reputation.

Meg Russell: Yes, I do. There is an amendment due to be debated [00:30:00] on the limiting Prime Minister appointments, which is due next Wednesday, proposed by Lord Burns, who was actually the chair of the Lord Speakers Committee, which was established to look into this problem, established in 2016 and reported in 2017.

So that amendment will be debated next week. But this issue did come up several times in the debate this week where a number of people were popping up and saying, there are too many people coming here and you know, bad for our image and so on. That said, the amendment that did go through was broadly about retaining the hereditary peers for a bit longer.

And there were also discussions in the debate about what that was gonna look like if that came back to the House of Commons, if there was ping pong on the question of retaining the hereditary peers that the House of Lords would look a bit ridiculous to be doing that because there is public support to remove them.

And as I say, my poll shows there is public support to remove them. It's [00:31:00] not universally a supported thing. Shrinking the size and restricting the Prime Minister is more or less universally supported. So I think if the House of Lords were saying, please make us smaller and stop sending people here, they would have public support for that.

And I think they might even have House of Commons support for that. And of course MPs are very keen to follow public opinion where they can. But I think there were some concerns that asking the Commons to think again on what is, after all, a manifesto commitment to remove the hereditary peers, was maybe not gonna make the House of Lords necessarily look at its best in the media.

Ruth Fox: Perhaps. Um, Meg, we should just explain for listeners, there's 87 peers I think now that are hereditary peers that are still in the House that were retained. After the big Lords reform in the Blair years and negotiated by Baroness Jay, uh, as leader of the House to essentially get that big Lords reform measure through.

And the idea is that, as I understand it from this amendment, that um, they will leave the House not at the end of this session, [00:32:00] which is the plan under the government's bill that they will all be departing whenever this session ends assuming that the bill passes, but that they will die out essentially by natural wastage that as and when the peer dies, that will be it.

And there won't be any proposals to replace them as there is now at the moment with hereditary by elections. We've all been up late watching the debate last night. What did you make of the mood of the House? Because one of the arguments that's been spilling around is that the Conservative peers are, partly it's a defence of the hereditary peers, because so many of them, the majority of the hereditaries, are Conservative peers and therefore they're the party most affected. But also that this is part of the way of disrupting the government's legislative program to take a long time over this because it's a very, very short bill. It's only five clauses, so they're taking quite an extensive amount of time up.

Do you sense that there's, from the debate last night, that there's a degree of trying to spin this out?

Meg Russell: I think there is a degree of time wasting [00:33:00] going on, but I'm not sure that's what this particular amendment is about. I mean, I think there's heartfelt sadness among some on the Conservative side. And you know, there's been an awful lot, including from the leader of the House, Angela Smith, an awful lot of paying tribute to the hereditaries who will be affected by this, many of whom have given good service to the House.

And there was a lot of talk last night about, well, it's not their fault they got here through a particular route, but they're good people, so let's not be cruel to those individuals. On the other hand, you are right of course, that this was a compromise brought about in 1999, Labour's original intent had been to remove all of the hereditaries with that bill.

They would've been gone 26 years ago if Labour's bill back then hadn't been amended as a result of this compromise. And within about two or three years, there were attempts to unravel that. Lord Weatherill, former Commons speaker who was convener of the crossbench peers at the time, he was the one who fronted up that compromise.

And within about two or three years, Lord [00:34:00] Weatherill himself was trying to propose a private peers bill to actually get rid of the by elections. David Steel proposed a series of private members bills starting about 20 years ago, and then it was taken up by Labour's Bruce Grocott in a series of bills.

They've been talking about this for more than 20 years. To end the by elections, which of course would be a less harsh way of getting rid of the hereditaries because they'd leave one by one when they came to the end of their time, either by death or retirement. And the Labour position is, well, we could have done this years ago and actually there'd be hardly any left now if we had, and in particular that some of the Conservatives in the Lords who are now saying what a marvellous idea it is to stop the by elections, were continually blocking Bruce Grocott's bill when he was trying to put it through as a private member's bill.

So there's a degree of aggravation, I think, on both sides. The Conservatives think Labour are being unfair. Labour think that the Conservatives spent years and years and years trying to stop this thing happening, and now that they've got a [00:35:00] manifesto commitment on it, they're convinced that it needs to happen.

In a way, I find the time wasting a nuisance because it's getting in the way of proper consideration of the serious things that ideally would be added to the bill to broaden it beyond just the hereditary peers.

Mark D'Arcy: But this is an issue that's been going on for much longer than just since the removal of most of the hereditaries back in the 1990s.

And if you look at the preamble to the Parliament Act in 1911, the powers for the Commons to override the House of Lords that were created then were seen as a temporary measure until Parliament could get round to creating an elected senate to replace the House of Lords. And that was more than a century ago.

