This transcript is automatically generated. There are consequently minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript please first check against the audio version. Timestamps are provided for ease of reference.

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

[00:00:18] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

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

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: The bill to legalise assisted dying clears its first hurdle in the commons, so what happens now?

[00:00:33] Mark D'Arcy: Could, should, a petition with millions of signatures force a government to resign and call an election?

[00:00:39] Ruth Fox: Spoiler, no. Plus, Sir Kier Starmer's first cabinet resignation, Tory defections and Liberal splits in an eventful Westminster week.

[00:00:56] Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, we've delayed the pod a day, precisely so that we can take in the result of MP's first chance to vote on the Terminally Ill Adult (End of Life) Bill, the assisted dying bill as it's generally referred to. You can, incidentally, still hear the buzzing of the helicopter, which, for reasons that pass all understanding, the BBC and Sky have orbiting Parliament at the moment to get aerial shots of the building during this important debate.

[00:01:21] Heaven only knows why they bother to do that, but they do. So apologies in advance for the buzzing you can hear in the background. But that's the least of today's events. It's been an extremely interesting debate. Conducted in a very, very serious manner. It was quite noticeable, for example, that when Mr Speaker read out the totals voting for and against the Bill, there wasn't a great erupting cheer to celebrate the victory that the Bill had cleared its second reading.

[00:01:46] It was far too serious an occasion for that. And now the Bill goes off for further consideration in a Public Bill Committee, and starts its journey through the elaborate machinery of Parliament.

[00:01:57] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I was struck as you were by that moment when they announced the result. It was not quite as close as I thought it might be.

[00:02:03] You know, a majority of 55. That collective sense, the atmosphere of the chamber that, I suppose it was a moment where MPs realise they've just made probably one of the most important votes, if not the most important vote, they'll pass this Parliament. And the sheer magnitude of it, of what they have embarked upon.

[00:02:21] Mark D'Arcy: Voting through a bill on assisted dying, at least past its initial approval stage, is not a moment to raise a mighty cheer and then head off to the bar for a stiff gin and tonic. This is a very, very serious moment. And so if there were any celebrations, I think they were fairly muted ones. More congratulation, perhaps, than celebration on the side that won.

[00:02:41] And the side that lost has plenty of opportunities yet to derail this proposition. This is not the end of the saga. It's not even the beginning of the end of the saga. It may be the end of the beginning, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. Many rivers to cross.

[00:02:54] Ruth Fox: Indeed. And the Speaker, I thought, set the tone with his statement at the beginning of the debate, where he laid out how he was going to manage the discussion.

[00:03:03] 160 MPs had applied to speak, which is clearly way more than could be accommodated in a debate of about four and a half hours long. A clear steer as to what he wanted to happen when he expected this closure motion, the motion that's necessary to bring the debate to an end before the 2. 30 cut off of business, when he wanted that to happen.

[00:03:22] He indicated after the front bench speeches, so shortly after two o'clock.

[00:03:26] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I thought that was incidentally an interesting precedent, because what you had there was a kind of soft timetabling of the bill. They didn't pass a formal motion saying that the vote will be held at this time, and that from that the chair normally sort of works back to when they would expect to start the front bench speeches, closing the debate, and so forth.

[00:03:44] So it wasn't done like that, but it still set an interesting precedent for Private Members Bills, which are normally pretty freeform. A few people can monopolize the floor of the house and speak as long as they want until they start hitting sort of deviation, repetition, or irrelevance. So, this may be the beginning of a change in the way people do that, or it may just be it's limited to this one occasion.

[00:04:05] We shall see, but it was quite an interesting move by the Speaker.

[00:04:08] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, previous Speakers on, well, in the Assisted Dying Bill debate in 2015, for example, gave an indication of what they expected in terms of time limits and prodded members during the course of the debate. And you had some of that this time.

[00:04:22] I mean, the Speaker indicated that he was minded to ask MPs to limit their speeches to about eight minutes. And that was subsequently reduced to five minutes, but he didn't have to take any measures to formally introduce speech limits. So he's still within the normal practice. He didn't select the reasoned amendment that had been put down.

[00:04:40] A number of MPs had clubbed together to put down on a cross party basis an amendment opposing the bill, but giving reasons. Setting out a view that they wanted more consultation, possibly, you know, a commission or an inquiry of some kind. So they weren't saying that the debate should end, and if people rejected the bill, that would be it.

[00:04:58] They wanted further consultation, further work.

[00:05:00] Mark D'Arcy: Essentially, they were saying that the Private Members Bill process couldn't bear the weight of this issue. It was too difficult a process to force something like this through and get it debated adequately at the same time. So that was, uh, spearheaded by the conservative Dr. Ben Spencer, who's also on the Conservative Front Bench, but it was quite an interesting cross party move. I noticed that he had, um, for example, Polly Billington from the Labour side. Anna Dixon as well, yeah,

[00:05:26] Ruth Fox: health expert.

[00:05:27] Mark D'Arcy: A whole series of quite serious people from all the different parties signed up to that.

[00:05:32] So that was an interesting proposition that wasn't discussed. I think essentially because the Speaker wanted a clean vote, he didn't want to get into any confusion about what MPs vote at the end actually meant.

[00:05:43] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it was, yeah, it meant that you were very clear in what you were debating and what the vote was on.

[00:05:50] He also said some words at the beginning about the importance of what was to follow, about the debate and the seriousness of this issue in the context of this Parliament.

[00:05:58] Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP: It is one of the most important debates this House has had. So it's about being considerate, respectful of each other, and let us listen to each other.

[00:06:07] This is for the time for the House to show itself at its best.

[00:06:10] Mark D'Arcy: I think it would be very interesting in due course to discover what the viewing figures were on BBC Parliament, on Parliament Live, for the coverage of this, because I'm sure an awful lot of people across the country will have wanted to watch this as it unfolded, see what was said in the debate.

[00:06:23] MPs were conscious of that, that I think they're becoming increasingly aware that when these Private Members Bill Fridays are debating something people really care about, there can be very, very large audiences indeed, and they don't want to make a fool of themselves. And mercifully for Parliament they didn't.

[00:06:39] I think it would have been absolutely devastating if this debate had been taken over by kind of parliamentary game playing and filibustering that sometimes goes on, I think, doesn't do Parliament any good whenever it's used, but would have been particularly damaging on this occasion.

[00:06:53] Ruth Fox: Yes, I think we said on an earlier podcast, didn't we, when it became clear that this issue was likely to be the subject of a Private Member's Bill, that it was imperative that it was treated seriously, that There wasn't, as you say, this sort of political game playing and tactical procedural maneuvering that you can find on Private Members Bill Fridays.

[00:07:10] And there wasn't. It was treated incredibly seriously. The conduct of the debate, I thought, was excellent. There were some good speeches. First MP to respond to Kim Leadbeater, she gave a good speech. Response from, um, Danny Kruger, who sort of emerged as the figurehead opponent of the bill. He has serious concerns about the legal aspects, about the safeguards in the bill.

