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

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

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up in this week's episode.

Ruth Fox: The sentencing mess. How the government got into a tangle about new criminal sentencing guidelines and how it plans to untangle it.

Mark D'Arcy: A matter of privilege. Is heavy handed policing interfering in the work of MPs?

Ruth Fox: And after a 25 hour speech brought the US Senate to a halt, could it ever happen at Westminster?

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, let's begin by talking about, as you described it, the sentencing mess. The Sentencing Council, the independent arms length body, [00:01:00] which to some extent has had outsourced to it the policy on how many years tariff there should be for a particular offender who's committed a particular crime, all sorts of issues of sentencing procedure, has basically landed the government in a very difficult position.

It's supposed to be an arm's length body, but it's now recommended something that's very, very uncomfortable for a government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So what essentially it's done, uh, it has to consult on its guidelines, uh, periodically it held its consultation at the end of 2023, beginning of 2024. At the time, it was sort of passed over politically, both by the government and, and by the opposition.

Nobody really raised any questions about it.

Mark D'Arcy: Because this surfaced actually when the conservatives were still in government.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. Well, at least the consultation process was taking place and a Conservative minister, to some extent signed off on it in a rather perfunctory way, and now it's landed in the lap of their successes in the Labour government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and, and essentially this is quite an extensive consultation document that they've produced, but at the heart of, of this political [00:02:00] problem is the element of the new guidance, which deals with pre-sentencing reports. And essentially what the government and the opposition are concerned about is that it singles out differential treatment of ethnic minority offenders when ordering pre-sentencing reports, which then the judges would use to make their decisions on, on sentencing.

Now the argument is this is going to lead to a two tier system in which ethnic minority offenders, you know, have these pre-sentencing reports, but wouldn't necessarily have them for white offenders. Conversely, the argument is, well, we already have a two-tier justice system and sentencing system because all the evidence shows that white offenders are less likely to get an immediate custodial sentence or a longer custodial sentence than ethnic minority offenders.

Well, indeed, this is a part of, of the balancing process.

Mark D'Arcy: You can see exactly how the Sentencing Council got into this position, and incidentally, this is largely something composed of judges from the various different levels of the criminal justice system and magistrates and a few lay advisors of one sort or [00:03:00] another as well.

So you can see how it would've got into this position and has tried to do a bit of rebalancing, but you've ended up with something that's very, very politically toxic.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think it's important to stress, this is not about the Sentencing Council saying to judges, you've got to hand down lighter sentences.

It's simply about that you can order a pre-sentencing report to better understand the circumstances of the offender. Just important, I think, to, to set the parameters of that.

Mark D'Arcy: But the argument I suppose then is that that leads on, possibly, yes, to lighter sentences.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Yes. We know Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Opposition spokesperson, of course, was a member of the last government, very frustrated with the way the justice system is working.

Although a lot of these issues and problems were developed on his Government's watch, he raised it a few weeks ago. At the time in government, the then Conservative minister did not raise any concerns. The Government is consulted by the Sentencing Council on this. The Justice Committee in the House of Commons was consulted, didn't raise concerns about it, but all of a [00:04:00] sudden it's become, because of this campaign, a political hot potato, the Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood is very clear she doesn't want what she's described as two-tier sentencing.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But she got rebuffed when she said that to the Sentencing Panel.

Ruth Fox: So her response was, well, we're gonna legislate to stop this and we'll have emergency legislation if necessary. She's published this week a bill to do just that.

And that obviously has persuaded the sentencing council that, in fact, they should delay implementation of their guidance

Mark D'Arcy: And then just wait for the legislation to kick in.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: We've got the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Report) Bill 2025. Indeed. Will be debated by MPs after they come back from their Easter break. And will be, it's not quite emergency legislation because it's not being whacked through in a single day, but it's going through in a reasonably fast track.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so this is one of the things that is my bug bear, because politicians and the media, I'm sorry, mark the media, they often bandy around this concepts of emergency legislation. [00:05:00] If it was genuine emergency legislation, it would be going through yesterday, today. It would be on a very, very fast track and sometimes bills do, if you've got to respond to a, a court case, for example, or there's a national security issue or you know, you can put a bill through very, very quickly, drafted almost overnight.