There've been very few serious attempts to actually do that one or two over the years. But what you get round to is the feeling that actually constitutional issues. Are not something governments want to get into. They've got much more exciting stuff in which they wish to sink their legislative teeth, and they don't want to spend an entire parliament pretty much [00:36:00] devoting their time to reforming the upper House.

Ergo it will never happen.

Meg Russell: I agree partly, partly with that, but also I think the primary reason it doesn't happen is not because of lack of public interest. I think, although I admit that it's not at the top of the public's list of priorities, the primary reason it doesn't happen is because it's impossible to get agreement on what should happen.

And yes, there have been lots of attempts to get further reform. I've kind of got the scars on my back. I was working for Robin Cook, who was leader of the House of Commons from 2001 to 2003. He was trying to pick it up. After the hereditary peers had departed to get a move on with the next stage of reform. There were lots of debates about whether there should be elections and the proportion that should be elected, what sort of electoral system would be used, what sort of appointed members should remain, should it be indirect election?

Endless debates about all of those alternatives and those debates have continued, but that government published white paper after white paper, I think it published five white papers on Lords reform with a series of different options. [00:37:00] So minority elected, all appointed, half and half, majority elected.

None of them ever found their way into a bill because basically we couldn't get agreement inside the Labour Party on the next stage.

Mark D'Arcy: And we all remember the glorious indicative votes in which no majority could be found for any proposition at all to reform. Everyone wanted to reform the Lords. They all wanted to reform the Lords in different ways, and none of those ways commanded a majority.

Meg Russell: So some people think, well, you need election in order to give the place democratic legitimacy. Some people are afraid of the consequences of what will happen if it gets democratic legitimacy. It will challenge the Commons too much. They're afraid of the loss of the independent members and the expertise and so on.

And so this debate rolls on and on and on, and all that has ever happened on Lords reform. And you know, I've written books about this. I've written about the long history. I understand that even back in 1911, nobody really expected that the next stage would happen. But it was put in there in the preamble as a kind of sop to the people who wanted it to happen.

But this has been going on for a very, very long time. And the only thing that ever happens is [00:38:00] single little things on which there is overwhelming support. We've got to that point, I think now with the hereditary peers, although there is clearly some resistance and some Conservative voters who are unhappy about it.

But the other thing is this question of prime ministerial control over appointments and size, on which the House has made decisions in the past. It set up a committee. It made recommendations that the House of Lords should be no bigger than the House of Commons. The public overwhelmingly supports that, and that is the natural next step.

I think because this reform can be seen as a hangover from the reform of 26 years ago, it's not even a new reform, it's just finishing up the last little tiny step. So what's the next little tiny step that could be done npw, that could be a real contribution by this government? I think it is to limit prime ministerial appointments.

Make it more rational, and make sure that the House of Lords isn't bigger than the House of Commons. And of course they're gonna be talking about that next week.

Ruth Fox: So Meg, [00:39:00] you basically think that this is the chance to get those changes in place and that holding on to the hope of a second stage of Lord's reform that the government did promise in its manifesto.

I mean, it's said in terms that there will be another stage that will look at reforming the chamber to be more representative of the nations and regions. They've got this commitment that was initially gonna be in this first stage of Lord's reform, but has now been held over, to introduce an age cap of 80 on the peers in the House.

And there was some discussion in the House about a proposal that, um, the leader of the House Angela Smith made, for a select committee to explore these issues to try and work out where the consensus is on what the next stage should look like. I have to say, quite a number of peers were clearly not terribly convinced about that.

Some of them appeared to think that that was just gonna kick it into the long grass.

Meg Russell: Well, Angela Smith came forward with this proposal of a select committee to look at two issues from the Labour [00:40:00] manifesto. One considering introduction of a retirement age and the second one, increasing the participation requirements so that peers who never turn up would be automatically removed.

One assumes she was pressed on a series of other issues, including the one that I've been talking about, which is putting a restriction on the number coming into the House.

And she very explicitly said it wouldn't have responsibility to look at that. And there's been discussion about the extent to which the two things that the committee is gonna be asked to report on could be implemented without the need for a further bill.

So the government seems to be mostly arguing that it hopes this could be put through without the need for a further bill. And Lord Newby who leads the Liberal Democrats in the Chamber seems firmly of the opinion that it can be, but other people are a bit less convinced by that. And actually Angela Smith ended up having to say that if it needs another bill, there will be another bill.

But honestly, my experience suggests that there ain't gonna be no other bill, the [00:41:00] last bill was 26 years ago, and the bill before that was in 1963, 36 years before that.