[00:07:31] Thank you. So he spoke next and there were some very moving speeches by MPs who've got experience personally of relatives or friends who've had some very difficult experiences and there were some some good speeches by people like Meg Hillier, Mary Kelly Foy and the mood and the way it was captured most people who would have been looking on would have felt that it was treated seriously.

[00:07:50] Mark D'Arcy: And what can we learn about the way the parties broke on this issue because, uh, the Conservatives were, I think, sort of 90 something versus 20 something against the bill. 147 Labour MPs were against the bill, 234 in favour.

[00:08:05] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I should say we're recording this, we haven't really had an opportunity to get into the granular detail of who did vote, but Keir Starmer, as expected, appears to have voted for it.

[00:08:13] Kemi Badenoch put out a statement saying she would not. vote for it. So there's a clear split on the front bench there. An interesting one I saw was that Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP, he did a local constituency vote, sort of exercising direct democracy, and asked his constituents how they wanted him to vote.

[00:08:32] Now something like 1100 and something, I think, took part, considerable majority, in favour of the bill and he said that was how he was going to vote. That's not a mechanism I would approve of. I don't think MPs should delegate their responsibilities in that way. They're representatives and they should bring their judgement to the issues.

[00:08:50] Mark D'Arcy: Well this is the classic Edmund Burke quote about the role of an MP, isn't it? Speech to the electors of Bristol, I think it was, something like that, yeah. An MP owes his electors his judgment rather than his obedience, and of course in those days it was always his. And listening to your constituents is good, but it shouldn't necessarily, I think, be decisive.

[00:09:07] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and of course it won't help at later stages when you get to the amendments, but one of the interesting things has been watching how MPs have approached this without the guidance of the whips. Mm. Fascinating. A lot of them have put out letters, statements on social media for their constituents, setting out in advance what their thoughts were, how they were planning to vote.

[00:09:26] Mm. They've done a lot of, uh, of engagements in the constituencies, meetings with local stakeholders, faith groups, you know, health groups, lawyers, and they've, at Westminster, been doing a lot of research around legal safeguards, the capacity of the health service. The judgments about how you work out whether somebody's only got six months to live, which is key to the bill.

[00:09:50] So it has been quite interesting to see the really detailed engagement in the issues, without simply being told by the whips, this is the way you're voting on this particular bill. Now, pros and cons to that because everybody doing their own thing on every bill would be somewhat chaotic and that's why we have

[00:10:07] Mark D'Arcy: Whips nightmare!

[00:10:08] Ruth Fox: But it has been interesting to see how they've operated and of course it's been a bit of a baptism of fire frankly for the new MPs because not only have they, you know, going through this experience of learning about the legislative process and the procedures around government bills, but they've now sort of need for this first Private Member's Bill Friday, they've had to get to grips with those procedures and it's all a bit confusing.

[00:10:29] Mark D'Arcy: And I do wonder if this will be a good formative experience though for MPs to realise that they can go out and research something and find out about something and apply that knowledge as laws come before them.

[00:10:41] Ruth Fox: Well it's kind of the approach you'd like to see for all bills.

[00:10:43] Mark D'Arcy: It's a platonic ideal of what they should do, you know, but it doesn't often seem to happen that way.

[00:10:48] Maybe if it happened a bit more, we'd get better laws, incidentally, but, uh, there I am going all utopian again. Now the next thing that happens is the formation of the Public Bill Committee to consider this legislation in detail. And that's what we're doing. That's quite an interesting event of itself because after the bill had had its second reading vote, there was also a quick vote on Kim Leadbeater moving to allow this Public Bill Committee to call for people, to call for papers, and records, and records to inform its discussion.

[00:11:20] So they'll be able to have witnesses in front of the Public Bill Committee, and you'd imagine that there need to be quite a few witnesses. Perhaps from the medical profession, perhaps from the hospice movement, perhaps from the judges who would have a kind of backstop role in ensuring that people had mental capacity and genuinely wanted to end their lives and hadn't been coerced or controlled in any way.

[00:11:41] So there's a whole load of interest groups there that a bill committee would have to hear from, and that suggests a much longer committee process, frankly. than we used to for Private Members Bills, because often they go through in a single bite.

[00:11:52] Ruth Fox: Well, that's what a lot of the opponents of the bill were arguing, that the tradition for Private Members Bills, the sort of practice is it'll get one committee session on a Wednesday morning, two hours, and that'll be it.

[00:12:03] That never seemed to me to be realistic at all, the nature of this bill.

[00:12:06] Mark D'Arcy: It would have been absurd if it happened. Yeah,

[00:12:08] Ruth Fox: I mean, and it would have deserved to be kicked out on that basis alone if it was treated that way. But a lot of Private Members Bills, as we've talked about in the past, you know, they're quite Small bills, they're often addressing legal technicalities, their government handout bills, they don't need as much scrutiny.

[00:12:23] This will need an awful lot more. And it has the opportunity now to get it. And I don't think we should underestimate the importance of what Kim has done in moving for the committee to be able to call for "persons, papers and records". That is a precedent. I don't think there has ever been a Private Members Bill committee that has ever done that.

[00:12:41] It's the norm for government bills. It's obviously what select committees do through their inquiries, but it's, I don't think it's ever happened for Private Members Bills. And as you say, that's a precedent. The fact that she put that down on the order paper, and again, she didn't have to. She could have just done it on the day, she didn't have to give notice, but she put it on the order paper, so it was very clear to everybody what she was intending.

[00:13:00] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I think some people would have found it reassuring that that was there, and that she was clearly going to do it.

[00:13:04] Ruth Fox: It may delay things slightly, actually, because in terms of the, Committee, first of all, you've got to set it up, but then it's going to have to agree what the process is for taking evidence, who it wants to call in for evidence, if indeed it has oral hearings, or if it's just going to be written evidence, I suspect it will be both, but people who are invited to give evidence are going to need to prepare, so I think probably between now and Christmas, you'll see the committee set up, you'll see it start to get its structure and its formalities in place, but I'd be surprised if we get much action before Christmas, we might get one session, but more, more likely this will really kick off in in, in the New Year.

[00:13:41] Mark D'Arcy: And the next question, I suppose is who's gonna be on that committee? How many MPs are gonna be invited to take part? It's usually around 20 something. 21? Yeah.

[00:13:49] Ruth Fox: I mean 16 to 20 has been the norm for government bills of in recent sessions.

[00:13:54] Mark D'Arcy: This is a sufficiently big bill that maybe you want a lot of people on the committee.

[00:13:58] And also the point is that Kim Leadbeater gets to choose who's on the committee. Now if she's wise, she will make sure that people like Danny Kruger, who you've talked about, or Christine Jardine, some of the opponents of her bill, have a voice on that committee, rather than just a whole load of supporters.

