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

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

[00:00:25] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy, coming up in this special edition.

[00:00:28] Ruth Fox: Why does Parliament find it so difficult to reform itself, even on relatively basic issues like sitting hours, on which MPs often find themselves deadlocked.

[00:00:37] Mark D'Arcy: Well, some intriguing answers to that question can be found in a new book, Inside the Political Mind, by Greg Power, who was a special advisor to two reforming leaders of the House of Commons in Robin Cook and Peter Hain. He's also, incidentally, a former director of research here at the Hansard Society.

[00:00:53] Ruth Fox: When we sat down with Greg we asked him what do people with a grand design for parliamentary reform most often get wrong?

[00:01:01] Greg Power: This is the central argument in the book which is that institutional designers, people who are interested in parliamentary reform, tend to focus often much more on the structures, on the processes, on the design of the buildings, rather than on the people who work inside those buildings.

[00:01:18] And my own experience of working at Westminster and as a special advisor for the Leader of Commons, and then internationally over the last 20 years, is that political institutions only change when politicians want to change them. And you have to ask, well, why would they want to change them? And if they're not changing, why aren't they changing them? And that's the centre of the book.

[00:01:38] Mark D'Arcy: So it's about, if you like, the incentives that they have to want to support change in Parliament. And what sort of incentives might those be? Is it more money? Is it more power? Is it the ability to get things done that they can't get done?

[00:01:52] Greg Power: It's all of those things, and other stuff as well.

[00:01:55] Um, if I, if I take a slight step back, I mean, part of the challenge of trying to reform a parliamentary institution is that you do tend to think about the processes, you do tend to think about the structures. But, around the world, if you look at parliamentary institutions around the world, they all look broadly similar.

[00:02:11] If you read the Standing Orders or the rules of procedure in any parliament, they would look broadly similar. The way they work in practice is entirely different from country to country. And the best way to understand that is to think about traffic and how traffic works in other countries and other cities.

[00:02:26] Anybody who's tried to drive in a different city will know, if you read the Highway Code, or if you look at the road furniture, it looks very similar wherever you are in the world. But learning how to drive in somewhere like Cairo, or Nairobi, or Kuwait City, is much less about what the formal rules say than what those rules mean to the drivers in those places who've learned how to drive, not by reading the rules, but by the millions of interactions between them and other drivers in that place. And you come to an understanding. This is how things work around here. This is what the rules actually mean. That's how politics works.

[00:03:02] And that's the bit that is being missed when there are efforts, and very well meaning efforts, to strengthen governance and parliaments and democracy in other countries. It's often focused much more on the rules of the road than understanding the way that people are driving and why they're driving that way.

[00:03:19] And that's the way to understand politics. And that's where change is going to come from. It is about understanding the norms, the incentives, the interests at work, and the logic that underpins all that about how you make sense of driving in a place where the traffic is very difficult.

[00:03:36] Ruth Fox: So at Westminster, we've got a Parliament with just over 50 percent new MPs.

[00:03:41] Even those who've been there since 2017, 2019, were affected by the Covid Parliament, the fact that proceedings moved virtually, hybrid proceedings. So the socialisation, the political culture of Westminster has changed a lot in recent years because of the churn, the understanding of the norms isn't quite the same that it was for MPs 20 years ago.

[00:04:05] So how do we help those new MPs understand how Westminster works, how it could be better.

[00:04:13] Greg Power: It's a really important, I think, interesting point which is often overlooked in understanding how parliaments work the way that they do. But it's true in every job. You don't go into a job and learn how to do the job by reading your job description or your person specification.

[00:04:30] It's about fitting in, over time. In your first week, you'll have a certain perception of your job. After a month, it changes. After six months, it changes again. And you're working, looking at what other people are doing and trying to follow the norms, trying to understand this is how things actually work here.

[00:04:43] And the impact of turnover is massive on parliaments. Now, as you say, in this parliament, we've had the, what looks like the biggest turnover ever, certainly bigger than 1945, but also that's come after a succession of elections 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019. And if you look at the numbers, there are now, I think, around 60 MPs who have been there continuously since 2010.