Mark D'Arcy: So Meg, who is the barrier to reform here? Because my recollection is that the last couple of legislative attempts to reform the House of Lords run aground, not in the House of Lords, but in the House of Commons.

If you're talking about the Clegg bill, which was blocked by lack of Labour cooperation during the coalition years. If you go back to Harold Wilson, uh, Enoch Powell and Michael Foot teamed up to stop his bill to reform the House of Lords in the Commons. And previous attempts haven't even made it as far as being an actual bill.

Meg Russell: Yes. Well you could say the time when I was in government, when we were looking at the next stage of the last Labour reform, yes, completely. It was disagreement among Labour MPs in the House of Commons that prevented that even being a bill, and there was never another bill until the government left office in 2010.

So it does frustrate me sometimes when you hear people saying the House of Lords is an obstacle to reform. The House of Lords has never actually [00:42:00] been going back six decades or something. The House of Lords has never been sent a reform, which it has turned down. And indeed it's the House of Lords itself, which is begging for further reform often.

And that's where, you know, the Burns Committee came from. They're very frustrated that more and more peers are being sent to them and they're getting bigger and bigger. They're the ones who are in the newspapers getting slagged off, but it's nothing to do with them that they have got into that position.

They want something done with it. So I think it would be a bit perverse if the Lords didn't put more into this bill, didn't at least attempt to say to the House of Commons, what do you think about this? How about we do this bit extra? And if the House of Commons says no, then fine, it's over. But actually, you know, this bill pinged through the House of Commons in an afternoon.

There was hardly any debate on it. If you'd put in front of MPs, shall we make the House of Lords smaller, I think they probably would've happily voted to do so. So I would suggest that the House of [00:43:00] Lords asks them, would you like us to be smaller or not? And our poll actually shows that if they did that, they'd have the public on their side.

So don't go blaming the House of Lords for what's wrong. The government sends them a reform bill and then seems to not want any further reform. But the House of Lords wants reform, so I'm suggesting that it should ask for it. If they can get it done without legislation, fine. Something might happen. That depends on whether they can reach agreement, which is a big question because the retirement age isn't even particularly popular on the Labour benches.

And I dunno whether the opposition parties are really gonna collaborate in getting that agreed or not. It remains to be seen, but there are different stages to it. First, can they reach agreement? And secondly, can that be put into effect or will they need another bill? There's a rather clever amendment down from, the Conservative Lord Blencathra, the former Chief Whip in the House of Commons, David McLean, which is seeking to say that if there is a recommendation that the House [00:44:00] agrees, then the government will be empowered, see what you think about this, Ruth, by delegated legislation to bring in what the House has asked for personally, I think that's rather clever and I think if the House of Lords wants to change its own membership and sends a request, it wouldn't be an instruction.

It would be a request to the government to implement this. Personally, I would be fine with the government implementing it, but the government doesn't seem to like the Blencathra Amendment. The other problem though is that the other things that people want dealt with, which includes the prime ministerial appointment point, but also other things like bringing in elections in the future will not be within the scope of that committee anyway.

They aren't gonna be discussed. One more point that occurred to me when they were talking about the committee is that if they want to convince people that having a cross party committee coming up with proposals about what happens to the House, if they want to convince people that that really is going to have a chance of being implemented, they could start with implementing the recommendations from the cross party committee that met [00:45:00] and reported eight years ago on the size of the House, because you know, it came up with solutions to these problems and they haven't been implemented.

And that's exactly what the Burns Amendment is about. It takes legislation to do these things.

Mark D'Arcy: We've now got, as it were, almost decaying, sedimentary layers of reports on the future of the House of the Lords. One issue, as you say, that ministers are steering very much clear of is the Prime Minister's ability to appoint.

And there was a quite interesting part of the debate in which they were discussing this in the House of Lords where they say, okay, maybe prime ministerial appointment is a bad thing. What's the alternative? A committee of the Great and Good, presumably sitting in the Athenaeum, appointing people exactly like themselves on the grounds that they are gifted with special wisdom.

The claim is that at least the Prime minister's democratically accountable.

Meg Russell: Yes, you begin to illustrate. I think just what a tangle you can get into very quickly when you talk about any kind of major Lords reform. But as soon as you suggest anything that's [00:46:00] in any way kind of a radical shift from the status quo, people can come up with all sorts of arguments against it and the thing falls apart and no agreement is reached.

I think you have to take things one by one and look for that cross party agreement on the next little teeny weeny bit, and I think there is agreement that there shouldn't be so many appointments to the House of Lords, whoever is appointing them. There shouldn't be so many. That seems pretty uncontroversial, and I think they may well support that next week, and if they do, the question will be, well, what do MPs think about that? How would MPs feel about being brought back to the House of Commons and being told you must defeat this Lord's amendment so that the House of Lords can continue to be of an unlimited size rather than small than the House of Commons?