[00:14:12] Ruth Fox: She'll have the opportunity to put forward the names. But formally, the power to do it lies with the Committee of Selection, as it does for other legislative committees. And that essentially is a body of whips. So it's nine MPs, eight whips on them. It's chaired by the MP who happens to be also chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

[00:14:30] And they will have to formally, uh, do the nomination and they will still have obligations under the Standing Orders. They've got to ensure that the MPs that are going to be on this committee have got the qualifications for it, that they, the composition sort of reflects that of the house and where the bill divides across party lines, as is the case this time, that the strength of opinion as expressed in any division at second reading is reflected in the nomination.

[00:14:54] So you would expect that there will be a modest majority of members on that committee who support the bill. Hmm. If she's sensible, I think Kim Leadbeater's probably advised to nominate some of the strongest opponents. I mean, I'd put Danny Kruger on there. So there can be no, there can be no allegation that you're trying to fix this.

[00:15:11] And then, you know, the chairs will, will have to be appointed. I would expect two probably so that they can share the workload. And so it balances out probably one chair who is a supporter of the bill and another chair who opposed it. And then, you know, it will be for the committee to decide how long they sit, how many sessions they want.

[00:15:28] How long?

[00:15:29] Mark D'Arcy: They'll have a sort of planning session, I suspect, before Christmas, but the real action will probably take place after the holiday period. And in due course, there will come to the point where the Bill can come back to the full House of Commons for its report stage, and that will be another pretty major moment.

[00:15:45] Will there be lots of amendments? Will some of them perhaps be wrecking amendments that will disarm the bill. Will there be enough time in the course of one five hour Commons sitting on a Friday to get through all the amendments that MPs might want to put down? Because you can bury a bill in amendments if the time for it is limited.

[00:16:03] Ruth Fox: Well, put it in your diary. I would expect that to be 25th of April because

[00:16:07] Mark D'Arcy: 25th of April.

[00:16:08] Ruth Fox: Yeah, because these 13 sitting Fridays that we've talked about in the past that are dedicated to Private Members Bills. The 8th Friday is the one where you get precedence for report stages. So the first sort of, the first tranche are dedicated to second readings, like we've had today.

[00:16:22] And then you get into report stage, and the first one for that is 25th of April. So I would be very surprised if they don't meet that, because if they don't, then you're compressed for time in sending the bill to the House of Lords.

[00:16:33] Mark D'Arcy: It does give them headroom for quite a long committee stage, hearing from all these witnesses and going through all the provisions of the bill in some detail, as they should, so at least it won't be a rushed programme to get there.

[00:16:44] Ruth Fox: We've published this week our guide to this process, which you can get on our website, on the homepage, and it details all the steps and an indicative timetable and so on. Taking account of recess periods through to the 25th of April, taking into account the sort of recommended interval periods between it coming out of committee and going to report, so that there'll be a bit of time for MPs to consider what emerges from the committee before they have to go into report stage debate on the 25th.

[00:17:12] You could quite easily get 30 hours of committee time, and then there's still scope beyond that to expand it, you know, if you did one Wednesday sitting, If you wanted extra time, you could add in and do a Tuesday or do a Thursday. Rather than a two hour sitting, you could do three or four hours on a Wednesday.

[00:17:31] You know, there's ways for them to expand it, and I think they'll have to make a judgment about how much time they think is necessary to do this properly.

[00:17:38] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Then the time constraint hits again at report stage. You'd normally start at 9. 30 in the morning. You'd finish at 2. 30 in the afternoon on a Private Member's Bill Friday is one day of that because you only get precedence for one day.

[00:17:52] If there's another competing bill later on, that would have precedence for the next day. So would there be enough time in five hours to get that through? And I think that depends on another technical point called the grouping of amendments. Would it be possible to have just two groups of amendments that are voted on, so you'd have potentially, if there was procedural resistance, two closure motions to shut down the debate on each group of amendments, followed by votes on the amendments, followed in the end by probably a fairly perfunctory third reading.

[00:18:21] Would there be time for all that? This comes down to a question of can it easily be just divided into two chunks of amendments in the way that's discussed without people getting very angry that the debate is being forced into a pint pot.

[00:18:34] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean I've, I've spoken to some former Clerks about this in, in recent days, and their view was it could, because the bill, if you think about its structure and its composition, essentially divides into two parts.

[00:18:46] I mean, first of all, we should say the Speaker, as a matter of practice, both for government bills and for Private Members Bills, has in recent times been essentially selecting just one group of amendments. Within that group there may be, you know, several amendments that have to be divided upon, but not all.

[00:19:04] Several amendments where you've got to have a vote, but not all. And that's all therefore been at the end of the day, and the advantage of that is you've only had to close down the debate once on that group, so have a possible vote on the closure, and then a vote on the amendments that the Speaker says need to be formally voted on.

[00:19:20] Mark D'Arcy: Always remembering that votes are very time consuming things in the House of Commons, and a division can take 15 minutes minimum.

[00:19:25] Ruth Fox: Yeah, if you can't do it on the voices, as they say, then yes. So moving to two groups would itself be a departure from recent practice, but their argument was that you could have these two groups, one looking at the eligibility criteria for an assisted death, uh, which is this whole concept of, you know, six months terminal illness and how that is, is worked out, and then a second group addressing amendments relating to the safeguards in the bill.

[00:19:51] Now, will the Speaker take that approach? I mean, to some extent it's going to depend upon what amendments happen at committee. And of course, one of the things that the government is now going to have to be doing is working out what amendments it thinks are necessary to the bill. Because although it's neutral, it says it's for the House to decide whether to proceed, it cannot be neutral on whether it or not it thinks that there are technical issues in the bill that need to be addressed.

[00:20:15] It's got a duty to the statute book and to the integrity of our laws to make sure that the drafting is correct and can be implemented. So they will be looking at now, okay, what changes might be necessary and you'd expect those to be dealt with in Public Bill Committee and they're not going to want to take up lots of time with that at report stage that, you know, you're going to want that to focus on the amendments from other MPs.

[00:20:39] Mark D'Arcy: That raises the point that they've only really got one chance to make these kind of technical drafting changes. If they're not made at committee, and you don't want to make them at report stage. You then hit the problem that you can't easily make them in the House of Lords without requiring a whole load of time in the Commons again for MPs to approve any changes made in the House of Lords.

[00:20:56] And this all gets incredibly twiddly. But they've got one shot to get this right at Public Bill Committee if there are technical changes that need to be made.

[00:21:03] Ruth Fox: For the government I think, yes, that would be ideal. There may be an issue about having a second report stage, but I, you know, the problem with that, as you say, is you get into the dangers of the bill being leapfrogged by other bills that get through committee stage quite quickly.

[00:21:17] I think the idea that the House of Lords is not going to look at this and scrutinise it because it won't want to amend it, because it won't want to be accused of, you know, damaging the bill's prospects. That it can't get, do all its work, its scrutiny work, to get the bill back by the 11th of July, so that in a day the Commons can consider the amendments, seems to me unrealistic politically.