[00:05:08] That's 90, 95 percent turnover in the space of what would normally be three electoral cycles. That's a huge amount of turnover. Now what's being lost, as you say, are a lot of those norms, those assumptions about the way that things work. And talking to one clerk just before the last election, she was reflecting to me that the 2019 intake, again, there was a big challenge there because that intake had about six weeks in Parliament milling around with their colleagues before Covid forced everybody to spend more time with their families, which meant they weren't socialised in quite the same way.

[00:05:40] And by the end of that Parliament, lots of MPs still didn't understand parliamentary procedure because they hadn't picked up those norms, those assumptions, that socialisation. And it is a massive, massive issue, which is remarkably overlooked in understanding how politicians learn to be politicians. It's not about simply understanding Standing Orders. It's about understanding how you do the job and what works. It's about learning how to drive.

[00:06:02] Mark D'Arcy: And with so many learner drivers in Westminster at the moment has an opportunity been missed to change things. They're not set in their ways. They're not necessarily going to defend time honored working practices that they're very wedded to because they're not wedded to them. Is there a moment that's probably being missed now to change the way Parliament works? To, for example, shift it to a more committee based system? Less plenary time in the chamber, more detailed work in committees might be one of the things that a lot of people think would be a massive improvement.

[00:06:31] Greg Power: Yeah. You've highlighted the, If you like the pros and cons of exactly that. I wish I'd come up with the metaphor of a parliament full of learner drivers, because it's a really useful way of understanding it.

[00:06:40] Roads filled with learner drivers would be problematic, and that, I think, that's a problem for Parliament, and I think particularly a problem for the Labour government in managing such a huge number of MPs. Last time this happened in 97, if you remember, at that point when Labour had this size of majority, Ann Taylor, at that point, was sending backbench MPs off to do constituency weeks for one week in every four or five because there wasn't enough for them to do at Westminster, so there's an issue of management there.

[00:07:07] But you're right, that new influx brings with it the potential to do things in an entirely different way and get rid of some of the old norms which had become a little antiquated and a set way of working, because those norms can both be positive. and negative. They do keep a degree of order, but equally they can become stultifying and prevent innovation and we'll see what the Modernisation Committee does with this new intake.

[00:07:30] Ruth Fox: What would your advice be then to new MPs who want to learn the rules of the road if you like?

[00:07:36] Greg Power: That's a very difficult question.

[00:07:40] There is just no simple answer to that because again, going back to the analogy of any other sort of workplace, we often think that parliaments are, of course, very special. No company could cope with 50% of its workforce all starting on the same day. But this is what parliaments do. And most of the parliaments in which we work around the world, the turnover is often higher, 50, 60, 70, 80%.

[00:08:04] There's no way a company could cope with that. But even if you have 20 or 30 percent turnover, this is a massive challenge for absorbing that number of new staff into any organisation. But parliaments do this every four or five years. The challenge for parliaments is, it's partly about, I think, you know, the induction of members and getting them to understand the key parts of their job. But it's also, I think, about preventing bad habits from setting in too soon. And making sure that they are pointed in the right direction. After six months or a year, these new politicians will have a much better sense of what they don't currently know. It's very difficult to ask for help in your first few weeks or months of a job. By a year in, you can say, well, I need professional development and support and training in this area because I need to build up these skills.

[00:08:48] I can see how this is going to be useful. The new MPs don't have any of that. And without a cohort of longer, more seasoned MPs, helping them to understand how the place works and the pitfalls to avoid it's, it's difficult I think for this intake

[00:09:02] Mark D'Arcy: Now you were Special Advisor to two reforming leaders of the house in Peter Hain and Robin Cook. And they had changes that they had to push through that often seemed to be quite modest changes on things like sitting hours that would run into huge entrenched opposition because people were very wedded to the way they worked. How did they get over that kind of entrenched inertia?

[00:09:26] Greg Power: I mean, the book has been a long time in coming, in that, you know, I worked for Robin and Peter between 2001 and 2005, having previously worked at the Hansard Society and run a commission there on how to reform Parliament. So when I was taken on by Robin, we had an armory of reforms that we could draw on from the Hansard Society, from the Norton Commission, from the Liaison Committees.

