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[TRANSCRIPT]

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

[00:00:16] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy. Coming up

[00:00:25] Ruth Fox: Mr Speaker may be furious. But will government ministers ever stop briefing the press about major policy announcements like the budget before they're made to MPs?

[00:00:34] Mark D'Arcy: How will the opposition parties go about attacking the budget? And how much scope will they have to try and make changes?

[00:00:41] Ruth Fox: And they're the biggest third party group for decades, but who actually are the 72 other MPs? Lib Dem MPs and what will their political strategy be? We talk to former coalition minister David Laws.

[00:01:00] Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, the week began rather irritably in the commons chamber with the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle getting up to attack government ministers for releasing details of their budget plans well before the actual budget announcement was due. Rachel Reeves had gone to America to speak to the IMF and announced her plans to change the rules on government borrowing to allow for more investment spending, for example.

[00:01:21] And Keir Starmer talked about pushing up the minimum wage, both outside of the House of Commons, where of course the Ministerial Code specifies that such big announcements are supposed to be made first. Here's what Lindsay Hoyle had to say.

[00:01:35] Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP: Honourable Members may be wondering how they will get a seat on Wednesday.

[00:01:39] We'll be quite honest, the way it's going, you won't need to. We'll have all a verdict first in here. It's not acceptable. I don't want it to continue. And I want to treat this House with the respect it deserves. I'm not by this side or that side. It is totally unacceptable to go around the world telling everybody rather than these members.

[00:01:56] They were elected by the constituents of this country, and they deserve to be treated better.

[00:02:01] Mark D'Arcy: And I thought it was noticeable there that the longer he went on, and the more he departed from his prepared text, actually, the more irritated Mr Speaker sounded.

[00:02:10] Ruth Fox: Oh, absolutely. I mean, he, he'd obviously prepared what he wanted to say, and delivered that, and then, as the more, the longer it went on, the angrier he seemed to get..

[00:02:17] You could see his papers sort of fluttering around in his hands. And of course, actually in the budget debate itself, just before it started, Nusrat Ghani, the Deputy Speaker, reiterated their anger. So the Speaker's office are clearly very, very annoyed.

[00:02:30] Mark D'Arcy: You sort of imagine that they'd been in touch the week before.

[00:02:33] Ruth Fox: Well, yes. If you remember, Mark, on this podcast, just as we were recording last week, we got the news that Rachel Reeves was in the U. S. and was delivering a speech and talking to journalists out there about her plans. And we said at the time, Speaker's not going to be very amused about this.

[00:02:48] Mark D'Arcy: And lo, he wasn't.

[00:02:49] No,

[00:02:49] Ruth Fox: he wasn't. I don't think Rachel Reeves was on the front bench, so it was the other ministers that got it in the neck. But he made very clear that they're supposed to make those statements in the House. Now we've talked in the past about this issue, and the difficulties for ministers of the parliamentary timetable and when announcements can be made because of the sitting times.

[00:03:09] We've talked about the fact that sometimes Government ministers, you know, have got to prepare the ground for some of these things. She clearly wanted to prepare the markets for what was to come so that there wouldn't be problems on budget day itself.

[00:03:21] Mark D'Arcy: Exactly. And this, of course, is probably something that's intensified since the Kwasi Kwarteng-Liz Truss budget of blessed memory, where the markets were so shocked that they reacted very unfavorably very quickly.

[00:03:34] And it seems to me that what Rachel Reeves and her cohorts were doing was simply trying to avoid that situation arising again. But it does drive a coach and horses through parliamentary rules to do that outside Parliament. And there's no particularly good reason why it can't be done inside Parliament.

[00:03:49] Couldn't she, for example, have organised to make a statement about potential changes to fiscal rules before the budget, and said something then, and got it out that way, and just dipped her toe into the waters? But one way or another there surely could be a parliamentary mechanism for doing this that didn't tread on Mr Speaker's toes and didn't break the protocol but still managed, as I say, to give the markets a bit of early alert to what was happening.

[00:04:13] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think that bit at the beginning you said, Mark, is critical. It's sort of the respect for the House of Commons. She would have needed to find time in her diary to have gone to the House. Or she could find time in

[00:04:23] Mark D'Arcy: her diary to go to Washington.

[00:04:25] Ruth Fox: Well, I suppose at an IMF meeting you've kind of got to go as the Chancellor, particularly before the budget.

[00:04:31] Could she have found time in her diary last week, for an hour, to have gone to the House to make this statement? Or did it need to have been the Chancellor? Could it have been Darren Jones as Chief Secretary of the Treasury? Or another of the Treasury Ministers? Not perfect, but it would at least have meant that the announcement was being made to the House and they could have said, I'm doing this because the Chancellor is en route to the IMF, and she will be discussing these matters with her counterparts in other countries, and the head of the IMF.

[00:04:57] So we're making the statement now. I thought it was very interesting though, that the government's response was "well the Conservatives did this in the last budget. So we're only following precedent" and that really uh Did

[00:05:10] Mark D'Arcy: not well they attacked time for doing that you know, this is this is the thing that always infuriates me about these occasions the opposition parties without missing a beat attack the new government for doing exactly what they did in government. While the new government does exactly what it attacked the previous government for doing when it was in opposition. It's a complete change of clothes all around.

[00:05:31] Ruth Fox: Yeah and that particularly got the Speaker's, uh, annoyed because he made the point "just a few months ago you were on the other side of the house and you were complaining to me about this kind of thing and now you're doing it." And he basically said they've all got to get their act together I think were his exact words.