[00:21:39] I mean the House of Lords if it's concerned about this, and it will be, there will be Peers in there that are concerned.

[00:21:45] Mark D'Arcy: Look at the members, you've got a whole bishop's bench, you've got umpteen senior judges and super lawyers who will all have opinions about the legal structure of the bill, the theological implications of the bill, the ethical ramifications of it.

[00:21:56] They're not going to be told you can't possibly amend this because you'll kill the bill. Partly, some of them might want to.

[00:22:02] Ruth Fox: Yes, and they're not going to want to abdicate that scrutiny responsibility, but they will be aware of the deadline. They will know the timetable, because it has to come back by the 13th sitting Friday on the Private Members Bill timetable, which is the 11th of July.

[00:22:16] Mark D'Arcy: So mark that in the diary as well.

[00:22:19] Ruth Fox: But I think this is where if any time is going to be injected in the process now by the government, it will be at that point. A number of opponents of the bill are saying, you know, it's not going to be looked at properly in the Lords there isn't going to be time. I cannot see any circumstances in which the government would not intervene, given that, you know, we know Keir Starmer's position, and his sort of engagement with Esther Rantzen is what's prompted all of this, and given that we would be in a position where the bill would have been approved at third reading by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

[00:22:50] We won't get to an exchange of amendments between the two houses to ping pong unless both houses approve it. In those circumstances, as it was described to us on our webinar this week with Sir David Natzler, the former Clerk of the House of Commons, he said, It would be an incredible act of disrespect to both houses to turn around and say, well, we've done all this work and you passed the bill.

[00:23:10] Mark D'Arcy: Uh, time's up.

[00:23:11] Ruth Fox: Time's up. I mean, you're just not going to give you those extra few hours to reconcile some of the really technical details of the text. I just cannot see that happening. Now, how you provide that extra time, the government would have to do it, because they've got control of the order paper, the agenda.

[00:23:26] But it could be an extra Friday sitting, or it could be time on another day.

[00:23:31] Mark D'Arcy: Sit a few hours extra on a Tuesday night, for heaven's sake. Yeah,

[00:23:33] Ruth Fox: yeah. There's a whole host of ways. And I think it's important to remember that if there is a will in both houses, that this should be dealt with and brought to a proper conclusion.

[00:23:45] If it gets that far, if it passes the third reading in the Commons, then I think politically both houses will find, if necessary, creatively, a way to ensure it has the time that's necessary.

[00:23:59] Mark D'Arcy: I think you'd also have to say that there would be a price to pay if that was not done. It would be a huge blow to the reputation of Parliament, but I think it'd also be a political blow to the government.

[00:24:08] You'd have people who are in favour of this bill saying, well, what are these guys for? What's the point of them if they can't even facilitate something like this? No one's asking them to take an outright position on it but with both houses having passed a bill maybe they could just find a couple of extra hours in the parliamentary timetable.

[00:24:24] The idea that the parliamentary timetable is some sort of hard barrier that absolutely prevents anything being done. You've got a big enough majority you can do whatever you want.

[00:24:33] Ruth Fox: And also to remember these 13 sitting Fridays take us through to early July, so to before the summer recess. But there's no guarantee the session is ending at the end of July.

[00:24:42] I fully expect that it could run into the autumn, possibly beyond. If it does, then there is a precedent for longer sittings beyond a year. for the government to create additional Private Members Bills sitting Fridays to reflect the fact that they've gone beyond the usual sort of 12 months or so. That's a way you can see it being done and arguably there might be a case that the government decides to extend the session in order to facilitate it and make sure it's got the time rather than cutting things off early.

[00:25:11] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, this may be the most significant bill that's considered during this entire Parliament. This may be the big one. So they've got to get it right, and if they don't get it right, as I say, the reputation of Parliament and of the government is at stake here.

[00:25:22] Ruth Fox: Yeah. One thing I do think, uh, we talked about Public Bill Committee and report stage, Mark, and one thing that I think will happen possibly next week, or if not, early the week after, we will see the government bring forward a money motion if it's approved by the House and it will become a money resolution and uh, we will need that in order for the Public Bill Committee to do its work because the government will have to get the authorization of the house for the financial implications of the bill and there are some. You always in a bill look out for the, the wording, not the titles or the subtitles, but the wording of the text that is italicised, because if it's italicised, it shows you that there are financial implications that need authorisation, and that's what the money motion will cover.

[00:26:06] And they will need that before the Public Bill Committee starts its work, and, unlike government bills, which are normally done straight after second reading. This will be brought separately, and there'll be a debate of up to 45 minutes on it.

[00:26:18] Mark D'Arcy: It's one of those little bits that people don't tend to notice until they don't happen.

[00:26:22] There was a bill in the coalition years that didn't get a money resolution. Something to do with housing benefit reform that, I can't remember exactly the details now, but the government didn't approve it, and stopped the bill cold by simply not moving a money resolution.

[00:26:35] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and there's been a couple of instances.

[00:26:37] It's a way that the government can stop a Private Member's Bill if they really don't like it, and don't want any further discussion of it. The government will have to speak to the financial implications, and of course this has been a bone of contention with Wes Streeting's interventions in the, in the debate.

[00:26:50] So it will be interesting to see, first of all, who moves it. and what they say in that debate.

[00:26:55] Mark D'Arcy: We have incidentally seen another side of the majesty of the Private Member's Bill process in these debates on this Friday. Because having spent most of the available five plus hours talking about the Kim Leadbeater Assisted Dying Bill, the Commons then, in a matter of minutes, approved not one, but two other Private Members Bills.

[00:27:16] They had about two minutes on the Animal Welfare Import of Dogs, Cats and Ferrets Bill, which is the Private Members Bill proposed by the Lib Dem MP Danny Chambers, which is basically creating all sorts of new safeguards against the mass importation of puppies who are the product of puppy farming abroad.

[00:27:34] Things for example like, uh, instead of having five animals per person in a vehicle, being brought through you're only allowed five animals per vehicle so any dogs cats and ferrets that come through will be coming through in rather smaller numbers if this bill gets passed and that was moved by Danny Chambers supported publicly by the minister Mary Creagh and that was all done in, I think, about two and a half minutes just before the closure.

[00:27:58] And then immediately after, you have this mysterious ritual where all the titles of all the other Private Members Bills that are on the agenda are read out. And normally what happens is someone shouts, "object". And if a bill is objected, it cannot go further. But if no one shouts, "object", and that's not just a minister or a whip, it can be any member of the House of Commons, if no one shouts, "object", that bill is deemed to have had a formal second reading and kind of drops through a kind of procedural trapdoor into its committee stage. So it will be there, ready to be debated in the Public Bill Committee as soon as the assisted dying bill is dealt with. So these two bills will be next in the queue for Public Bill Committee consideration, presumably sometime in April when the bill emerges from committee.