And this is a very short bill, I think a couple of clauses.

Mark D'Arcy: So yeah, it's a very short bill indeed. It just basically says the Sentencing Council can't do what it wants to do, yes, on this.

Ruth Fox: But what, what it is going to be is what we would call fast track or expedited legislation in the, if it was an emergency bill, it would happen today.

Mark D'Arcy: Warp speed.

Ruth Fox: Warp speed.

If it's fast tracked, it would go through all its stages in a day. Second Reading through to Third Reading in the Commons. Now there've been 150 bills that have done that since 1979, so it wouldn't be unusual, but actually it's gonna be slightly slower than fast tracked because it's gonna have its Second Reading immediately after Easter, and then the following week it'll have its Committee, Report [00:06:00] Stage, Third Reading. So basically two weeks after Easter it will have gone through its Common stages and then it'll be kicked into the to the Lords. So it will mean that best practice around decent intervals of time between each stage won't happen.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean there is that problem with it, but it is, as you say, a very short bill.

The urgency has been slightly drained out of the issue by the Sentencing Council pausing the implementation of these guidelines to give Parliament time to legislate. Yeah. So they don't have to act to stop new sentencing guidelines coming in immediately. Yeah. Uh, otherwise it probably would've had to have been emergency legislation.

Yes. But it's all been a bit more civilized than that. I could predict that there will be a bit of fun when this hits the House of Lords. I think all the sort of massively senior ex- Law Lords and ex Supreme Court judges and ex judges who sit in the House of Lords will not be entirely amused, no, by this.

And we'll be a bit worried about possibly the end of arm's length determination of sentencing policy.

Ruth Fox: No. Well, when the, uh, the minister in the Lords, it was the prisons minister, Lord Timpson, delivered the same statement that Shabana Mahmood had [00:07:00] delivered in the Commons announcing this, it was very notable the number of eminent lawyers who rose to express concerns on all sides of the house, including some Labour peers as well.

But, um, the one that did amuse me was, um, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who'd been former head of the Sentencing Guidelines Council, so, which is the predecessor body of, of this particular Sentencing Council. But, um, yes, that's where the expertise is.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, absolutely. So, uh, there might be a little bit of fun.

Who knows? There might even be ping pong on this bill, which would keep us all entertained. But I think one of the points to watch on this is the genesis, uh, of all this, how did the government get into this mess in the first place. And my long-term theory of what's been going on in this country for a decade plus now, possibly since 2008, is that British government has been bouncing from one crisis to another.

In 2008, you had the financial crisis and that reverberated through the ensuing four or five years causing austerity amongst other things. [00:08:00] 2016 we get Brexit and the run up to the Brexit referendum had begun a couple of years before that really. You then had Brexit dominating politics, bringing down Prime Ministers at regular intervals for some years after that.

And then just as we managed to get a breath after the Brexit deal had been done, Covid hit and you had a couple of years of covid crisis, and then again, barely drawing breath or into the energy crisis occasion by the vast rise in global energy prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So it's been one crisis after another and a great deal of bread and butter governance, mm, has fallen by the wayside, both because there's an overriding crisis and because of the kind of governmental churn, yeah, the constant change in Prime Ministers and therefore in cabinets and therefore in ministers. The revolving doors in, in and out, of government meant that a lot of stuff just wasn't getting the attention it would otherwise have had.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There's also a question about where people's political antennae is directed.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Um, so both ministers, special advisors, supporting those ministers, there's churn there as [00:09:00] well. Do officials know what it is that ministers want in respect to these policies when, you know, they're directed to keep an, an eye on what they're doing?

There's sort of arms length, there's oversight. Ministers have representatives on some of these bodies. But do those representatives really know what it is that their ministers want from them or their departments want from them?

Mark D'Arcy: And you do suspect actually, that if you had a minister who was facing a challenge from Reform, rather than say from the Liberal Democrats, they might be rather more alive to the politics of this kind of process than appears to have been the case, shall we say delicately

Ruth Fox: And, and also interesting that when it was a Conservative minister, you might have thought they'd have been alive to this kind of issue, but evidently the then Conservative minister at the time, Gareth Bacon passed through, his officials passed, presumably passed his, his special advisors passed his desk.