I think that might be quite difficult ask. I think if MPs care about this, what they ought to be doing is contacting members of the House of Lords before the second stage of report next week and saying to them, we would actually welcome a cap on the size of the House, and [00:47:00] if you do this, we will not be seeking to overturn it.

Because I think removal of the hereditary peers forever, you know, the whole lot of them gone would be a historic achievement for the government. But in a way, it's sort of old news. You know, we've been talking about this for 25 years or more. What would be really quite refreshing would be if the government were to preside over a restriction on the size of the House of Lords, which people have also been calling for, for a very long time.

And that would look like a further step towards progress.

Ruth Fox: But isn't the real politic of this Meg that asked in isolation, do you want to see a bigger House of Lords? Do you want to see future prime ministers not of your own party appointing peers with no limits? They might say yes in those circumstances, but the reality is the current Prime Minister will not want to see constraints on his patronage power, and most of the MPs don't think much further than this parliament.

And that essentially is the inability to persuade prime ministers and governments to think beyond their own [00:48:00] sort of life as it were. And think about the powers that they're giving potentially to future Prime Ministers is a big part of the problem in getting any kind of constitutional reform.

Meg Russell: Of course, and nobody, prime ministers included, but nobody much likes having their patronage powers constrained.

But sometimes that is necessary for the good of the system, and sometimes people's hands needs to be forced, I think. And we all breathe a sigh of relief afterwards and say, God did it really used to be like that. That was crazy. The hereditaries look indefensible, but it does leave the rest of the system rather more exposed to scrutiny once they've gone and you've got the bishops, obviously, and then you've got the prime ministerial appointees and having a chamber, which is almost entirely appointed by the Prime Minister. There's nothing remotely comparable around the world. I mean, the closest thing you have is Canada, where you've got a 105 member chamber, strictly limited, and where the Prime Minister a few years ago, Justin Trudeau, [00:49:00] effectively gave away his patronage power.

So an independent commission is choosing everybody, and he's just appointing who they recommend. So there's nothing like this on the world stage, and the size of the chamber has been going up and up and up. I mean, it was over 1200 before the reform in 1999 that brought it down to 666, and now we're back up to 859 I think today and counting.

There have been 76 new life peers appointed this year. So, you know, we're on the path to a thousand members if we don't get a grip on this, and I think now is the time to do it. Otherwise it's gonna be another generation before we're all sitting around saying, goodness, the House of Lords is back up to 1200 members again, what are we gonna do?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I should perhaps just say for listeners, in the interest of transparency at this point that the Hansard Society's Board of Trustees has on its several peers, one of whom was appointed in the last year by the Prime Minister. So just to clear that one up.

Meg Russell: Um, and likewise, there's no suggestion that any of those people are bad people.

It's not the people who are bad, it's the system that is [00:50:00] bad. Nobody is suggesting that we should be stripping the Prime Minister of all of his patronage power and giving it to somebody else. We're just suggesting that pretty much every Prime Minister within recent years, arguably the exception of Theresa May, and to an extent Gordon Brown, who were both quite constrained in their appointments to the House of Lords, but all of the others have appointed well beyond what is sustainable. You give somebody a patronage power and they cannot resist using it and overusing it. And until the system puts limits on that, we're not gonna deal with the over appointment and the spiralling size.

Ruth Fox: Thank you, Meg, for joining us. That was great.

And the House of Lords will be back at it next week, next Wednesday for the next round of report stage. So we'll see what happens. And no doubt, Mark, we'll be discussing it on a future podcast episode.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, let's take a short break and when we come back we'll be talking about the recent collision between religion and politics.

Ruth Fox: Well, welcome back everyone. And Mark, [00:51:00] what did you make of the news this week that the Liberal Democrat MP Chris Coghlan, was complaining on social media because his local Catholic priest has publicly said he cannot receive holy communion because he voted for the assisted dying bill. And the MP, Chris Coghlan has said, well, first of all, he objects to the priest publicly announcing it in front of families and friends of his children, but also he finds that it's unacceptable democratically that the priest is trying to influence his vote, essentially.

Mark D'Arcy: On one level, I found his reaction a little bit precious, I think them's the breaks in politics. You're occasionally going to have people saying things like that. I think Keir Starmer was banned from a pub a few months ago. Is that landlord acting undemocratically. The constant drumbeat of groups saying that our MP is voting in a way we don't like.

We therefore think he's wrong and we are expelling him as a member or taking some form of exception to him. The other thing that hit me was that this all sounds terribly, [00:52:00] terribly American.