[00:05:46] But of course the problem

[00:05:47] Mark D'Arcy: Mr Speaker has with all this is however angry he is and however many hear hears he gets for making these criticisms, there's actually very little he can do about it. The only way you could really sanction Rachel Reeves for misbehaving and breaking parliamentary rules would be to get a motion through the House, which, uh, has a very large government majority, so that's not going to happen.

[00:06:06] The one time I saw a Speaker obviously take vengeance was John Bercow some years ago, where the government had made some announcement, and that was followed up by, I think, an urgent question and the minister responsible for making the announcement outside the house came into the Commons and made a statement and took questions And the Speaker kept him there for I think an hour and three quarters just to make the point And I think a lot of people on the opposition side rather gleefully joined in the fun and I think it was Greg Clark was kept there answering away on his feet until he was almost visibly wilting.

[00:06:41] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we should take the reminder that the Speaker doesn't really have the powers, as you say, formal powers to do much, because this rule that when Parliament's in session the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance to Parliament, it's not actually a House of Commons rule, there's nothing in Standing Orders or a Resolution of the House that explicitly says that.

[00:07:00] It's the government's own rule in its Ministerial Code.. Now, interestingly, we haven't seen an updated Ministerial Code at this point. And I think certainly previous governments, I think we would have had it by now. And the

[00:07:12] Mark D'Arcy: Ministerial Code is just something that the prime minister pens more or less themselves.

[00:07:17] And there was no Parliament. Well, I dare say, but I mean, what I'm working around to here is it's not like Parliament votes to ratify anything. It just comes out of Downing Street. It's handed down under the Prime Minister's

[00:07:29] Ruth Fox: signature and it's it's what ministers are expected to follow. We haven't had the updated version.

[00:07:34] New Prime Ministers will be expected to issue one. We haven't yet got it. So it'd be interesting to see whether there's anything further on that, but um, I'm not expecting it. And I think it's sort of interesting that, you know, the House of Commons has had opportunities in the past where it could have agreed a motion effectively reinforcing the point and making it a position of the House that they wanted.

[00:07:53] that, you know, when Parliament's in session, the important announcements must be made in the chamber, but it hasn't done so. Hard to imagine that it's going to make progress with a with a stonking Labour majority, but it is something that perhaps ought to be considered by the Procedure Committee or the Modernisation Committee because it does create this tension with the Speaker's Office.

[00:08:13] I think it's damaging for the Speaker himself because certainly you get it at PMQs, you see it with other statements, uh, the public perception is that the Speaker is weak. He keeps saying the same thing, he keeps criticising, he looks powerless, keeps saying it, keep criticising ministers and they still keep on doing it.

[00:08:30] And a lot of the observers outside don't realize that actually he hasn't got any formal powers to actually stop it.

[00:08:35] Mark D'Arcy: And last week we were talking about the very complicated framework of rules within which budgets are passed through the House of Commons. And now we're going to get a chance to see all those in operation as finance bills eventually go through.

[00:08:49] And one of the things that we talked about in that was this mysterious creature, the amendment to the law resolution that used to be part of the setting up of parameters for a budget debate. And this would allow, uh, MPs to try and make amendments on a wide range of aspects of the budget, and it's something that's fallen out of use, to put it gently, over recent years.

[00:09:10] The Amendment to the Law resolution disappeared from the kind of preface to the budget, I think, in the Theresa May years, and hasn't come back since. So the ability of MPs to amend the budget, or at least try to amend the budget, is somewhat reduced by the lack of that resolution.

[00:09:26] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Should we take a step back, Mark?

[00:09:28] So at the close of the budget debate next Wednesday, so listeners, we're recording on Thursday, the end of October, the budget debate will last another few days, uh, for next week. And at the close of that debate, MPs will have to consider a series of what are called Ways and Means motions. And these are the founding resolutions, as you say, for the Finance Bill.

[00:09:48] And typically there's, there's dozens of them because what they require one each for all the sort of proposed changes in taxes and duties that are set out in the budget. Now, these resolutions are procedurally important because they set the boundaries on potential amendments to the Finance Bill, as you say.

[00:10:06] So any amendment outside of the budget. outside of the scope of those resolutions, it's automatically

[00:10:11] Mark D'Arcy: out of order. Yeah,

[00:10:11] Ruth Fox: it can't be debated, let alone made. So the type of motion then that the government chooses as the first Ways and Means motion, which is introduced immediately after the chancellor has made her budget statement when she sits down, is therefore really critically important because the government has a choice.

[00:10:28] It can table one of two types of motion, that first motion. It can table what's called an Income Tax (Charge) motion. which restricts the scope for amendments at the committee and report stage solely to the matters covered by those budget resolutions so everything else that they will cover next week or it can table as you say an Amendment to the Law motion and that has typically in the past been what has been used, going back, I think, for virtually a century.

[00:10:53] That opens the door for a broader range of amendments to be proposed to address matters not covered by the budget resolutions. The government may attach some conditions that limit the scope for debate and amendment, but generally speaking, it just opens the door to a much broader consideration at committee and report stage on the Finance Bill.

[00:11:12] And the reason for that Amendment of the Law motion. Historically was to enable the opposition parties, particularly the official opposition, to propose alternative tax proposals. The government isn't required to put this type of motion forward as the first Ways and Means motion when the Chancellor sits down, but historically they have done so.

[00:11:32] And as you say, the change happened in around 2018,

[00:11:35] Mark D'Arcy: and which, spookily enough, was when Theresa May's government had lost its majority, and presumably was quite worried about what oppositions might attempt to do to its budget. They'd lost control of the Commons to some degree.