[00:28:40] Ruth Fox: If you were concerned about the lack of scrutiny for the assisted dying bill and that quite a number of opponents were making that case that five hours wasn't going to be enough time, then goodness knows what you must think about five minutes for scrutiny, at most, of the animal welfare bill.

[00:28:54] And then the second one, uh, Mark, that got through, the Livestock Protection from Dogs Bill has also got through. Essentially a whips deal, um, clearly, that both front benches are broadly supportive and, and arranged to get those through to the next stage.

[00:29:08] Mark D'Arcy: You, you imagine that they're both effectively government handout bills.

[00:29:11] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I assume so. And, uh, the other bills which didn't make it, essentially, well, you know, the Speaker was talking, you know, with the members about the next day, what day, and they were sort of reading out dates in the Spring, um, and they would be relegated to the back of the queue.

[00:29:25] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and these will be like, you know, 10th, 20th on the agenda, and will probably, almost certainly, not be discussed any further, so there's a weird parliamentary ritual, you know, many people might think that this is no way to run a chip shop.

[00:29:37] It's a very, very strange way of dealing with Private Members Bills. And people are often solemnly told, well, these bills are on the agenda for this day! And will then assume that they're going to get an actual debate, and they don't.

[00:29:49] Ruth Fox: No, well, I mean, I've been long an advocate of reform of Private Members Bill process, because precisely that bit at the end where you get the five minutes and it goes through on the nod or it gets rejected.

[00:29:58] More often than not rejected. Yeah, it's an absolute nonsense. And I wrote a paper back in, I think it was 2011, advocating reform, the Procedure Committees, looked at it., largely endorsed a lot of our recommendations, successive governments have not done anything, actively opposed change in some circumstances.

[00:30:16] There's no defense for a lot of how it works. But on the other hand, I think the system for this for assisted dying bill can be made to work if MPs want it to. . And as we saw today, you know, with the seriousness in which they approached it with no game playing, like we do see on Private Members Bills, sometimes they rose to the occasion.

[00:30:37] Mark D'Arcy: The cliché here, and I always wince when I hear someone saying, "This is Parliament at its best." Because it's such a hoary old cliché, but just for once, I think MPs deserve a bit of credit for the way that debate was conducted, the spirit in which it was conducted. I didn't see any occasion where it got nasty and personal.

[00:30:54] Ruth Fox: No. Well, Mark, that's a tick for the MPs this week. Shall we take a break and perhaps come back and look at some of the other things that have been going on in Westminster this week?

[00:31:03] Mark D'Arcy: See you in a minute.

[00:31:06] Ruth Fox: 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.

[00:31:16] 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, our weekly analysis of what's coming up in Westminster, as a complement to this podcast. Our approach is inspired by the informative articles Mark used to write each week for the BBC.

[00:31:33] 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.

[00:31:51] It'll only take a minute. Again, that's hansardsociety.org.uk.

[00:31:58] Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, we're back, and one of the other big Westminster stories of this week has been the petition currently approaching 3 million signatures calling for a general election to be held because the petitioners have lost confidence in the Labour government and feel it was elected on a false prospectus, etc, etc, etc.

[00:32:15] And there's been a great deal of excitement around this and the idea that an election may be triggered and, it's all twaddle. The government is not in any way compelled to do anything in response to this petition. And you do feel that there's a lot of rather artificial excitement being whipped up by people who either should know better or do actually know better.

[00:32:36] Ruth Fox: Yes, quite. I've had quite a number of media inquiries this week and one of the questions I have asked of some of the producers is, why does it take this to get you so interested in e-petitions when there's a huge number of really interesting ones, albeit with perhaps with fewer signatures, but really interesting ones that actually might have some kind of policy impact?

[00:32:53] I'm tempted to say to this, so what? Yes, it's got 2. 9 million signatures as we speak, it's edging towards 3 million, but if we had a petition six months after a general election, and there was any kind of active response to bring about that general election because 3 million people had said so, we'd have basically two general elections a year. I mean, you'd never get anywhere, you'd never get anywhere.

[00:33:16] Mark D'Arcy: And to put it in context, 9. 7 million people voted Labour back in July, should their vote be overturned by slightly under three million people now. 6. 81 million people voted Conservative, so this has not even got all the signatures of the people who voted Conservative.

[00:33:34] I think the most important thing about this petition is that it's an indication that the current government hasn't exactly got off to a flying start. It's rather belly flopped, I think.

[00:33:44] Ruth Fox: Have you had a look at the heat map of parliamentary constituencies, because as we perhaps discussed last week on the podcast with our experts about e petitions, Christina Leston-Bandeira and Richard Huzzey, we talked about the fact that you can look look at the data of where the petitions come from, and you can look at the heat map, and I think that's quite interesting.

[00:34:02] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, it was very striking that the places where the most intense signing of this petition were tended to be big agricultural constituencies, so mid Kent, Richmond and Northallerton, Rishi Sunak's seat. Lots of big agricultural seats, Conservative ones. Labour ones, Liberal Democrat ones, and so I suppose what you can read from that, frankly, is just that there are a lot of very discontented people from agriculture out there who are making clear their displeasure at the government's decision to change the law on inheriting family farms, so there's more inheritance tax paid on them.

[00:34:37] Clearly that has a lot of resonance, and if you're a Labour MP for one of those constituencies, you're probably feeling the hot breath of your voters on the back of your neck right now.

[00:34:44] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well as you say, I mean, it's sort of an indicator of the lack of a honeymoon and the difficulties the government finds itself in, some of its own making and some of its, its inheritance.

[00:34:52] We talked last week about the petitions, about having a fire alarm function, a sort of a warning signal to politicians. And you could say, that's what this is. It's a clear warning signal that there are quite a number of people who are pretty unhappy with the way that the government's responded in its first six months.

[00:35:08] But hey, you know, it was always going to be that way, isn't it? I mean, every government has to make choices and make decisions and they upset somebody.

[00:35:14] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I'm beginning to think of this government, though, as kind of the "On Chesil Beach" government. This is a book by Ian McEwan. It's about a young couple who get married and to put it delicately, the husband bungles the wedding night and the entire marriage...

[00:35:30] Ruth Fox: Is this the honeymoon analogy?

[00:35:31] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:35:32] And the entire marriage descends into deep freeze. So this government clearly hasn't managed to have anything as exciting or joyful as a honeymoon and seems to have plunged somewhat into deep freeze at the moment. And the question in politics, I suppose, is can they get out of it?

[00:35:46] Ruth Fox: So you don't get those kind of literary allusions on other podcasts do you. I hadn't thought of it that way, I must confess.

[00:35:52] No, I mean, it just finds itself in considerable difficulties, but what's going to happen now in terms of this petition, before we can come on in a minute to Labour's difficulties in a bit more detail, but what will happen to the petition? I mean, it will clearly get a debate, and all of this will be aired, I think 6th of January is the date that's been chosen, because

[00:36:11] Mark D'Arcy: The dates been set by the Petitions Committee, it's clearly well over the normal hurdle of 100, 000 signatures, so it's bound to be debated.