Joe Biden has had the threat of being told he can't receive holy communion. Nancy Pelosi's had that threat.

All sorts of people usually over their stance on abortion issues in America that that have had Catholic priests coming after them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean that was a case when I was working on John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 in the States. He was then a leading Catholic politician and he got various priests across, um, bishops across the country saying that he should not be given Communion because of his stance on abortion. And it's one of those really difficult issues in terms of this line between politics and faith, and particularly the Catholic church with it's, you know, quite very clear doctrinal stance on issues in relation to the sanctity of life. So whether that's abortion or whether that's assisted suicide, euthanasia, you name it, it's a problem not just for the politicians in terms of how you navigate it as you know, are you a representative or a delegate?

Yeah. And to what extent does your faith inform your values, inform your moral code, then inform [00:53:00] your decisions on these kinds of conscience issues. Are you taking greater account of your constituents views? In which case, how do you measure it on something like this? And how do you balance that conflict between what your faith should be telling you and what your constituents are telling you.

But it's also a problem for the church, of course, because you say, on the American side of things,

Mark D'Arcy: Do you want sort of heavy handed priestly interventions in every moral issue that comes along, you'll be down for all eternity unless you vote this line, you know? It's a very odd position for churches to get themselves into it and a very dangerous one.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that's what the American Catholic Bishops Conference has found themselves in difficulties with in the States. Precisely because of that, they've taken, some of them a very strong doctrinal stance saying, well, we are protecting the sacrament, the Eucharist, from abuse. And the alternative view being, well, yes, but there's also a quite a risk here that as a consequence of that you are seen to be party pre. You're aligning yourself with a particular political party in America [00:54:00] in their case the Republicans, because more often than not Republicans are anti-abortion, and more often than not, Democrats are in favour of more liberal approaches to abortion law. You've then got a situation where, including during the last general election, for example, there are allegations that the Catholic Church was too closely aligned with Donald Trump, which when you think about Donald Trump's sort of record and family life and histories, it's a rather odd thing to fit with Catholic doctrine.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, some people can just brush these things off as we are all sinners, but this has oddly enough been a continuing problem for the liberal Democrats in particular.

I remember Tim Farron when he was Lib Dem leader got into trouble on all sorts of issues because of his religious faith as an evangelical. Sarah Tether when she was a Lib Dem MP in one of the Brent seats I think got into trouble because of her views on abortion. And so these kind of things do happen.

I mean, when Charles Kennedy was the Lib Dem leader and was a Catholic, people would remark that, of course, you know, he's a Catholic and this is a strain that he also used to get in America. And John F. [00:55:00] Kennedy was plagued by this. He wasn't the first Catholic to run for president, but he was the first Catholic to actually get there.

And there was a constant charge against him that he would be a slave to a Roman dictator. And he explained that he would put his hand on a Bible if he became president and be sworn in and he would swear to observe the separation of church and state. And he said that if he didn't do that, if he broke his word and allowed himself to be influenced by the Catholic church, he would be committing a sin against God.

So he was adroit enough to diffuse that question. And I think there's a kind of almost vestigial thing here, dating probably all the way back to like the 16th, 17th century, that there's this kind of lurking fear that Catholic politicians are somehow tele-operated by the Pope and it still surfaces from time to time, from the kind of primordial lose of politics.

Ruth Fox: Well, and if you're right, that there's sort of this movement, and particularly around um, things like the number of countries that are looking at assisted dying legislation. The fact that once again, here in the UK [00:56:00] we've had sort of discussions and debate again about abortion law, you're seeing that in other European countries also being a touch issue at some point, is gonna be something on which the new Pope may have to reach a view. I mean, the previous Pope, Pope Francis took the stance of, you know, take a pastoral approach rather than a doctrinal one, which was not in keeping with position of the Catholic bishops in America. Will the current Pope take a more pastoral approach as well?

And if so, that would suggest that you try and keep the bishops and the cardinals from being quite so out there in terms of condemning politicians who are not quite in line with Catholic doctrine, but appreciate and understand the political pressures that they are under.

Mark D'Arcy: It's absolutely one thing for a priest of any religion to write to the local MP and say, our teachings are such and such on this particular issue, it is quite another to start proposing in effect religious sanctions against them.

I can understand why Chris Coghlan was upset by this. [00:57:00] He gives the impression of someone who's a bit blindsided and rather offended by this, people have religious convictions, but those religious convictions are not necessarily a kind of full package deal. You sign up to the Catholic church, you believe automatically everything the Catholic Church believes.

And certainly if you look at what Latin American branches of the Catholic church are doing on contraception, they were not in line with official teaching during the last couple of papacies. And again, on gay rights and on abortion, you know, there are different views and shades of views that come with membership of a church.