He signed off on it, presumably thought it was okay, and didn't spot the elephant trap.

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe they're all busy looking at the impending general election, Gotterdamerung, that was, uh, visibly ahead of them. But there's [00:10:00] also a legislative side to this. Oh, yes. The, the, the fashion for outsourcing difficult areas of government policy to semi-independent or supposedly independent bodies, I think is something that's been going on for quite a while now. You saw it with NHS England, although the idea that closing a hospital would suddenly not lead to politicians being blamed because it was NHS England and not ministers making the decision was always, I think, a complete illusion.

Similarly with sentencing policy, when people are unhappy with sentencing policy, they're not gonna say, oh, it's all determined by an independent body of judges.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: They're gonna say, ministers do something.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and essentially if you go back to sort of this Sentencing Council set up in 2009, so this is a decision initially taken by Jack Straw when he was Justice Secretary, and again, you know, to bring some coherence to sentencing guidelines.

It was in response to various independent reviews and official working groups and bodies that made these recommendations from the judiciary themselves. But, it's interesting if you look at the [00:11:00] sort of back history on this, 1998, so very early in the Labour administration, they set up the Sentencing Advisory Panel in the Crime and Disorder Act.

Five years later, they're setting up the Sentencing Guidelines Council in the Criminal Justice Act. Four years later, they're having a review of prisons to look at the advantages of a Permanent Sentencing Commission for England and Wales. And this is all tied up with the debate about prison places and the cost of prison spaces and, and so on 2009, then you get the Coroners and Justice Bill, in which this structured sentencing body that we are now dealing with the after effects of is established in the Coroners and Justice Act.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course this was a bill that was going through in the dying days of Gordon Brown's Labour government and possibly wasn't getting quite as much attention as it might have deserved. I mean, when we're talking about these pieces of legislation, they're all, all singing, all dancing, giant pieces of multipurpose Home Office legislation, which tweak the criminal law here, reform coroners courts [00:12:00] there, do lots of other things and often have 20 different prime purposes within them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean that bill that sets up the Sentencing Council was if ever there was one, a Christmas tree bill. You know, it had lots and lots of policy bells hanging off its, its various arms and branches. Such a lovely expression.

Um, everything from, you know, as you say, the coroner's system, freedom of information, that was Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, security of the courts, provision on legal aid. I mean, the short title was very, very long, um, one, you've got the problem that you're. You're constantly legislating, which we know in the sort of home affairs and the justice area has been a constant problem.

Regular legislation every few years and,

Mark D'Arcy: And sort of sedimentary layers.

Yeah. And half of any given criminal justice bill is correcting the mistakes in the previous one, one.

Ruth Fox: Previous one. So nothing sort of settles for very long, but then you've got the problem. You have a very, very big bill like this one with lots of provisions, quite different in character, [00:13:00] all scrutinized together in one job lot, and it becomes, it is more difficult for, for MPs and peers to, in terms of where they focus their attention.

Yes. The Sentencing Council issue was raised, it was, there was a brief discussion of it at Second Reading in the debate back in 2009, for example, but it perhaps didn't get the kind of focus that it might have had if it had been a slimmer, smaller, more focused bill.

Mark D'Arcy: So if there'd been the Sentencing Council (Establishment) Bill, and people have then looked at the powers, abilities and the parameters in which this organization would work, it might have been a much more focused effort.

Yeah. And you might, as a result, not have gone into the elephant track that it's subsequently blundered into.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and, and back in, in 2009, a lot of the focus ended up being on other provisions because the bill got into a complete procedural tangle in the House of Lords, amending the bill around secret inquests in sensitive cases.

They got into a whole mess about including new amendments to make provisions for this, but then didn't deal with the [00:14:00] consequential amendments later in the bill. So they've got sections of a bill that they were proposing to send to the House of Commons about, a provision that they'd taken out and they ended up this huge procedural debate about how on earth you then remove them.