[00:36:18] You wonder what the content of that debate is going to be. Lots of opposition MPs going, "yahboo sucks, Labour are pants". And lots of Labour MPs going, "yahboo sucks, we won the election and we're not going anywhere".

[00:36:28] Ruth Fox: Yeah, which is kind of the response Keir Starmer gave to Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister's Questions when she raised it.

[00:36:34] And of course, it's worth remembering, a lot of the journalists have got very excited about all of this, nearly 3 million signatures. But of course, during Brexit, we had e petitions requesting a second referendum that got, what was it, five, six million signatures? Nothing happened, so

[00:36:47] Mark D'Arcy: Nothing happened, and lots of people are now saying the government should go on the basis of this petition were at the time saying no one should take any notice of that petition. So you choose your petitions carefully, I suppose. Yeah. But Labour must be conscious of the fact that although they have this huge, imposing majority in the Commons chamber, it's on a very thin actual electoral mandate, a third of the voters generated something like a sort of 60 percent majority in the House of Commons, so, it's, um, a fragile position for a government that appears to have total dominance, and they know it.

[00:37:19] If you know your supports are a mile wide and an inch deep, sometimes it can be quite paralyzing and you're terrified of putting a foot wrong. And the trouble is that the situation kind of calls for boldness at the moment.

[00:37:30] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, as we're recording, we've had the news this morning that the government's got its first resignation.

[00:37:37] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, Louise Haighh departing over a complicated imbroglio involving a phone that apparently was thought to be stolen then turned out not to be.

[00:37:45] Ruth Fox: Yeah, very confusing.

[00:37:46] Mark D'Arcy: And a conviction that she declared to Sir Keir Starmer at the time and has now emerged in the magistrate's courts. In normal circumstances it would be what's known as a spent conviction, something that happened so long ago that it shouldn't normally be used in evidence.

[00:37:57] But there is a kind of exception for public figures and it's now redounded upon her and Louise Haighh has gone.

[00:38:03] Ruth Fox: Well, and it seems that this, this offence was over 10 years ago, so apparently in, in 2013. Um, and as you say, she declared it, and Keir Starmer still appointed her to his shadow cabinet, so I'm not entirely sure what it is that's therefore prompting this.

[00:38:18] I mean, you could argue his, his judgement was wrong then, but it does seem a little bit odd.

[00:38:23] Mark D'Arcy: It does. I, the, the classic phraseology that always comes up in these situations is that the person involved didn't want the issue to become a distraction. Now, that kind of avoids making any kind of admission of guilt or fault and just says we don't want the press harping on about this to the extent that the government's own agenda is crowded out or damaged by it.

[00:38:42] So no one's admitting any blame for anything here beyond the existence of the actual conviction. But she's gone, and the first cabinet resignation of any government is always a somewhat painful affair. I remember, as I was there reporting on it at the time, Tony Blair's first cabinet resignation, rather like this one, came completely out of the blue when the then Welsh Secretary, Ron Davis, took his famous walk on Clapham Common and had to resign very abruptly.

[00:39:07] There's a euphemism there somewhere. Yeah, well, you know, it became a euphemism for a while. But that was, uh, again, completely out of the blue, a kind of unexpected manifestation of personal conduct that caused a cabinet minister to resign. And similarly here, this wasn't a resignation over some great political disagreement or policy dispute in cabinet or anything like that.

[00:39:28] This is purely a matter of personal conduct. And it's had the effect of teleporting in Heidi Alexander, who was a minister in the Ministry of Justice. She was likely to have been dealing with assisted dying, had she remained in that post. And she has quite a background in transport policy. She's a former deputy mayor of London with responsibility for transport.

[00:39:47] She was an MP in Lewisham. She resigned to take up that job. She's now returned to Parliament for a seat in her hometown of Swindon. She beat the former Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland at the general election. She was immediately back in government, and now she's at the top table in the Cabinet. And you wonder what the effect is on, kind of, the cosmic balance of the cabinet.

[00:40:05] Because Louise Haighh was seen as the soft left faction in the cabinet, along with people like Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, Ed Miliband, and so forth.

[00:40:14] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it doesn't, I think, tilt it soft left in the way that Louise Haighh's position perhaps did. The other thing, in terms of Heidi Alexander's appointment, you can understand the rationale on it from a transport perspective.

[00:40:25] But she was dealing with the courts and the legal service, which is not a minimal problem at the moment in terms of policy issues. I mean, if you're in the court system at the moment, you must be despairing at the prospect that you've got another minister who's now going to have to spend months getting their head around what's happening and trying to sort out some of the problems.

[00:40:41] And as you say, we've thought that she was going to deal with assisted dying. The other thing, though, that interested me was Keir Starmer's response. So the minister resigns, you have an exchange of letters. And shall we say Keir Starmer's letter was somewhat curt. Short.

[00:40:56] Mark D'Arcy: On the abrupt side, to say the very least.

[00:40:58] Of course, we don't really know how Keir Starmer's going to deal with resignation letters. This is his first one, so there isn't, as it were, a body of case law out there showing how he normally deals with these occasions. So we don't know if this is curt or whether it's just Keir, so to speak.

[00:41:13] Ruth Fox: But of course the other thing is we've talked in, if you remember during the general election campaign and we talked about government wanting to come in and setting a higher bar on standards and thinking that you've got to apply that, even if it was, for example, against Angela Rayner, you know, no matter how high in the cabinet that bar has got to be set, well, the first resignation is over essentially a standards related issue.

[00:41:37] Yeah. The detail may be a little bit unclear. Keir Starmer's judgment may come into this. Nonetheless, it's a standards issue. So it's the bar he's set.

[00:41:46] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and some people are saying this is a ridiculously low bar, where she's resigning over something that she'd already declared to him was the case.

[00:41:54] She'd admitted she had this conviction when Keir Starmer appointed her to the Shadow Cabinet. So why is this suddenly a resigning matter now? And we come back to the, as I say, boilerplate reason that's always given on these occasions. They don't want it to become a distraction. The other question about it, though, is Is that a good thing?

[00:42:11] Should there be a low threshold for ethics issues here, rather than shrugging off quite serious concerns about people? Perhaps the Prime Minister should be tough. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion kind of argument. If there's any shadow of a doubt, It may be hard on the individual, but maybe it's necessary to rebuild a bit of public trust, and the government's already taken ethical hits.

[00:42:35] The whole issue of Keir's suits and glasses being paid for by a Labour donor has been quite damaging to the image of the government. And it may be that part of the reason Louise Haigh is gone. Because Keir Starmer's not resigning over his issues. This is another way of demonstrating probity. Maybe that's a rather unfair interpretation of it, but

[00:42:53] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, there's also this sort of political stuff around her, uh, in recent months.