It's equally true of political parties. When you join a political party, you don't necessarily believe every dot and comma of that political party's platform. So too with churches.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I did think it was slightly odd that the priest appeared to have announced this publicly when the MP wasn't present.

He'd previously written to Chris Coghlan and said,

Mark D'Arcy: He'd emailed him, but maybe, maybe slightly innocently didn't realise how many emails MPs get and you know, if you emailed him, that email would not necessarily have been read or still less actioned within [00:58:00] three or four days. So it may be that he fired off the email with the confident thought that this MP was going to immediately read it. And it's probably still sitting there in his inbox.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So maybe not the best approach to managing the issue, but yeah. It's an interesting sort of conflict of politics and religious faith. And it won't be the last

Mark D'Arcy: no, indeed.

And, and Ruth, we've got some listeners questions that we probably ought to address at the moment as well.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We've had these held over for a few weeks, so apologies to listeners. They've been building up.

Mark D'Arcy: Ben Johnson says on Monday night, Northern Irish peers forced an unexpected division on a motion to approve a statutory instrument laid under the draft affirmative procedure.

When was the last time the House of Lords rejected a piece of delegated legislation?

Ruth Fox: Well, Mark

Mark D'Arcy: Your favourite subject here? Your starter for 10.

Ruth Fox: Well, first of all, they didn't reject the instrument, so the instrument in question was the Marking of Retail Goods Regulations 2025. So it's one of these [00:59:00] Brexit related instruments about goods and there are implications for Northern Ireland are particularly specific under things like the Windsor framework and so on.

I don't begin to understand the policy detail. Debated for a couple of hours in the House of Lords, but it wasn't rejected by peers. They unexpectedly, I think, voted so they started the debate at eight 30 ish, finished two hours later. I think the expectation was it would probably go through on the nod and there wouldn't be a division, but there was a division called, and it was inquorate, so it wasn't rejected.

The deputy speaker said at the end of the division that the question was not decided because there were not 30 peers in the division lobbies, and the debate there on stands adjourned. So they carried it over to the following day, to Tuesday, and they didn't debate it, there were very, very brief statements from both front benches, and then it went through on the nod there was no [01:00:00] division.

Hmm. So. What happened? Quite difficult to determine exactly what happened, but there were certainly appeared during the debate to be enough peers in the chamber for it to be quorate. In the division, there were 17 peers who voted for the regulations and there were nine who voted against them. Now, the nine who voted against them were all DUP, Democratic Unionist Party, also Ulster Unionist Party, and Baroness Hoey, who's sort of non-affiliated former Labour MP, but very closely aligned with the Northern Ireland parties.

Amongst that 17 who voted for the regulations, there were only 13 Labour peers, plus two Lib Dems and two Conservatives. Now, why were there only 13 Labour peers voting in that division? So I think they didn't have enough troops on the estate.

Mark D'Arcy: So they were blindsided.

Ruth Fox: They were blindsided. And I think somebody either on the, I dunno whether it was the DUP benches or the Conservative benches realised and managed to get the division [01:01:00] and the DUP and the UUP voted. But the Conservatives, apart from two Conservatives, George Young and Philip Norton. Lord Norton, they voted with Labour, but the rest of the Conservatives didn't. So they abstained or were not present, including the Lord Blencathra who'd spoken for the front bench in the debate, he didn't take part.

So either he'd gone or he abstained. So it looked like a bit of an ambush, but the upshot of it is a very rare instance where a vote in the House of Lords was not quorate. I've had my colleague, Matthew England, our researcher, having a look at this, and he and a friend of the society, indeed a member of the Society who we had on the podcast a few months ago, Kacper Surdy, who's also a bit of a procedural expert, they've been looking at it, and between them, they reckon they've come up with six examples in the last quarter century of votes in the House of Lords that were inquorate. So the last one we think was [01:02:00] 2016. So quite rare, but the regulations went through the following day. But then there's another twist, and I don't know whether this legally matters or not, so perhaps some lawyers might be able to tell us, but the instrument was supposed to come into effect at one minute past midnight on the Tuesday and half an hour before midnight on the Monday evening, Peers failed to approve the instrument. They didn't reject it, but they didn't approve it either. When an instrument comes into force on the a named day, like the 1st of July, it comes into effect at one minute past midnight..

So for 23 hours, that instrument said on it, it wasn't law because it hadn't been signed by the minister, but it was supposed to have come into for that 23 hour period.

Mark D'Arcy: Is it now retrospective legislation?

Ruth Fox: Well, is it now? So if something happened in that, well, I don't think it can be. But he's also, um, highlighted, why was the government approving it the [01:03:00] night before it was due to come into effect.