Because you know, the clerks said, it can't be done at third reading in the House of Lords. And it can't be done at ping pong because that's about resolving differences between the two Houses. It's not about removing mistakes. They eventually resolved it, but up against, you know, prorogation was heading, uh mm-hmm, end of the session was heading, uh, in the direction of the bill. It had been going on for months. So all of these issues mean that things get lost and it highlights the problems, I think, of scrutiny of legislation.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So 15 years later here we stand with, um, problems perhaps that might have been avoided, if there'd been more focus at the time on what a Sentencing Council was gonna do.

Ruth Fox: And one of the things that they could have focused on, but didn't, interestingly, was what is the role of Parliament in relation to this body.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm.

Ruth Fox: So at the time in 2009, [00:15:00] Alan Beith asked the question, should the role of the council be subject to scrutiny by parliament?

Mark D'Arcy: I think he was at the time, the chair of the Justice Committee.

Was he?

Ruth Fox: He might've been. I'm, I'm not sure, but no, no,

Mark D'Arcy: Sorry, it's in the subsequent parliament. Okay.

Ruth Fox: Um, but yes, I mean, he's had a longstanding interest in these matters. So you raised the question, what's Parliament's role here and Jack Straw indicated there had been a discussion about whether Parliament should have to approve these guidelines by the affirmative order, essentially requiring both Houses of parliament to debate them and to approve them.

And he said, um, there would be many objections to that. Now, interestingly, he didn't articulate them, he didn't detail them. No, he didn't, didn't articulate what those objections would be, and didn't seem to be challenged on it in the Second Reading debate. So we never got that provision for Parliament having a role here, that it might have highlighted these issues if it had to come to a debate and might have avoided the problems.

Interestingly, another aspect of the bill, they did make provision for Parliament having to approve things, [00:16:00] but but not on this, and again, you ask, why, what, what's the difference?

Mark D'Arcy: You thought sentencing policy was a pretty important issue for Parliament to be distanced from?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so all that Parliament got on, on the sentencing guidelines was that the, the Justice Committee is a statutory consultee, and of course they were consulted and um, didn't see any problem.

And here we are. And here we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Well with that Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's do that. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

And we are back. And Ruth, let's talk about another area where perhaps officiousness has become a problem for Members of Parliament. And this is the police investigation into comments made on a parent's WhatsApp about the appointment of a teacher in a primary school. And what seemed to flow from it, which was that local elected representatives up to and possibly including local MPs were basically being warned off intervening on behalf of parents who'd been [00:17:00] arrested by police, over comments that have been made on a WhatsApp forum, and there is a general thought here that maybe the police are getting a bit too concerned with policing nasty things or even innocuous things that are said online. And possibly are not concerned enough with bread and butter policing about boring stuff like crime.

But it gets particularly toxic when it impinges on the work of elected representatives who are told that they should keep their distance from something that's surely their job.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I'd missed this mark until you actually pointed it out to me in the, the Sunday Times story this weekend. I'd completely missed it.

But, um, this is the story of the two parents who seemingly got arrested by six police officers held in a cell overnight by my own police force, Hertfordshire Constabulary,, thank you for that. And, uh, the local elected representatives, I think both local councillors, and an MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, former Deputy Prime Minister, no less, I mean, not an insignificant figure.[00:18:00]

They got involved, obviously, and, and were, were looking into it and what seems to have happened is that a police officer seems to have told a local councillor off via email. He was asking questions about this case and had copied in Oliver Dowden and others that, uh, if they didn't stop asking questions about it and cease communications on the issue, they might find themselves liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation.

Which is, um, pretty extraordinary and understandably, Oliver Dowden has basically said, well, first of all, you've got police overreach here. And, and secondly, this is a curtailment of democracy. I'm quite entitled to ask questions on behalf of my constituents about what on earth the police are doing.

Mark D'Arcy: This gave me a little bit of a flashback to a case some years ago now, where the Conservative MP in one of the Worthing seats, Tim Laughton, at the time, he's not there anymore, got into a spat with a constituent. Mm-hmm. One of these chronic correspondence that a lot of mps have, people who are [00:19:00] constantly firing in angry letters, demanding this, demanding that, turning up at the surgery haranguing the mp. And it's often something that the MP can't do anything about. Or is something completely illusory.