[00:11:45] Ruth Fox: Yeah, there was, the other circumstances would be when there was either, a general election was imminent, or had just taken place.

[00:11:50] When I say just had taken place, it was weeks, not months. between the election and the budget as we've had this year.

[00:11:56] Mark D'Arcy: Used to be the case, but it wasn't this time around.

[00:11:58] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so as you say, in Theresa May's time, in a sort of politically precarious situation, political context, you can understand why the government might not want to broaden the scope of debate on their proposals.

[00:12:12] But Labour's got a majority, a working majority of 166. So frankly, there's no excuse at all. And what they have chosen to do, listeners, you can, you can see where this is heading. They chose to table the more narrow, the restrictive Income Tax (Charge) motion, and therefore continue with the precedent of recent years, but not the longstanding historical precedent going back a hundred years. And that, I think, then raises the question.

[00:12:40] Mark D'Arcy: It's going to stick, basically, isn't it? This is how we're going to do things in future. No one's got an incentive to return to the wider Amendment to the Law resolution after this. Everyone will do it this way. If so, future governments will stick to that precedent, unless they can think of a very good reason not to.

[00:12:55] Ruth Fox: Absolutely, because this is the budget where it's just a few months since Labour was on the other side of this, on the opposition benches so their experience of opposition is still fresh in the memory and if they didn't care enough to be considerate of the role of the opposition in the House of Commons now it's not going to happen later no they're not going to do it in future future years so i think that probably is

[00:13:16] Mark D'Arcy: dead. A cynic might suggest that maybe in the last budget before the next election they might restore the precedent just in case but

[00:13:25] Ruth Fox: well we're not that cynical surely. But I was particularly disappointed, I have to say.

[00:13:29] I mean, on top of the disrespect, I think, of the approach they've taken to the leaking so much of the budget. We were watching the TV, uh, closely in the office. What kind of motion is it going to be? And, uh, I'm afraid I tossed my notebook on the desk with some force in frustration.

[00:13:45] Mark D'Arcy: You were possibly the only person in the country to do that.

[00:13:48] Ruth Fox: There were a couple of others, I think. Listeners, I tweeted quite a long thread about this. So if you want to go over it again, it's on my social media account on Twitter. But David Davis MP calls it legislative chicanery on the part of governments. And he's critical of his own party for doing it earlier this year and critical of Labour this time.

[00:14:07] The Green MP, Sian Berry, was also annoyed and was making the point that the government's got a big majority. What interest is there in restricting debates? It suggests weakness, actually, and a poor attitude to debate and alternative views.

[00:14:20] Mark D'Arcy: And now that we've got, in effect, five party politics in this country, with not just the Conservatives in opposition, but also Reform and the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, as well as the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru and the Northern Ireland party groups, there are plenty of different directions from which a government might be attacked through its Finance Bill.

[00:14:40] I'm sure that there will be attempts, for example, to try and do something about the cap on bus fares being raised by a pound from the two pound cap. Because that's one of the more contentious areas. You could see the Greens, for example, being quite keen to do that. You could see the Liberal Democrats looking for something to try and do on social care. You can see the Conservatives wanting to try and reverse the employer's National Insurance Contribution provisions.

[00:15:05] So there are plenty of different angles from which this budget may come under attack in the forthcoming Finance Bill.

[00:15:11] Ruth Fox: Of course, the Conservative Party leadership is going to change midway through this., this budget debate so it will be interesting to see what they focus on. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if they're expressing some concerns about the implications for farmers of some of the changes in the budget.

[00:15:23] So they might pick that up. Of course, Labour's got quite a lot of rural seats now. So it's got to think about its strategy in relation to those. And of

[00:15:30] Mark D'Arcy: course, you've got the Jeremy Corbyn led Independent Group, which you could, I think you might start seeing the whole sort of constellations of the smaller opposition parties combining on particular issues.

[00:15:40] And that'll be quite an interesting indicator. of how things may develop on, on that side of the Commons, who can rally a critical mass of opposition MPs.

[00:15:47] Ruth Fox: And of course, the interesting angle from the House of Commons perspective is what select committees are going to make of this because, uh, select committees are now starting to meet, have their first meetings privately this week.

[00:15:58] So as I was watching the budget, I was sort of thinking, how are they going to get their teeth into this? And certainly we know the Treasury Committee will obviously have the, the usual suspects - the the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation - to do their sort of constitutional turn, dissecting the budget.

[00:16:13] But there'll be quite a bit of meat for the other select committees to get their teeth into. I mean, I know the Defence Committee, I think, has already announced that it's going to do an inquiry or at least an evidence session into the implications for the defence budget. And you start to see Home Affairs, Justice Committee, possibly getting into the numbers.

[00:16:30] And the spending and investment commitments for their departments that they shadow. I mean, the thing to say about this budget, we obviously, we don't want to get into the, the detailed economics. Other podcasts are available for that, but it was a historically very big budget.

[00:16:45] Mark D'Arcy: And it also, there was the precedent that Gordon Brown sets in the Blair years where he would Do these enormous great budget statements and every now and then he'd say something like my Right Honourable friend the Secretary of State for such and such will be expanding on this later on setting himself up almost as the kind of domestic Prime Minister under Tony Blair's presidency almost. That's a tradition that hasn't come quite continued in the same way.

[00:17:08] There's a whiff of that about some of George Osborne's budgets. But Rachel Reeves set of announcements is so sweeping that there will be implications flowing right through the whole of government policy. And so there will be a bit of sort of backfilling by other cabinet ministers in the future, no doubt.