[00:09:44] There was no shortage of ideas. What struck me moving from the think tank world into government was firstly what looks very obvious and straightforward and sensible from the outside, takes on a whole new level of complexity when you're on the inside, not least how do you do a note for your Minister so he can go into Cabinet and explain to his colleagues why a stronger Parliament is a good idea.

[00:10:06] But the other thing actually was why all of the Members of Parliament were objecting to these really sensible and good ideas. One of the central themes of the book is understanding the importance of personal interest and personal preference when it comes to getting parliamentary reform through. It's not enough to build an argument solely around constitutional democratic principle, as powerful as they are, you have to understand what is this going to do to the working patterns of the politicians who have to make these systems work.

[00:10:35] And as the book explains, it's about trying to align those personal interests with parliamentary principle. The whole issue of hours, which you mentioned, was, I think, probably the most contentious reform that we tried to put through. Ultimately it didn't matter at all to anybody in the outside world. We were talking about bringing forward the sitting day in the chamber by three hours.

[00:10:55] It was a very, very modest change, but I saw stand up rows between Labour MPs in corridors about the merits of this change or, or not. And it wasn't, it struck me at that point, it had nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with parliamentary principle. It was entirely to do with personal preference.

[00:11:10] And if you were an MP in London, who could perhaps get back to see their family and put their kids to bed at night, then you quite liked the idea of finishing by six or seven o'clock. If you were based in Newcastle or in Scotland, you wanted to compress the week, get as much done as you can, because there was no chance of you getting back to see your kids during the week, you wanted to go back earlier at the weekend.

[00:11:30] And it's those sorts of things which the very personal dimension, the very human side of reforms, which ultimately determine whether they pass and whether they work or not.

[00:11:38] Ruth Fox: One of the critiques of MPs, not a recent one, it's been a live issue for some years, is the question of how much time they spend on constituency work and, you know, that desire to get back to their constituencies as soon as possible in the week.

[00:11:54] How much time they're giving over to it, how much time even at Westminster now, post Covid, they're spending on constituency meetings online rather than being in, for example, the Chamber or in committees. Reading your book, it's, it's interesting how it's actually, it's an issue in all parliaments all around the world, that draw on constituency service.

[00:12:12] And there are questions about whether it actually has the kind of degree of electoral effect or electoral incentive that many of the MPs think it does, but nonetheless, they see that as a critical part of their role, and it's seen as in conflict sometimes with their parliamentary responsibilities as legislators and scrutineers.

[00:12:29] What's your take on what they're doing with constituency work? Because in our recent discussion with Sam Freedman about this, I was making the point and drawing on my own experience having worked for a constituency MP, you do a huge amount of this, I mean the volume is astonishing, but there's no real formalised, systemised mechanisms to get the, often the early warning system that the constituency correspondence and advice surgeries generate for you on policies that are perhaps going wrong, into formal parliamentary mechanisms?

[00:13:00] Greg Power: Yes, I mean, I think it's central to understanding why politicians do what they do. And it goes back to, in many ways, to the first question about the challenge of trying to strengthen, institutions and what it looks like from the outside and what it feels like on the inside.

[00:13:12] Because, as you say Ruth, you know, the argument is often that MPs should be spending less time doing their constituency work and more time doing their parliamentary roles, their constitutional roles of overseeing the executive and scrutinising legislation. MPs don't see it like that. Because, as you say, there is some debate about the electoral effect of doing constituency work, but certainly every MP believes that's how you get elected, and that's what they do.

[00:13:36] And also, it's the one part of the job that gives them real meaning. I remember talking to Tony Wright, a former MP and Chair of the Public Administration Committee a long time ago about this and saying, look, the difference is in Westminster, you're just part of a big machine. There's very little that you can point to and say, I did that. You might put down an amendment, you might, you know, sponsor a bill, but there's very little that you can actually tangibly achieve. In your constituency, if you can find housing for somebody. or get help to somebody into employment, that is something very tangible and gives meaning to your work as well.