I mean, I'm pretty sure most MPs have someone who fits this kind of description. Oh, yes.

Ruth Fox: I, I can imagine all the parliamentary staff listening to this podcast, I've now got in their mind's eye exactly who the constituent is in their particular case.

Mark D'Arcy: Eye strays to a bulging file of correspondence. Uh, but, uh, Tim Loughton in this case got quite irate and made a speech in the Commons about how he had sacked this person as his constituent.

He was so sick of the constant correspondence that he is basically saying that he's not gonna deal with him anymore. And he sent a Hansard of this to the constituent who then complained to the police, who then interviewed Mr. Laughton.

Ruth Fox: Oh goodness.

Mark D'Arcy: So what had been a, dare I say it slightly silly spat, suddenly escalated into something where the Sussex Constabulary were wandering along to talk to an elected Member of Parliament about his relationship with or non-relationship with a [00:20:00] constituent.

Tim Loughton was sufficiently unhappy that he actually referred this to the Commons Privileges Committee, who very quickly decided that the act of an MP sending a Hansard of a Commons debate to a constituent was covered by parliamentary privilege, and that the police's action in this case had been a contempt of parliament.

And I will remember going along to the Privileges Committee hearing in which the Chief Constable of Sussex took, um, a hell of a thrashing.

Ruth Fox: I, we should probably explain to listeners that when we sort of talk about parliamentary privilege, what we mean, so essentially it's, it grants some legal immunities to MPs.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: To enable them, basically to perform their duties.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm. Without interference, speaking free, speaking freely in the chamber is, is probably the biggest of these. Yep. In the sense that you can't be prosecuted for libel for something said inside, yeah, the inside the Commons or at a committee a, a number of other sort of Commons related contexts.

Yeah. But at at the same time, there's also, as you say, the ability of an MP to do their job is also a right for an [00:21:00] impeded access to the buildings of Parliament itself. So there's a whole load of things covered by parliamentary privilege. But the idea that the police should get involved in something to do with the correspondence between an MP and one of their constituents is actually quite alarming.

And I don't think there was a great deal of sympathy for the Sussex constabulary in Parliament over this 'cause it was just the most extraordinary overreach.

Ruth Fox: No, well, I don't, there's an awful lot of sympathy for Hertfordshire Constabulary, also who have some form and they, I think, the chief constable himself has basically admitted that they probably could and should have handled it better.

We should say that the parents, in this case, the police have concluded there's no case to answer. There's no case to be pursued, but nonetheless, it raises lots of questions about what the role of the MP is. How do you deal with these kinds of cases? And frankly, what the ability of, of organizations like schools and others is to deal with potentially, it might have been, vexatious correspondence, it might have been, you know, excessive. But lots of organizations, lots of public bodies have to deal with that. And you can't keep calling in the police every time [00:22:00] you don't like it.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it, it is a bit going nuclear, isn't it? Mm-hmm. I think a lot of schools have parental WhatsApp groups where teachers are discussed, perhaps in ways that those teachers don't particularly like.

But I'm afraid that's show business, you know, you've gotta put up with that.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think the lesson here is just get off WhatsApp.

Can, can we tariff it?

Mark D'Arcy: Very good life lesson there. I think. Meanwhile, Ruth, it's been a very, very busy week on the committee corridor. Mm-hmm. It's pretty humdrum in the main chamber, but on the committee corridor, there've been two whole hearings of the Treasury Committee dedicated to looking at the intricacies of Rachel Reeves' spring statement. We were talking about it last week, and the Treasury Committee had, first of all, the usual panel of experts, Paul Johnson, making his now traditional and possibly constitutionally required appearance before the Treasury Committee.

Ruth Fox: Probably his last one, isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, quite possibly his last one, because he's going off to run an Oxford College, I think. Yeah. But um, he was there and a whole load of other experts from the, uh, OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility were there as well. Teeing up the following day on [00:23:00] Wednesday, an appearance by Rachel Reeves herself and, the weirdness of this occasion is that rather reminded me of the day that Boris Johnson, the final day of his premiership, was in front of the Liaison Committee solemnly discussing policies that he was never going to actually implement. In this case, you had Rachel Reeves solemnly discussing a budget that had been completely upended by Donald Trump's big.