[00:17:24] And of course the other thing that we'll see right at the end of this budget process is rather unusual circumstance of the Conservatives changing their leadership in the middle of a budget process. So Rishi Sunak responded for the opposition when Rachel Reeves made her budget statement. By the time we get to the end of the budget debate next week there will be a new Conservative leader, quite possibly a new Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Cabinet, who may be responding to this budget in a different way. There may be a change of strategic direction right away, and we could learn some quite interesting things about whoever is the new leader of the Conservative Party plans to approach their time in office. And there's also been some pretty interesting developments around one of the candidates, Robert Jenrick.

[00:18:05] Ruth Fox: Yeah, Mark, I wanted to ask you about this, because I think probably given your past journalistic career, you've got a bit more background and knowledge on this than I have. Robert Jenrick got very annoyed this week and accused Keir Starmer essentially of a lack of candour for having failed to announce to the public or to announce to Parliament that the person who was arrested for the murders of the school children in Southport had in fact also been charged with terrorist offences and the government must have known this early on, he suggested, and that Keir Starmer should have been more open about this and should have publicly stated this on the record and so on. Now, this sort of engages the whole question about what ministers can say, what the Prime Minister can say, what can be said in and out of Parliament. I mean, there are strict parliamentary rules on this, the sort of sub judice rules.

[00:18:52] There

[00:18:52] Mark D'Arcy: are also strict legal rules on this for contempt of court as well. I mean, first of all, as a journalist, you are taught in the sort of essential law for journalist courses that people like me go on or went on back in the mists of time. You are taught that once someone is arrested for an alleged offence, proceedings are active and there are very, very tough limits on what you're allowed to say for fear of prejudicing a trial.

[00:19:18] That applies to journalists and also indeed to anybody else. And it applies on social media and every now and then you'll see on court cases the Attorney General or someone like that will get up and say, people should be very careful what they're saying. There's a live trial underway. And you're not supposed to conduct a kind of running commentary.

[00:19:35] It's also true that there is no obligation on the police to release all the details of all the evidence that they've collected as soon as they've got it. I mean, it may well be that Downing Street was told that some evidence had been found of some kind around this suspect. But at the same time, it's not necessarily clear that it'd be a good idea for Downing Street to announce that, leaving aside, uh, the riots and attacks on people who were thought to be asylum seekers and so forth that took place all over the country.

[00:20:03] I mean, pouring petrol on a fire never seems like a good idea to me. But leaving aside that, there's the process issue about prejudicing a trial, which is a very serious one and people can get into a lot of trouble for doing that.

[00:20:14] Ruth Fox: And there are similar rules in relation to Parliament, to the House of Commons, and the Speaker is usually very clear at the beginning of debates where these issues might come up, about reminding members of the sub judice rule, about reminding them that they shouldn't be talking in detail about cases.

[00:20:30] And presumably that's probably quite difficult to manage, not just in the Chamber, but also in the Westminster Hall debates, where, you know, Potentially

[00:20:38] Mark D'Arcy: in select committees.

[00:20:39] Ruth Fox: Potentially in select committees, yeah.

[00:20:40] Mark D'Arcy: There's a kind of ground rule here, that Parliament and the courts try very hard not to tread on each other's toes. So while there is a presumption of free speech in the chamber of the House of Commons and Westminster Hall and committees and the rest There's also a consciousness that that free speech shouldn't be employed in ways that potentially prejudice a trial. Years ago

[00:21:00] I was making a profile of John Bercow as Speaker and was allowed very unusually for a journalist to sit in on some of the Speaker's early morning meetings. And there was

[00:21:09] Ruth Fox: Oh, they call that the Speaker's Conference? The

[00:21:11] Mark D'Arcy: Speaker's Conference. First thing in the morning. Nine o'clock in the morning.

[00:21:14] Interesting. there we were, recording away. And there was a discussion of a particular legal case and a Westminster Hall debate in which it might be referred to. And there was a very strong set of advice given by the Clerk of the Commons, I think it was David Natzler at the time, that the Chair should absolutely not allow a particular MP to start spouting opinions about this case, because there was a live trial underway.

[00:21:40] The person chairing that debate would be briefed very strongly to keep a very, very close eye on this individual and make sure that they didn't say anything. And that is perfectly normal in the parliamentary context. A very famous incident many years ago where Michael Mates, a veteran Conservative MP, got up and tried to make a speech about a case involving a guy called Asil Nadir.

[00:22:01] Oh goodness, that's back in the day. I mean, this is in the 90s, about how his criminal case had been handled. And the speaker, Betty Boothroyd basically got up and warned him off and then he kept going and she basically sort of gored and trampled him In a particularly magnificent fashion and told him to sit down and shut up and that's what the chair normally does. There's nothing unusual about MPs being warned off this subject by the chair. That kind of thing is really quite routine and there are very very strong reasons for doing it.

[00:22:33] Yeah, so it doesn't sound a good, a good position for Mr.

[00:22:35] Jenrick to find himself in. But just going back to what you were, you were saying earlier, I mean you, you are clearly one of those rare people that has sat in the, the Speaker's Conference, and we should perhaps just explain a little bit to listeners, because I, I was intrigued by it. So this is the morning meeting where the Speaker meets with Speakers and the Deputy Speakers.

[00:22:52] Meet with their officials, with the clerks of the House, and they look at the business of the House for the day, and try to work out what issues are going to come up that they can foresee on the Order Paper that might become problematic. I guess that's the point at which the Speaker probably makes decisions about things like urgent questions and ministerial statements and confirms all of that, gets advice.