[00:14:10] And there's a lot to be said about that. And the challenge is that these two things are often counter posed. You should be doing less constituency work and more parliamentary work. The argument that I make in the book is that you need to do both, but you need to do them better. I think what politicians are doing in this country, but also around the world, in terms of what they're doing in their constituency work, it doesn't call on any of their parliamentary roles. It's arguably not within any official sphere of their jurisdiction either.

[00:14:35] I remember talking to Bernard Wetherill, former Speaker of the House, a long time ago, who, listeners may be aware, was a very colourful man full of anecdotes. And what he said to me when I was asking about his approach to constituency work, he said, I had constituency surgeries, and in that constituency surgery there was me, I had a lawyer, I had a psychiatric nurse, and a social worker. And between us, we were able to cover all of the issues there and then.

[00:14:57] Now I'm not sure that's true, but it speaks to the breadth of issues which MPs are dealing with locally and the fact that very few of them call on their role in Parliament at all. The argument that I make in the book is that politicians everywhere are doing exactly the right things.

[00:15:12] They're not doing the wrong things. Voters expect them to do certain things locally and they believe there's an electoral benefit. So they're doing the right things, it's just they're doing them in almost entirely the wrong way. There are much better ways of doing constituency work which is much more strategic rather than trying to solve the problem of every individual that comes to you.

[00:15:29] And I say this in the book, you know, if you've got 50 people coming to you saying we've got a problem with health, that's not a problem you should be solving 50 individual times. You need one strategic solution, which in many of the places we work, it's just a new hospital, a pharmacy, or whatever it might be, that solves that problem at source, rather than the MP trying to ameliorate the problem.

[00:15:49] But also, the other point which you allude to, Ruth, is that MPsthrough that constituency work sit on a tonne of evidence about how government policy and legislation and service is working or not, because every person that comes to them is potentially highlighting a gap in where the government is getting things wrong. The problem is it sits at the constituency level. And the MPs have to deal with it. Now if you could take that information and collate it and channel it into the legislative process or into government, this is a degree of expertise and evidence which is completely beyond the reach of the civil servants in the centre of government whose job it is to make policy.

[00:16:30] There is a resource there which is not being used and which could be used much, much better. I have to say I haven't found any country which does this well, so it's not just the UK. But there is a potential there, and such a source of information which would be incredibly useful in improving both legislation and policy.

[00:16:45] Mark D'Arcy: So might a wise Secretary of State, say a Secretary of State for Health, have kind of surgeries for MPs in Westminster where they could bring the problems that they were encountering to that Secretary of State or their ministers, and they would then perhaps get a bit of an early warning that there was a problem with people getting appointments with their GP within reasonable time.

[00:17:05] I'm sure you remember Tony Blair tripping up in one general election, completely unaware this was an issue, until he appeared on live national television in front of a live audience.

[00:17:13] Greg Power: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think there are all sorts of ways you could approach this. I think ministers will say to you that they're quite good at reading, you know, certainly their own parliamentary party, in the tea rooms and on the terrace and elsewhere, and having those sorts of informal conversations, but they remain informal, they remain ad hoc. And I think that's part of the challenge. And if you look at over the last 20 or 30 years, the number of issues that have emerged from MPs getting so much correspondence on things from the Child Support Agency in the 1990s, the Dangerous Dogs Act, the problems at the Passport Agency, and most recently the Post Office scandal. All of this came up through MPs being aware of this at constituency level. But they didn't connect the dots almost until it was too late. Lots of MPs were having these problems, but it wasn't until they started talking to each other about them that they started, something started to emerge at the national level.

[00:18:04] So there needs to be a much more routine way of, and systematic way, of tapping into what MPs are hearing at the local level.

[00:18:11] Ruth Fox: One of the approaches you allude to is, is this idea of an MP taking a more strategic approach, almost like a social entrepreneur role in their constituency. I mean, certainly one of the most impressive MPs I've ever met was an MP in Bangladesh who did exactly that.