[00:42:58] I mean, she got herself cut off at the knees when she criticized P&O for the fire and rehire practices on the eve of the government's big business investment summit, who said that there were some issues there and around the railway strikes, she'd given too much away to the train unions in terms of money and not getting enough commitment in terms of reform.

[00:43:14] And that was one of the very early decisions that was made by the government. So there may be some politics behind this, and it might not just be all about ethics. Mm. But yeah, I agree with you that it's important to set the bar. My concern would be, though, if we are going to be essentially enabling the press, the opposition, to crawl over the past history of every parliamentarian's record, everything they've done 20, 30 years ago, and finding something that then leads to resignations, we're just going to have constant churn.

[00:43:44] Mark D'Arcy: Well, they'll start installing a few revolving doors in ministerial offices, if that's the case.

[00:43:49] But, you know, there was a story, I can't even remember whose resignation it was now, but some ministerial resignation was announced in the Blair years, and members of the lobby boiled out into what's known as the Burma Road. The long corridor of, uh, yes, it's, it's, it's a sort of long corridor with all the different Westminster offices of various newspapers and other media outlets are off it.

[00:44:08] They all boiled out into the corridor and started cheering. We've got them. We've got them. They always like to have a sort of trophy mounted on the wall, but let those who are without sin cast the first stone. I always found it a little bit ironic when the expenses scandal was boiling that it was journalists who of course are famous icons of probity in their expenses who were pursuing this question.

[00:44:30] I'm not saying that MPs shouldn't be facing a penalty if they're dishonest and fiddling their expenses. I'm just quite amused that it was journalists casting the stone some of the time. Just add two other points about this though. I mean, the first is does resigning kind of purge your sin? Can you come back? if you do a certain period in the wilderness.

[00:44:50] Ruth Fox: There's plenty of evidence historically that you can.

[00:44:52] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I only think of David Laws who quite early in the coalition years lost his cabinet post as Chief Secretary of the Treasury on an expenses related issue and um, came back eventually.

[00:45:05] Ruth Fox: Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett.

[00:45:07] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, there's any number of second comings of Labour ministers who'd have various things, uh, levelled at them. So, it can happen, I suppose. So, it's entirely possible that Louise Haigh will reappear in some future reshuffle in a year or 18 months or something like that, I suppose. The other point that I wanted to explore, though, is where did this come from?

[00:45:28] I mean, we don't know. the source of this, but is it simply that some diligent digger and scrutineer of ministers has unearthed this and brought it to the attention of His Majesty's press? Or is this the product of some kind of court intrigue, maybe aimed at the Angela Rayner faction of the cabinet, intended to sort of cut off a soft left cabinet minister at the knees and replace them with someone who's incrementally more in tune with the cabinet mainstream?

[00:45:52] Because for heaven's sake, If that kind of thing's going to start happening at the cabinet level, it suggests that the government is too much focused on its own internal tensions and not enough focused on actually doing the stuff that might get it re elected.

[00:46:03] Ruth Fox: Yes, I'd suggest they maybe focus more on Parliament than on politics of it and, uh, see what happens.

[00:46:11] Yeah, it would be pretty depressing if that's, if that is the case. But every government falls prey to it, don't they? To internal factions, to internal intrigue.

[00:46:19] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. Not, not exactly unheard of in Westminster.

[00:46:22] Ruth Fox: But they do need to focus.

[00:46:23] Mark D'Arcy: They certainly do. Um, all sorts of other little bits of churn going on.

[00:46:28] I, I was very struck that Dame Andrea Jenkins, the former minister in, in the Boris Johnson government, has switched her party affiliation to Reform. She of course lost the seat that she'd been defending, Morley and Leeds South, I think, or something like Ed Ball's old seat or sort of lineal descendant after several rounds of boundary changes. Anyway, she was someone who won her seat as a Conservative and lost her seat as a Conservative as she said herself and now she's jumped over to Reform and I find myself wondering whether there might perhaps be a few other ex Conservative MPs who are on the kind of Reform adjacent wing of the Conservative Party who might be contemplating a similar move. Maybe not quite yet, but I imagine that they might be looking to see whether Reform on a sustained basis overtakes the Conservatives in the polls, whether Reform does well in any by elections that come along, whether Reform does well in local elections in their area.

[00:47:23] I noticed, for example, that Andrea Jenkins has been made the Reform candidate for the Greater Lincolnshire Mayoralty, which is somewhere that, you know, you could imagine them winning frankly, certainly in the current climate.

[00:47:33] Ruth Fox: Well, the thing that struck me about this story was what took her so long, because I mean, the bigger surprise would be if she hadn't actually jumped to Reform, and she has.

[00:47:41] Mark D'Arcy: But, um, watching Reform with interest, I mean, one of the nerdy things I do of a Friday morning...

[00:47:47] Ruth Fox: Go on, how nerdy do you get?

[00:47:49] Mark D'Arcy: I have a look at local government by election results. Oh, there we go! And one caught my eye in Sheffield, it was a Labour seat well, a sort of a Labour seat because the sitting Labour councillor had gone Independent and subsequently has resigned and Labour were kind of quasi defending the seat on Sheffield City Council.

[00:48:06] It was won by the Liberal Democrats, but the second place party was Reform. Only 10 votes behind the Liberal Democrats who got, I think, 1,018 and the Reform challenger got 1,008. And Labour was some way behind on 600 and something. And that near miss kind of suggests to me that Reform might turn out to be quite a potent challenger in quite a number of places.

[00:48:29] Vying with the Liberal Democrats with "a to hell with them all" vote that's always out there.

[00:48:33] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, as you say, earlier this week, Nigel Farage doing a press conference to announce they've got 100, 000 members, they're organising across hundreds of constituencies. So they're building their, the infrastructure that they're going to need to operate at a national level as a party and build on the momentum that they've clearly got.

[00:48:50] And one of the challenges, particularly, for Labour, I think the Liberal Democrats to some extent as well, is the fact that the sheer number of new MPs who were local councillors and therefore their election has prompted resignations from the council and therefore a lot of by elections, not in the particular one you've pointed to, but we've seen that across the country and losing a number of those seats.

[00:49:10] Mark D'Arcy: Well last week in my home territory of Horsham in Sussex the seat vacated by the Liberal Democrat councillor who'd won the Horsham parliamentary seat was won back by the Conservatives, quite narrowly, but it was won back by the Conservatives. And that kind of thing is happening, and I think there's a bit of a move both amongst Labour and the Lib Dems.

[00:49:28] The MPs who are kind of double hatted as councillors are being asked to hold on until the next round of council elections when they can be part of the general wash rather than an individual by election. And that way maybe the seats won't be as easily lost.

[00:49:43] Ruth Fox: Another thing that took my eye this week about splits, we've talked on the podcast before about who are the Liberal Democrats now, this much bigger third party, dozens of MPs.

[00:49:53] On the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, this sort of, you know, began with Rishi Sunak, was going to be one of his flagship policies, now been taken up by this government.

[00:50:01] Mark D'Arcy: This was basically a long term abolition of smoking.