[00:23:11] So, fascinating to have sat in on that.

[00:23:14] It's a very seldom seen piece of parliamentary activity there. And the Speaker and his officials make all these decisions. You know, warnings are passed down, perhaps the chair in a particular occasion is warned to be aware that something might happen. But those kind of decisions are made there, and it was just fascinating to see, and the thing about journalists in Westminster is we very, very seldom get to see kind of under the hood and see the engine turning over.

[00:23:38] And this was almost the only occasion in 20 years of covering Parliament where I actually did get to see something like that.

[00:23:43] Ruth Fox: Yeah, fascinating. Well, Mark, with that, shall we take a short break? And when we get back, we've been sitting down with David Laws, the former Liberal Democrat MP, coalition Minister, about Liberal-Labour strategy.

[00:23:56] He's just written a new book about it and we thought it'd be intriguing to find out what does he think the new parliamentary party, this big group of Liberal Democrat MPs, who are they and what's their future?

[00:24:06] Mark D'Arcy: Tune in in a moment.

[00:24:07] Ruth Fox: See you then.

[00:24:11] Westminster is always buzzing with political drama and rumours. But whatever the daily gossip or the latest crisis, lawmaking and parliamentary scrutiny carries on regardless. So it's crucial to stay informed about what's happening in Parliament each week. That's why we've launched a new Parliament Matters Bulletin, a weekly analysis of what's coming up in Westminster, as a complement to this podcast.

[00:24:33] Our approach is inspired by the informative articles Mark used to write each week for the BBC. Which many of you have told us you miss. So if you want to know what's coming up in Parliament, sign up to our Hansard Society newsletter. To get the bulletin straight to your inbox every weekend, you go to hansardsociety.org.uk and click on the newsletter button in the menu bar at the top and fill in your email details.

[00:24:56] It'll only take a minute. Again, that's hansardsociety.org.uk.

[00:25:04] Mark D'Arcy: David Laws, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod. I wanted to start by relating something that happened to me a few years ago where I found myself on a train with a Labour MP and the Labour MP had a little joke and it went something like this. You're a Labour MP and you're in a balloon that's gradually losing height along with a Liberal Democrat MP and a Conservative MP. Which one do you throw out?

[00:25:27] And the answer to that was the Tory, business before pleasure. And that, I suppose, could be said to be an illustration of the weird relationship between Labour and the Liberals and Liberal Democrats. The level of distrust, the level of distaste. And why is that? Because the history of the two parties, as your new book Serpents, Goats, and Turkeys illustrates, is very much intertwined.

[00:25:50] The old Gladstone Campbell Bannerman era Liberal Party nurtured the growth of the Labour Party in Parliament by not running against the founding Labour MPs.

[00:25:59] David Laws: Yeah, look, I think there are two reasons why there have been quite often tensions between the Labour Party and the Liberals or Liberal Democrats.

[00:26:07] The first actually is that people often in politics like it when politics is polarizing. And they can be in one party and there is another party that's very different for them in terms of its ideology and policies. And then politics is sort of easy, and it's back and forth between those two parties.

[00:26:27] And what Labour have often not liked about the Liberals and Liberal Democrats is that we sort of get in the way of that two party politics, you know, with that sort of irritating lot that sometimes have parties. Policy positions which aren't as right wing, in inverted commas, as the Conservatives, which can compete with the Labour Party in some areas if people are disillusioned with the Labour government, as happened in Blair's second and third terms in office in the early 2000s.

[00:26:54] So I think that that's the first thing that people in politics in general like black and white, and they don't like it when somebody else comes in to mess that up. But the other reason that there's a big tension between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party is that although they seem to have similar values and policies when the two parties first started cooperating in the early 1900s when the Labour Party consisted of just a couple of there was quite a lot of policy and values alignment then.

[00:27:23] But the more socialist the Labour Party got as it went into the 1920s and the 1930s, the more that dividing line on economic policy, which previously put Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the same side, united in favour of free trade, against the conservative party, which for a while was a protectionist pro tariff party, that dividing line changed to a free markets versus socialist dividing line.

[00:27:52] And suddenly a Liberal Party was always more likely to be on the free market capitalist side of that. So there is a serious policy issue, which has divided the two parties at times. And that is Labour has quite often over the last 60 70 80 years been a socialist party of nationalisation of big government That can never be a Liberal Party position And that has been the deep ditch that has divided the two parties for much of the period since the 1920s. But not all of the period, you know, particularly the period under Tony Blair when he moved the Labour Party well to the right on economic policy

[00:28:30] Mark D'Arcy: Was there also perhaps a level of politically inspired distrust because essentially the Labour Party having been nurtured by the old Edwardian era liberal party eventually ate that party in the 1920s and took over as the main opposition to the Conservatives.

[00:28:47] And a bit later on you've got, and you were part of it, the Liberal Democrats going into coalition with the Conservatives, having just run on an election platform somewhat to the left of Labour in, in 2010, which again, really poisoned relationships, I imagine.