[00:18:24] I mean, he sort of had this strategic approach to solving housing problems. They face huge pressure to dole out money to constituents to, to solve individual housing problems or education problems. And he was taking a much more strategic approach, a sort of dealing with the local agencies and saying, right, can we come up with a constructive solution here that's not going to solve it for one of my constituents, but it's going to solve it for all of them.

[00:18:49] You see some of that in MPs in Westminster in terms of their constituency work, but there perhaps isn't enough of that. And the support for them to do that kind of work is actually quite limited. And we have these ridiculous debates about how much money and resourcing MPs get and it's all classed as personal expenditure, which of course it isn't. It's expenditure on staff and skills, you know, the necessary skills you need in your staff. From your experience working internationally, how does Westminster compare in terms of the resourcing of MPs for that kind of constituency work? I mean, you look at Congress, for example, and that's probably the top end, but just seeing this week, congressmen and women are leaving after the recent general election and they're having photographs taken and putting them on social media with their staff and they've got huge numbers surrounding them and I think about what you get at Westminster and it's just not even comparable.

[00:19:41] Greg Power: The honest answer is I'm not sure. One of the frustrations is that the constituency work is very, very under researched. Most, it goes back to the point of the book in many ways that there is such academic focus on institutional structure and procedure that this human side of politics, what politicians actually think to matter most, and they all say that the constituency matters, you know, often, and it certainly takes up most of their time in many of the places we work, is missing. The research isn't there. So trying to find data for some of the stuff on, in this book was difficult, but I'll give you three quick examples in terms of the sorts of things that politicians are asked to do. The book starts with an anecdote from from Nepal where I was chatting to an MP and I was asking about the sorts of things that voters asked for. And he said I once bought somebody a cow. And so I said well, the obvious next question, why did you buy him a cow? And he looked at me blankly and said well because he needed a cow. Now that was then followed up by a case in Ghana where an MP stood up - I mean, this is the thing MPs will do what they feel their voters expect them and need them to do. But it's got to a point in many, many places where they are absolutely overwhelmed with the volume of stuff they're being asked for.

[00:20:51] So an MP in Ghana a few years ago was complaining about this and then told the story about how he was once phoned by a constituent who had a snake in their toilet and expected the MP to come around and remove this snake. The MP politely said, well, that's not my, that's not my job, but he still sent them money to get rid of the snake, to get a snake remover or snake charmer to remove this snake from the toilet. But then said, I then went around and inspected the job had been well done. And he still felt obliged to go and check on this even though it completely out with his, his role But the third example again, this is from from Nepal, an MP who was saying, you know, I worry about going back to my constituency sometimes because I know as soon as word gets around everybody will be coming to my house. And this is true in many of the places that we go to. So my question to him was well, why don't you see him in an office? And he looked at me like I was an idiot and said well, I don't have money for an office but also what the people say to me is that when you want my vote, you come to my house. Now I need something from you, I'm going to come to your house. And there's a logic to that which is actually difficult to argue with if you think about it.

[00:22:02] But just going back to your question about resourcing, the point I make in the book is that actually, if you keep throwing - everybody uses the US as a comparison, it's a bad example because in many ways Westminster and the US Congress are complete outliers on the spectrum of parliamentary development and parliamentary resourcing.

[00:22:20] And the fact is that throwing more resources at constituency work is not necessarily a solution because you will just do more of the same. More people will come to you. It's like the logic of, you know, building more motorways. They'll just fill up because there's the space there to be filled up. In the same way, you see this in a number of countries which have introduced what are called constituency development funds, where there are discrete pots of money to help politicians do that constituency work more effectively.

[00:22:48] What happens is public expectation is always running ahead of the ability of the politician's ability to deliver it. So the more resources you throw out, the more that public expectation increases, and the more the MP feels they need to do more of that work. As you're saying, Ruth, I think the challenge to this is not necessarily more resources, it's thinking about doing this in an entirely different way, a much more strategic way.