[00:50:03] Ruth Fox: Essentially, yeah. The Liberal Democrats split on the vote on the Bill this week, and eight of them voted against their whip and, uh, did so because essentially they opposed what was described as illiberal age restrictions. So this idea that, you know, you impose age restrictions, different levels, different points. So eventually you end up in a situation where people under the age of 18 will never have the opportunity to smoke legally.

[00:50:28] But the Liberal Democrats split. You got Tim Farron, former Lib Dem leader, voting against the party's position. You've got up and coming new MPs like Josh Babarinde, who's, uh, talked about as a potential future leader. So I thought that was just interesting, that, you know, sort of a liberal line in the sand about what being a liberal today means.

[00:50:48] Mark D'Arcy: Well, when we talked to David Laws about his book about the Liberals relationships over the century with Labour, It was quite interesting that when we got to this point about who actually are the modern Liberal Democrat contingent of MPs he said that one of the things about them was that they were skeptical about big government and kind of paternalistic measures And here's an example of that that fits.

[00:51:09] Maybe they didn't all vote that way I can't imagine that Wendy Chamberlain the Lib Dems Chief Whip is unduly exercised about this. You know the it's never particularly nice to have members of your party voting in a different way, but it hasn't actually occasioned a vast public bust up. And I'm sure that the Liberal Democrats will find some way of having a group hug and getting back into business without too much trouble.

[00:51:31] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, Mark, I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. But before we go, a bit of listener feedback. So, one of our listeners has contacted us. They haven't given their name, which always leads me to think it might be a parliamentary official, but, um, not, not necessarily, but, uh, we talked last week about select committees and they wanted to point out that, uh, this idea I raised about having a non plenary week.

[00:51:52] So this idea that, that you'd have a week in the parliamentary timetable where just committees would sit, not the chamber and the opportunities that might present to sort of reorganise business. This person's pointed out it would be a sort of great opportunity for committees to also travel. They could get out of London and do the inquiries and particularly with the government with a big majority that gives you opportunities that you wouldn't have perhaps for example if you had a a small majority or no majority at all where the whips would want you.

[00:52:19] Mark D'Arcy: Whips didn't let people out into the wild in case they missed a vote and the government lost something.

[00:52:23] Ruth Fox: So having designated weeks where the chamber's not sitting that wouldn't be an issue. They also wanted to correct something that we said in the podcast about select committees. We weren't sure whether they met during recess or not, whether they were empowered to do so.

[00:52:36] Apparently they can meet in recess. They did in Easter 2020, for example, around Covid, but they can't meet during prorogation, which we ...

[00:52:43] Mark D'Arcy: It tends to be that they don't particularly meet during recesses, but I thought there was an actual ban on it and there isn't, so mea maxima culpa I got that one slightly wrong.

[00:52:54] Ruth Fox: And then we've had another, uh, another comment from somebody who used to work for an environment minister. They'd, again, they've kept their anonymity. So this was, if you remember a few weeks ago we did an urgent questions edition and we were talking about the fact that the Public Accounts Committee has a minister who sits on it on an ex officio basis, gets the papers, the agendas, but doesn't actually take part in the meetings.

[00:53:13] This person contacted us to point out that the Environmental Audit Committee also tends to have an ex officio member, an environment minister, and he or she says, "I never understood why they were a member as they never contributed or read any of the papers", it seems a bit pointless as ministers having that role just to get the papers.

[00:53:29] Have we got any information about why a minister was appointed? And the short answer is no. But, uh, if any of our listeners, particularly working in Parliament or in parliamentary history, know the answer to that, we would be most interested.

[00:53:40] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I think the Environmental Audit Committee was set up by an Act of Parliament in the Blair years.

[00:53:45] And I think they took the Public Accounts Committee as a kind of template for the kind of thing they wanted to do. They wanted a committee that looked very closely at the environmental implications of government policy. And the Public Accounts Committee has a minister as an ex officio member, so they all sort of cut and pasted and changed the word to environment rather than treasury or something.

[00:54:05] Ruth Fox: Nobody actually asked is there any point to this?

[00:54:08] Mark D'Arcy: Well, if they ever did attend, it rapidly fell out of use. You go along to meetings of the Environmental Audit Committee and there's never a minister there unless they're the ones giving evidence.

[00:54:16] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, Mark, I think that that is all we've got time for.

[00:54:19] So thank you for all that feedback, everyone. Do keep sending your questions in to us. You can, uh, send them into us by social media. We're on Blue Sky and we're on Twitter. Or you can send them in using the form, which there's a link in the show notes, or you can find it on our website. And, uh, yeah, do send in the questions and the comments its always incredibly useful and, and good to hear that you're enjoying the podcast.

[00:54:40] Please do let people know about it. Share it. Let your friends and family know about it. Word of mouth is our best marketing. So please do give us a review, wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'll see you next week, Mark.

[00:54:52] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and just before we go, a couple of things that are going to happen next week that are a little bit out of our normal timetable.

[00:54:58] We've got a special edition, we've been talking to the mysterious figure who became a kind of procedural oracle for the workings of the U. S. Congress, and then turned out to be a 20 year old Durham University student, Kasper Surdy, talked to us with a view to explaining the complexities, amongst other things, around the appointment process for President Trump's cabinet, and that'll be released in the coming week.

[00:55:20] Plus we've got a special edition of our podcast next week. Oh yes. We're coming out live.

[00:55:25] Ruth Fox: We're going live, well kind of. So we are going to be recording next week's podcast at the Study of Parliament Group Conference. Now you don't get better than that do you? The Study of

[00:55:35] Mark D'Arcy: Parliament Group is the kind of study group for uber parliamentary nerds.

[00:55:40] Procedural experts, commons clerks, academics who specialise in the workings of Parliament all get together and discuss the workings of Parliament.

[00:55:49] Ruth Fox: Yeah it's kind of like the podcast, you two days. You can actually get Tickets still, there are still a few tickets left to some of the sessions. So Mark and I have been a member of this group for more years than I care to count.

[00:56:00] Or indeed

[00:56:01] Mark D'Arcy: they.

[00:56:01] Ruth Fox: Or indeed they. And um, they've asked us to do an episode of the podcast on the Thursday of the conference next week. So we will be doing that live and taking questions from an expert audience.

[00:56:12] Mark D'Arcy: Turn on, tune in, drop out.

[00:56:14] Ruth Fox: Yeah, see you next week.

[00:56:15] Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

[00:56:22] Ruth Fox: 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.

[00:56:30] Mark D'Arcy: And help us to make the podcast better by leaving a rating or review on Apple or Spotify and sharing your feedback. Our producer tells us it's important for the algorithm to give the show a boost.

[00:56:40] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:56:42] 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 my carrier pigeon.

[00:56:49] 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/PMUQ.

[00:56:59] 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.

[00:57:06] Ruth Fox: And you can find us across social media at @HansardSociety to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.

[00:57:14] Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @HansardSociety.