[00:29:00] David Laws: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that whereas in the very early days when the Liberal Party was actually allowing Labour to stand some of its candidates unopposed to Westminster seats

[00:29:10] after that spell of very close cooperation, two things created divisions as well as the policy issues. The first was that by the 1920s, Labour had moved from a strategy of cooperation with the Liberals to break through, towards a very explicit strategy of displacing the Liberals, kicking them out, replacing them as the other great party of politics and therefore it was that for a period of time Ramsay MacDonald actually had more in common with some of the Conservative leaders than he had with people like Lloyd George He was focused very much on trying to destroy the Liberal Party so that Labour would be the the other natural party of government. So that was one issue and the other that you pick up both in relation to the recent coalition, but also the relationship between the Liberal Party in the 30s, 40s, 50s, is there have been these periods where actually the Liberals have been working with the Conservatives, or arguably closer to them than with Labour.

[00:30:10] So in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the Liberal Party in a way only survived because the Conservative Party allowed most Liberal MPs a free run in their seats unchallenged. And Winston Churchill was desperate to have a coalition with the Liberals in 1950 and in 1951. And then of course, much more recently, we had the coalition between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015.

[00:30:36] So it's unsurprising that some people in the Labour Party say, you know, Are they really our allies? You know, they remember the decades where the Liberals seem closer to the Conservatives, or they may remember the period of coalition government. So you're right that as well as the ideological dividing line, there is this quite mixed experience of proximity of the parties over the last 125 years.

[00:31:00] Ruth Fox: David, the one occasion where there is practical working with the Labour Party is the mid 1970s with the Lib Lab Pact and that sort of sandwich between that sort of desire to work with Conservatives in the 50s and then the relationship with Tony Blair's government. How do you think that affected things?

[00:31:15] Because obviously just a few years later we get the emergence of the SDP, a whole philosophical argument about the realignment of the left. Where do you place the Lib Lab Pact in that historical context?

[00:31:28] David Laws: Yeah, the Lib Lab pact is quite an oddity, really. I mean, the Liberals, as you mentioned, went into a pact with Labour for a period of just over a year, which avoided for Labour a very difficult general election, which gave them a chance to recover before the 1979 election.

[00:31:44] Labour seemed to gain hugely from it, and the Liberals gained very little. Indeed, their support plummeted after they went in to that pact. But David Steel, the Liberal leader at the time, saw it as a way of building up credibility and argued in a way that it created some of the relationships that then sustained the alliance between the Liberal Party and the breakaway from Labour STP in the early 1980s.

[00:32:11] My view, as expressed in the book, is that actually Labour in the 1970s was not really on policy, a natural ally of the Liberals who did achieve very little from that pact. And actually, it was much more in the Liberal Party's interests as many of their leading figures thought at the time to retain a difference from the Labour Party, to allow the Labour Party to lose, and then split.

[00:32:39] And that split was then really the opportunity that the Liberals had to rebuild a centre left party in their image, and to try to marginalise the socialist element in the Labour Party, which had really been dominant since the 1930s. So I think David Steele's strategy. In the 1970s and going into the Lib Lab pact was in a way commendable adult politics for a party that had been on the fringe for so many years, but probably quite bad strategy.

[00:33:09] And actually, the Liberals were really lucky not to get pretty wiped out in 1979. Only a last minute by election win got them lots of publicity and may have helped them to salvage their position in the 79 election.

[00:33:23] Mark D'Arcy: Fast forwarding to the present, you have a situation now where there's a very, very large group of Liberal Democrat MPs, the largest third party group that there's been for really quite a long time, nearly a hundred years, sitting on the opposition benches facing the Labour Party, but pitching themselves as kind of critical friends to the Labour government rather than outright damn the torpedoes opposition, but what's not clear to me is who these people are. I mean, you, you talk about Labour having won a loveless landslide in your book, but that's also true of the Liberal Democrats. A lot of Lib Dem MPs won by not being the Conservative Party in Sussex, or Surrey, or Oxfordshire, but it's still not clear who they actually are, other than perhaps local champions fighting local issues, and campaigning on the local bypass, or the closure of the A& E, or whatever.

[00:34:11] So, have you got an impression of who these guys are?

[00:34:14] David Laws: Yes, I think I have, and although you're quite right to say that the Liberal Democrats strategy in the last general election was very much to win by simply opposing a conservative government that have been in power a long time, that have messed lots of things up, I think that there is a clear identity to many of the people who've been elected as Liberal Democrats.

[00:34:34] They are essentially in the centre ground of politics where the party has been parked for as long as anybody can remember. They believe in the free market, they're sceptical of big government, but they also want well funded public services, particularly areas such as education that the party's always been very passionate about, health service.

[00:34:55] They have a strong commitment to the environment, that green strand has been there for a long period of time in the party. My guess is many of them are quite internationalist in outlook. Some of them have been motivated by Brexit, by having a Conservative Party that has gone off to a sort of nationalist position on the issue of Europe.

[00:35:15] So I think that there is a clear identity there, even though it hasn't perhaps been as evident in fighting the 2024 campaign that was really simply about picking up on areas of perceived weakness for the Conservative Party. And it's understandable, I think that the Lib Dems, given the how badly hurt they were in 2015 at the end of the coalition with David Cameron, just focused in a way on a survival strategy, getting back in the game strategy in 2024.

[00:35:43] But to survive and prosper long term as a political party, you've got to have a clear agenda and ideology. You've got to motivate new people to join the party. And I think the challenge for Ed Davey now is to build that policy foundation for the party, to talk about a much wider range of issues than those aired at the 2024 election.

[00:36:05] But to do that while not repelling any of the new voters that have secured him seats that, frankly, the Lib Dems have never held before in affluent parts of, uh, the south and southeast of the country that used to be regarded as cast iron safe seats. That's not going to be an easy thing to do, but every successful political party has to be able to do things like that and has to be an alliance of voters with different interests and perspectives.