[00:23:09] I don't know if the MP you were talking about in Bangladesh is a guy called Saber Chowdhury, who's based in Dhaka, - yes, it is - who, who, again, I think I've referred to him in the book, but on one occasion, I encountered him about a decade ago where he had just set up a microfinance credit union in his constituency. Yeah.

[00:23:26] And he's line to me at the time was, you know, I'm giving people a hand up rather than a handout. You know, if people come to me and ask for money, I will say to them come back with an idea for a business or something, and we will fund you to do that business. I'm not just going to give you money.

[00:23:39] The obverse of that and again, it's in the book, there's an MP from Tanzania who we worked with for a while who said to me very candidly, look, some people come to me, if I don't give them money, I know they're not going to eat today. So what else do I do? But also I know it's not solving the problem, because they're going to have to come back to me in a day, a week, a month to ask again. So it's not solving the problem. But also they're going to go and tell their friends that the MP helped me, that their friends come to me, I have to find more money. So I'm increasing demand without the ability to increase supply. What we need, and what he had come to, was that again there's a more strategic approach of trying to start if you've got as I say 50 people coming to you with the same problem that's a problem you need to solve once that gets to 50 people in one go rather than 50 individual times simply by giving them money

[00:24:23] Mark D'Arcy: In the light of all those thoughts, what advice would you give to the 50% of the new House of Commons who are new MPs who've never been there before?

[00:24:30] How should they aim to kind of shape their careers?

[00:24:34] Greg Power: You both have probably had the same experience. Every politician I've ever met has been busy. They're all overworked. They're all completely stressed. And run down by the job. The number of MPs who you would regard as effective is relatively small. And I think the advice I'd give to new MPs would be the same to anybody starting in a new profession.

[00:24:57] Have a clear sense of strategy and how you're going to approach the job as a whole. Where would you like to be in one, three, five years time in relation to this? Because there is a risk, there is so much going on around the Palace of Westminster and in the constituency that you could spend five years just responding to stuff, putting out fires as they, as they turn up. You also need to be building some fire stations, which makes those fires easier to put out in three, four, five years time. And I think in my experience, that's the difference between a busy politician and an effective politician is having that sense of a strategic plan and trying to get things done in the, in the long run.

[00:25:35] Mark D'Arcy: One other thought I had, which is rather separate to all that is that there's a new phenomenon, or at least new to me out there at the moment, which is the political outsider. Who's never been really socialsed by the party systems in their country. Who's never really had to muck in with the general sort of crowd who are trying to climb up the greasy pole of politics. But who suddenly find themselves in an incredibly powerful and dominant position. I'm thinking people like Elon Musk who come in with an agenda having never had to go through the mill. How does the system handle them? Does the system break them or do they break the system?

[00:26:09] Greg Power: I think history suggests they eventually break themselves don't they?

[00:26:13] I mean, I think the, I mean, I don't want to necessarily specifically talk about Elon Musk, but the rise of populists, over the sort of 20th century, what you seemed to have was a pattern where the populists and the far right in particular would get into power. And it was almost as if the political systems needed the occasional inoculation from this level of stupidity and ineptitude and seeing how bad it is.

[00:26:39] At a time of real economic tightness and difficulty, the populist solutions sound very attractive when nothing else has worked. I mean, this is a lesson of Brexit, obviously, you know when, if your life is fairly bad anyway, and your economic prospects are difficult, why not vote to leave the European Union? It can't get any worse. And for those people, arguably, it didn't. So there is that siren song of the populists, which, which is very appealing in those times. But what seems to inoculate the system is then having the experience of those people in charge for a while, because invariably they tend to ruin things, because those simple solutions never work.

[00:27:15] In relation to some where like Bangladesh, which last year saw the removal of what was widely perceived to be a very corrupt leader and a political party, largely overthrown by a leaderless student movement. You've now got a new temporary, technocratic government in there, led by Muhammad Yunus, the guy who came up with the idea of microfinance credit unions in the first place. But he is very much a technocrat and not a politician. And the challenge is, how do you make that sort of political system work? Well, two things are going on. One is, the expectation of things changing is incredibly high, which is what happens when you get rid of a despised leader. Suddenly the expectation that things are going to change, and change very quickly, go through the roof.