Mark D'Arcy: Seems there very little margin of error. Very little.

Ruth Fox: And they had plenty. It was approved in the Commons the week before and you know, the committee reports that the House of Lords producers and are needed to approve an instrument before they vote. That had been produced by the joint committee on statutory instruments. So there was no obvious reason why it had been delayed, but it just seemed to me very odd.

But anyway, um, a twisted tail.

Mark D'Arcy: Let's move on to our next question from Tim Treuherz. I hope I'm pronouncing you right there, Tim. Why did the government choose to change the welfare benefit system using primary legislation? The bill changes secondary legislation using primary legislation. I've not come across this before.

How common is it? I know the use of secondary legislation and the way it passes or does not pass through Parliament is a subject close to your heart. I'd welcome a podcast on this.

Ruth Fox: I think a podcast, Tim, might be pushing it with many of our other listeners. It could be just me and you tuning in. So this takes us back to what we were talking about at the [01:04:00] top of the podcast, which is the bill that prompted the parliamentary rebellion, the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments Bill, which because it's now been filleted, has now got a new short title or will have next week as a result of the amendments the government's tabled.

It will be just known as the Universal Credit Bill. I think we've taken PIP out of it, but it's an interesting question, Tim, why have they done this? Did they need to do it by primary legislation? The answer is in a House of Commons library briefing. So that wonderful resource is the House of Commons Library.

Mark D'Arcy: Blessed be the name of the House of Commons Library.

Ruth Fox: We'll put the link in the show notes so you can have a look at it. But basically, the Social Security Administration Act 1992 says that the Secretary of State has to review social security benefit rates every year to essentially see whether they've kept pace with prices, and if they haven't, then they have to be uprated, increased.

Now, what the government was doing in this Universal Credit and PIP bill was to be in effect [01:05:00] getting ahead of an annual review. Anticipating more than an annual review because the bill includes plans to increase and make changes and freeze certain benefits. So it's a bit of a mixed bag, a mosaic of things that they're doing with the benefit system, but all would have implications possibly beyond a year.

So because of that, they needed primary legislation,

Mark D'Arcy: So they're kind of trumping the normal review process.

Ruth Fox: Yes. You said that so much more eloquently than I do going round the houses. So as a consequence, you need primary legislation. Is it quite rare? Yeah, it, it is quite rare because the normal approach is this annual review process, in which you get the up rating that's then implemented through and

Mark D'Arcy: MPs just vote on a series of sis. And the different up ratings.

Ruth Fox: And you usually get that in the spring in advance of the start of the new financial year. But there are precedents for it. So back in 2016, the Welfare Reform and Work Act did something similar because they were imposing a benefit freeze on working age benefits for several years.

So that was also done then. [01:06:00] So yes, interesting development, but of course as a result of that, this is what's prompted all the government's problems this week. Mark, couple of questions for you. I think I've dealt with the legislation, so we're moving away from delegated legislation to a question from Keith Clarity, who I think is one of our regular listeners.

And Keith wants to know what are the books that are between the dispatch box and behind the Mace. And then he says, love the show. Appreciate the work you do to make Parliament and its culture accessible. Thank you. So thank you Keith for keep tuning in. But Mark, what are the books?

Mark D'Arcy: My understanding is it's the full 50 Shades of Gray series of sado-masochistic, uh,

Ruth Fox: Not 50 Shades of Erskine May.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, well maybe it's 50 Shades of Erskine May, but no, seriously, I think that there's probably a copy of Erskine May in there, and there's a load of statute books that no one ever reads.

Ruth Fox: Indeed.

Mark D'Arcy: I have a theory that in fact, they've all been there so long undisturbed that they're [01:07:00] probably all slightly stuck together now.

Ruth Fox: Oh, oh, let's not think about that. Yes. Well, I did actually consult our procedural guru, Paul Evans on this. The question about whether Erskine May is there, and indeed it is. It sits on the ledge in front of the clerks. o there you go. Erskine is always with us. And then we've got a question from Louis Jones who wanted to ask something about the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.

And he said Former Labour MP Luciana Berger is now a member of the House of Lords. And apparently she was saying on social media that if the legislation were to proceed to the Lords, amendments to it will be limited because it's a private members' bill and Lewis wanted to know why on earth that would be the case and what that would mean in practice.

Would the Lords consider it? Would they be feel unable to address it? I can think of a one word answer to this: rubbish.

Mark D'Arcy: First of all, it would not be the case. Private members bills in the Lords that have come from the Commons can be amended in precisely the same way that any other [01:08:00] bill that comes to the Lords from the Commons is.