[00:36:33] Mark D'Arcy: I mean, the problem I have with some of this is that I think that you can fight some of the seats that they've just won as kind of Rory Stewart, you certainly can't win those seats as Jeremy Corbyn. And that's the dilemma in a sense, that the kind of self concept of the Lib Dems as a left of centre party is at war with the voters that they're trying to hold.

[00:36:53] David Laws: Well, I'm not sure that the party has ever really, in recent times, gone to the electorate with a very left wing manifesto of its own. I think it has generally been quite a moderate manifesto. There may be issues that are divisive around Europe, but generally on the economic and social policy, it's been centrist.

[00:37:13] But a key point that I think you've just touched on is that the Liberal Democrats often do well when Labour is perceived to be a moderate alternative to the Conservatives. So people think well actually the area i'm in Is one that Labour can't win. I want a change from the Conservatives. I'm not too worried about Labour getting into power I'd be very happy with the Lib Dem MP in this area So the Lib Dems did well, you know in 97 when Labour had a moderate leader in Tony Blair.

[00:37:46] They did well when Keir Starmer was perceived to be moderate and people weren't afraid of a Labour government. In a situation where a Labour government does badly or appears to be left wing or people don't want it and the Liberal Democrats just seem to be too close to it, that's the really dangerous point, particularly if you're relying upon former Conservative voters and the consistent message that you pick up in this book is that whenever the Liberals and Liberal Democrats have been close to other parties in government, or even when they've been hung parliaments, where those Liberal votes appear to be crucial to keeping the party in power.

[00:38:27] That can be very damaging to the party in the following general election. And it's that proximity to other parties that can be damaging, not having Labour in power per se. And actually in 2005, 2010, the Lib Dems did quite well in spite of having a Labour government in power.

[00:38:45] Ruth Fox: So learning the lessons of history, David, and given the political context, obviously we don't quite know yet how the Conservative Party's future is going to pan out under its new leader and the threat from Reform and so on, but given the lessons of history, where do you think Ed Davey should be looking to position the party for the next election? Is it simply to build on its current position, retain the seats as the third party, or do better? And if so, how?

[00:39:12] David Laws: Well, I think firstly, he's got to recognise that he's got a challenge in trying to win more Conservative seats. After all, given the landslide against the Tories in 2024, it's going to be very difficult to pick up lots more. But given the seats he holds and the Lib Dem approach, it's not obvious that he's going to be able to pick up seats in very Labour areas in the North, the Midlands, where the Lib Dem vote has been reduced to a very low level. So he's going to have to find seats that may be held by the governing party, but that are more vulnerable to a liberal or Lib Dem challenge.

[00:39:49] Those could be more affluent seats that have got Labour MPs, higher levels of higher education that that tend to be associated with voting Lib Dem in some parts of the country. So he's going to have to search out the right places. He's also going to have to do something which is quite tricky. He's going to have to keep a bit of a distance from the Labour Party because we know that proximity can be dangerous.

[00:40:13] But he's also got to note the fact that the two parties have, in the past, tended only to attempt to cooperate and look at key issues for the Lib Dems, like electoral reform, when they've absolutely had to do that because the Labour Party's been in danger of losing power. And often then it's been too late to affect change.

[00:40:37] So if you want to reform the electoral system, which is still probably quite important for the Lib Dems, long term interest, the

[00:40:45] Mark D'Arcy: Holy Grail,

[00:40:45] David Laws: the time to do it actually is when the Labour Party has got a working majority when they are capable of delivering change. And that's now. So that's a tricky thing to do.

[00:40:58] How do you

[00:40:59] Mark D'Arcy: How do you persuade a party that's got a massive majority on 33 percent of the vote that the best thing to do is switch to PR which would give them a much smaller majority, if any majority at all.

[00:41:09] David Laws: That's right, and that was what Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair failed to do in 97 and the period after that.

[00:41:16] Perhaps understandably, particularly given that Labour had not only a very large majority, but a very high vote share. Now what's interesting for Ed Davey is that, although Keir Starmer has an enormous majority and appeared to do very well in 2024, we all know that he did that on an incredibly low share of the vote, under 34%.

[00:41:39] I mean, I thought he'd get in the 30s, but he got even lower than I expected. And I think what that hints is that the Labour majority may be huge. But actually, it's vulnerability to an electoral backlash is extremely large. And that might offer Ed Davey an opportunity. It might be that Labour now are in that very unusual position of having a very large majority but real doubt over whether they can sustain that by themselves in the medium and long term.

[00:42:09] Ruth Fox: David, you were in Parliament for a number of years, you were in the House of Commons, and you were on both the backbenches and then in government during the coalition. Looking at Parliament now, how would you, if you were advising Ed Davey, how would you advise him to use the House of Commons, the opportunities in Parliament, to sketch out that sort of philosophy, the principles, the policies that he wants to get the party identified with.

[00:42:36] And, you know, we saw during the general election, he had a remarkable ability to get attention, but to some extent by behaving a bit like a clown. And it's a criticism, I think Mark and I have, that the media's approach to this, that it took that in order to get a focus on Lib Dem policies during the general election.

[00:42:54] But it worked. You can't quite do that week in, week out in the House of Commons. So, how can he use the House of Commons to get attention and to get some focus on the party?

[00:43:03] David Laws: Two things. I mean, firstly, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier for him to get that attention now that he's leading a party of 72 MPs.

[00:43:11] As well as using that enhanced position in Parliament, I think Ed should go on doing what he's been doing very well over recent years and recognising that opposition parties can't always make the political weather themselves, but they can exploit opportunities that arise very well. When those arise, they can be nimble.