[00:28:03] And the expectation of the citizens is, well, my own economic circumstance is going to change very quickly. And of course they don't, because it's one of the very harsh ironies of this sort of occurrence, is that the political institutions who are trying to make that change happen are at their weakest when public expectations are at their highest.

[00:28:21] And what you often see, when you have this sort of revolution, is that very quickly there's a disillusion. But the other challenge is, for the student movement, how do they become effective, because they are priding themselves on being leaderless and not being a political party. But if you are going to pull the levers of political power, you need a degree of organisation, which they're resistant to at the moment.

[00:28:43] And the challenge, you know, the worry in Bangladesh is that things could get very messy very quickly because of all of those things, because of the high levels of public expectation, because of the lack of organisation within the student movement and their unwillingness to really conform to traditional structures and the inability to pull the leaders of, levers of government with that public expectation.

[00:29:04] Ruth Fox: The irony in relation to Bangladesh, of course, is that although the system is highly, is regarded as corrupt, actually Sheikh Hasina's administration from an international perspective was regarded as quite successful. I mean it's transformed the economic development of the country in recent years, met many of the millennium development goals and so on, and yet still highly unpopular.

[00:29:24] Greg Power: I mean, we're on to a potentially, I'm happy to come back and do another podcast and talk about all of this and much more like, because I think that's the start of another very interesting conversation about where diplomacy and international development goes, because it has been focused in the early 2000s what can be described as 'state building in other countries, which didn't really work very well.

[00:29:44] It then moved to a much more if you like, pragmatic focus on economic development. But I think the lesson of somewhere like Bangladesh is that you ignore democracy at your peril. You know, she was very successful in improving the economy, but there were broiling tensions underneath that system, which had no vent because Sheikh Hasina was at the same time manipulating the political system to shore up her power. And that description could apply to several other countries in the world, which are doing economically reasonably well. But you can see those boiling tensions underneath, which could boil over at some point in the next few years. In terms of the U. S., you, it's difficult to see how egos as big as Elon Musk and Donald Trump could work together and collaboratively in a way that any system of governing needs for a very long period. The cracks, I think will start to appear relatively quickly.

[00:30:39] Mark D'Arcy: Greg Power, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and I on the pod today.

[00:30:43] Pleasure, lovely to be with you.

[00:30:44] Ruth Fox: Thanks Greg.

[00:30:48] Well Mark, what did you make of that? I was very struck by his words about the role of constituency work for MPs, which of course is a live issue amongst many commentators and researchers of parliaments concerned about MPs becoming social workers. He was very clear that MPs are right to be doing this constituency work, it's sort of necessary, but they're doing it the wrong way, as he described it.

[00:31:08] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I've always thought that actually the constituency link is absolutely vital for the working of Parliament. And what you could get, if you aren't very careful, is a kind of political class who flip from international conferences and summits to parliamentary plenary sessions and then off to some Davos style event or whatever. But never have a mechanism for rubbing their noses in the daily problems of the people they're supposed to represent. Having a constituency does that. And so, going to a constituency surgery and discovering that there's a kind of systematic problem, that people aren't being able to get GP appointments, or something else is going wrong in the machinery of the state, as Greg was saying in there, is vital data that ought to be piped into ministers in trays so that they can do something about it?

[00:31:50] Ruth Fox: Well, it gets piped in, of course, through correspondence, through a mountain of letters that flow into each minister's inboxes from MPs. But it doesn't get done, perhaps early enough, and it doesn't get done in a systematic way, and, you know, you can't plot the problems early enough.

[00:32:05] Mark D'Arcy: It seems very piecemeal, the system we've got now, and I would have thought a smart Secretary of State would be finding a way to be much more proactive in going out and finding what the problems are, possibly having MPs organised to come and tell him.

[00:32:19] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so any Cabinet Ministers out there who are already doing this, let us know, or if you, uh, if you're not already doing it and want some advice. then, uh, definitely read Greg's book. What else did you make of it?