So there are conventions about how far you push it, but essentially the Lords can do as many amendments as they like on any subject that they like. I mean, this is a line that's been propounded now by a number of supporters of the bill, Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, who's gonna be taking it through the House of Lord and sponsoring it there, said that the Commons has decided that there should be an assisted dying system and it was for the Lords only to sort of tidy the thing up and make sure it works and do technical amendments to ensure its operation and that kind of thing.

No. I'm afraid that's simply not the case. It is entirely possible for the House of Lords to completely gut this bill if that's what they want to do. Procedurally, they are allowed to do that. That is not a statement that I'm for or against the bill. I'm not. But simply in terms of the rules of the House of Lords, procedurally peers can do what they want.

The convention is that they do not throw out legislation sent from the commons at second reading, but even that might be up for grabs. Certainly it's been tried before. I'm old [01:09:00] enough to remember when Janet Young, the Conservative peer tried to stop the bill to change the age of consent for gay people.

There was a whole series of ways in which opponents of the bill could attack it procedurally, and they are not limited to some kind of delicate, making it work properly, kind of ethic in this at all.

Ruth Fox: No, and I think those who have been making this argument about private members bills have been comparing it to other private members bills in recent sessions.

And the point is, these are not comparable because what you're looking at with those private members bills are usually government handout bills that are very small bills, a few clauses, fairly uncontroversial, technical adjustments to existing legislation or policy. And as a consequence, there isn't much for the House of Lords to say about them.

You know, they, they're generally not something that they've got much that they would want to amend, so they do tend to pass through fairly quickly.

Mark D'Arcy: But if you look at the big controversial ones like the bill to ban hunting with hounds, yeah, you know, it was quite a long time ago now, but it ran [01:10:00] into huge opposition in the House of Lords.

And there were people like Baroness Mallalieu, the Labour peer at the time who spearheaded the opposition. All kinds of amendments went down. And with the explicit aim of basically stopping the thing dead.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And the House of Lords are gonna have to reach a judgment. It is not constitutionally improper for them to say no to the bill.

Whether it's second reading or whether it's third reading, you know, whatever. It's not constitutionally improper for them to amend it. To accept it, but to amend it and send it back to the Commons and ask MPs to think again about certain aspects of it, certain safeguards, and so on. The question I think peers would have to ask if they wanted to do the first thing, which is just block it in its tracks and reject it, is, it's not constitutionally improper, but is it politically wise? Given that the House of Commons has voted for it twice at second and third reading.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that their Lordships would take the view that it'll get a second reading. There may be people who try to stop it. There may be people who are so deeply opposed to it that they put down a reasoned amendment, which I've been talking about, say, we are not going to support this bill because we think it's an [01:11:00] awful idea in words to that effect.

But if that's defeated, the real point at which the bill is vulnerable is at the stage where it starts to be open for amendments. So we're talking about report stage, which may be late in the winter or even early next year, depending how quickly the bill makes progress and how difficult the Lords timetable is.

But there will be plenty of opportunities for opponents to sink their teeth into this bill.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, on that point Mark, we could perhaps just update listeners if you haven't already heard. You mentioned there that Lord Falconer is gonna take it on in the House of Lords. He's gonna be the sponsor, so he'll play the Kim Leadbeater role in the House of Lords.

But Second Reading for the bill has now been confirmed for Friday the 12th of September. So that will be the first outing in the House of Lords. We will therefore be doing a special episode that day to cover for what happens. I'm in search of our Lords procedural guru and we will have one for that episode.

Mark D'Arcy: Might even wheel someone out to preview the whole thing as well. Just so that listeners can get a handle on how these things will work, play out in the rather different environment of their Lordship's House.

Ruth Fox: [01:12:00] Different procedures and processes and things to think about. So we will have that probably as I would expect as a sort of a recess episode to keep people going over the August break in time for that 12th of September sitting. So with that Mark, I think that's everything we've got time for. Listeners, if you have got any more questions, do send them in. We'll try and get round to them a bit quicker than we have in recent weeks with the pressures of the assisted dying bill, week in, week out.

We've not covered as many questions as we would've liked, but do send them in. Links will be in the show notes as will the link to our listeners survey. You're probably bored stiff of me asking you for this, but would you please if you can complete our listeners survey, incredibly helpful for us in terms of finding out more about what you think about the podcast, but also helping us in terms of developing the podcast as a, aa platform to attract some advertising, which, uh, bluntly helps pay the bills.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed. Yes.

Ruth Fox: And of course, if you can, listeners, please do rate the podcast. I don't begin to understand algorithms, but I'm told that five star ratings are really helpers to go up the chart. So [01:13:00] five stars on whatever podcast app you're using, please.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from Ruth.

Ruth Fox: I'll see you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

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

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