[00:43:30] They can focus in on issues of great concern to the public. But the other thing is that as well as just focusing on those one or two or three big issues where the government's getting itself into trouble. Now that the party is larger, I think that there is more need and more opportunity to develop that wider philosophy of what does liberalism and liberal democracy stand for.

[00:43:55] What are the issues that may not be the top three in the list of public concerns today, but are motivating many voters that are going to bring on. Activists and future MPs and people who are passionate, you know, you can't sustain a big political party just on two or three or four here today, gone tomorrow issues.

[00:44:14] So I think he's got that opportunity now to build the intellectual agenda for the party, the policy agenda. And to expand that to a much wider range of topics than the party's been able to focus on in recent years.

[00:44:28] Mark D'Arcy: A final thought really David, um, the Conservative leadership election is underway as we're talking, we don't know the result of it yet, but there seems to be a very real possibility at least, that the kind of Conservative coalition may unravel a bit, and there may be some fairly centrist Conservatives looking for a new home before much longer.

[00:44:48] Should the Lib Dems be setting out their stall to get the Rory Stewarts, the David Gauke's, people like that?

[00:44:53] David Laws: Yes, I mean clearly a lot of those Conservative centralists have voted for the Liberal Democrats in the last election. Are probably still going to be concerned about the type of leadership that is on offer from the Conservative Party under either of the potential leadership candidates.

[00:45:10] And the Conservative Party has got this extremely difficult job of thinking it needs to appeal to Reform UK voters. But holding on to some moderate, centrist, liberal Conservative voters of the type that David Cameron tended to represent and cultivate. That means that there is that opportunity, I think, for the Liberal Democrats to continue to peel off those moderate Conservatives, and to get some of those people inside their party, but also to go on targeting some of the seats that they just missed out on at the general election in 2024.

[00:45:44] Mark D'Arcy: Well, David Laws, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod today. The book is Serpents, Goats and Turkeys, A Century of Liberal Labour Relations, and it's quite an interesting sidelight on what might now happen with the Labour Party and the Lib Dems.

[00:45:57] Ruth Fox: Thanks, David.

[00:45:58] Mark D'Arcy: Thank you both very much.

[00:46:02] Ruth Fox: So, Mark, we're back and what do you think we learned from that discussion with David?

[00:46:06] Mark D'Arcy: You get a sense of quite how difficult the strategic dilemmas facing the Lib Dems as kind of the group in the middle are, especially in this new era of five party politics with Reform and the Greens as well, all competing for votes outside the two big parties.

[00:46:22] But I do wonder whether the Lib Dems will be able to attract the Greens. That tranche of centrist Conservative voters, whether the Conservative coalition will unpeel to the extent that there may be people up for grabs looking for a new political home, whether those voters can be persuaded to put up orange posters rather than blue ones, or whether the new Conservative leader, whoever it is, will be able to hold that coalition together, despite what's been really quite a divisive leadership campaign, with some quite nasty brickbats being exchanged, and two leaders who don't exactly come from the one nation wing of the Conservative Party.

[00:46:56] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it exposes that eternal dilemma for the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats now, is a lot depends not just on what they do, but what the other parties do as well, and how much space opens up politically for them, and where on the left or right. We know the Liberal Democrats, as a result of this election, we associate the issue of social care with them now.

[00:47:17] We know that of all the parties in Parliament, they're pro European, but they don't really want to talk too much about it. So the question, I think, philosophically, and politically is what other issues are they going to associate themselves with? What other issues are going to become their issues in this Parliament?

[00:47:33] Because they're not going to be able to get through the next five years on that one issue and on Ed Davey periodically appearing on the media where they're sort of the latest

[00:47:42] Mark D'Arcy: Performing a stunt.

[00:47:43] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so that is not going to be enough to sustain them through the Parliament. So it'd be interesting to see how they utilise the opportunities that they're going to have in Parliament as the third party.

[00:47:53] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, one thing's certain that they can't just survive as a comedy turn.

[00:47:56] Ruth Fox: No, absolutely not. So, Mark, with that I think we'll leave it there. Listeners, do tune in later in the week. We will have a bonus episode where we'll be answering listeners questions for you. Urgent questions on the latest political and parliamentary issues we've been discussing over the weeks. That'll be in your podcast feed later in the week. But when we're back next week, we'll have not just a new Conservative Party leader, but a new leader of the free world. So, uh, are you staying up for the election results next week in America?

[00:48:24] Mark D'Arcy: I think I'll just wait till the morning after and watch a little bit then, rather than pick it up. I must say at the moment that I have a sense of foreboding, but we shall see.

[00:48:33] Ruth Fox: We shall certainly see. Mark and I are both American political obsessives. We've both worked on US presidential campaigns over the years.

[00:48:39] So, uh, I

[00:48:40] Mark D'Arcy: still, I still have nightmares about Dukakis for President in 1988.

[00:48:44] Ruth Fox: Oh, mine's 20 years ago. John Kerry all went horribly wrong. So let's hope for better next week. And, uh, we will be back in your podcast feeds next Friday for the next edition.

[00:48:54] Mark D'Arcy: Join us then.

[00:48:55] Ruth Fox: Bye.

[00:49:02] Well, that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands.

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[00:49:20] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:49:22] Mark D'Arcy: What do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon.

[00:49:29] Ruth Fox: Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety. org. uk slash pmuq.

[00:49:38] Mark D'Arcy: We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament.

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[00:50:05] Intro/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 @Hansard Society.