[00:32:30] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I, I think that he's absolutely right, that what tends to happen is you get, kind of, parliamentary grand designs.

[00:32:35] Here's this shining new structure for scrutinising ministers.

[00:32:38] Ruth Fox: Surely not from the Hansard Society.

[00:32:41] Mark D'Arcy: Well, they're absolutely fine. Yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But when they collide with the reality of this is going to make my week much more difficult, this is going to mean I'm doing the wrong thing at the wrong time from my point of view as a Member of Parliament, that's always been the problem.

[00:32:56] And it remains the problem now, and people prefer the devil they know. rather than changing things. We saw this a couple of years ago in the House of Lords, where Peers rejected an apparently sensible set of changes to their sitting hours, because they just preferred doing things the way they do it now.

[00:33:11] Similar problems arise in the Commons. It'll be very interesting to see what the new leader, new ish leader, Lucy Powell, comes up with in terms of proposals for the work of Parliament, and whether she tries anything dramatic there, and what kind of resistance she might meet. The advantage that she might have is that you've got a 50% new House of Commons. So lots of MPs don't really have habits ingrained in them yet, which means it's so much more easy to change, especially since Labour's got such a huge majority, you'd have thought they could tank through almost anything they like. If they really wanted to. But then again, you know, maybe the people who do the tanking, if you like, drive those tanks, the whips, are the ones who wouldn't like the idea of change. There's a, a very telling sentence in, in Greg's book, where he's discussing changes that Robin Cook wanted to make to the way the Commons worked. And the, the response came back from someone at the Whips Office, well, yeah, this is very good and I can see that in many ways it looks a better system. But the system we know how to operate is the one we've already got. Yes. And they didn't like the idea of changing it beyond that.

[00:34:11] Ruth Fox: You get the institutional inertia as a result. I mean, I think the lesson is also that, you know, Robin Cook, of course, was renowned as a great parliamentarian and he had a reformer's instinct and he was open to ideas. But even he found it difficult to drive reform. And in some ways, just in terms of the sort of the volume of change, some of the later leaders of the House, who probably had more political capital in Cabinet, perhaps found it slightly easier. And I think that's going to be a challenge for the Leader of the House of Commons now. Not only has she got to corral her way through finding a consensus amongst this, this new House of Commons, with some degree of vision and plan for what she thinks the focus of reform should be, but she's also got to have the political capital at ministerial level and within Cabinet itself to drive that, that change through and she's going to need the support of the Whip's office.

[00:34:58] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, all of those things. And this is of course a moment when things are pretty difficult for the current government and frankly they may think of better things to spend their political capital on than changes however worthy in the functioning of Parliament.

[00:35:10] Ruth Fox: To which my response, as you might expect as Director of the Hansard Society, is I'm afraid fundamental to reforming the state is reforming the institutions of government and Parliament. And unless they do that they're going to keep repeating some of the errors of the past, and that's why we need change.

[00:35:26] Greg's book highlights that the human dynamics of this are incredibly complicated.

[00:35:31] Mark D'Arcy: I saw a cartoon the other day which had someone saying those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, but those who do know history are doomed to sit there watching other people repeat it.

[00:35:40] Ruth Fox: I've been here before. Well with that Mark, for further reading, listeners, do get Greg's book, Inside the Political Mind. It's fascinating. We'll put a link in the show notes. It's a must read for anyone who's interested in parliaments and how they might change.

[00:35:59] Mark D'Arcy: Not least because it's buttressed with all sorts of experience from all sorts of other parliaments. It's not purely a Westminster thing by any means. In fact it's 80% not about Westminster.

[00:36:07] Ruth Fox: Yeah, fascinating about other parliaments around the world, yeah. Great, well we'll see you next week Mark.

[00:36:12] Mark D'Arcy: See you then. Bye bye.

[00:36:14] Ruth Fox: Bye.

[00:36:20] 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.

[00:36:28] 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.

[00:36:38] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:36:40] 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.

[00:36:47] 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.

[00:36:57] 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.

[00:37:04] Ruth Fox: And you can find us across social media at Hansard Society to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.

[00:37:12] 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.