Tariff announcement. Mm-hmm. I suppose it's the way of Western democracy now that you have world trade government by narcissistic episode up, up gets the president of the United States and announces something, and all previous calculations are therefore an operative. So all of Rachel Reeve's carefully calculated.

X billion pounds of headroom have been completely upended by the slack that's been given to UK industry by these tariffs, 25% on cars, 10% and everything else, wham.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't see it. Was the discussion actually in the committee about tariffs or was that just sort of, off the side.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, of course it was before the announcement had been made, so, but we knew, we knew it was [00:24:00] coming.

Well, we, we knew, we knew it was coming. We didn't quite what was coming. We didn't know that the UK was gonna get a 10% tariff and everybody else was gonna get 20% or more. Mm. So there was that side of it, but it was essentially Rachel Reeves issuing a plea for calm and saying the government would keep a cool head and, uh, react to whatever emerged, because of course, the government didn't know what was gonna be announced.

Apparently half the White House didn't know what was gonna be announced either, so they just had to sort of wait and see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah, the committee is chaired by Dame Meg Hillier. And of course the committees now are so dominated by Labour members. Did they give her a real grilling? Because that's the question I think with a lot of us have got an eye on, is, you know, how is it gonna work with Labour ministers and in very difficult circumstances at the minute being grilled by select committees that are so heavily dominated by Labour members.

Mark D'Arcy: It wasn't that great. I think at the moment, new Labour MPs are still a little bit diffident about giving ministers, particularly senior ministers like the Chancellor, who's the most senior minister other than the Prime Minister, yeah, uh, a bit of a grilling. So I think [00:25:00] that's going to wait. I think the other side of it is I think that Rachel Reeves is one of those very highly evolved politicians who somewhere in the course of their evolution has developed a blow hole, which enables them to inhale while still talking. Talking and she just talks and talks and talks and talks and talks, and there's never a gap to leap into.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: In the way that when you're dealing with Treasury mandarins, for example. Yeah. There's usually sort of well spaced pauses in their answers to questions, which allow people to leap in with Rachel Reeves. That just that the word stream, if you like, is such that it's actually quite difficult to interrupt her.

Ruth Fox: Hmm. Interesting. And I understand the, uh, the Transport Committee also gave a, a grilling to representatives from Heathrow and, uh, the National Grid about the, uh, the disaster at Heathrow Airport a couple weeks ago.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. They, they, they had the chief executive of Heathrow in there, and he gave a very, very abject apology right at the start of proceedings.

I mean, uh, Ruth Cadbury, the chair of the transport Committee, another Labour MP just pointed out at the beginning that something like two [00:26:00] to 300,000 passengers had had their journeys disrupted, possibly canceled altogether, by the power outage that crippled Heathrow for a while. So in that context, this guy began with an apology. I haven't seen anything quite like it since the masters of the banking universe had to come in one by one in two sessions, I think of the, of the Treasury Committee at the time, back in 2008 and apologize. And this was at that level of abject apology. And then there was a discussion of why it was that there was this sort of point failure possibility one substation goes out and Heathrow has to close. When Heathrow's actually supplied with power from three electricity substations, but apparently elaborate cross wiring had to take place before another one of them could fill the gap. So there was something very odd about the way the whole system was configured and it wasn't very resilient.

And I think that point sunk home pretty hard.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't catch those Mark, but I did catch a, a session of the Modernization Committee. This is, the committee's been established, uh, under the leadership of the leader of the [00:27:00] House of Commons, Lucy Powell. And, uh, they had a session with a group of current and former MPs who have some form of disability to talk about the access of Parliament, both as a building and also its procedures around things like voting and actually just the length of time you have to sit in the chamber to get called to speak.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so as we were talking about that with Marie Tidball, a Labour MP, last week because she'd been lobbying very hard on this issue. And indeed she featured.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, she was one of the MPs. Former MP for Harlow, whose office she now occupies. Robert Halfon was also there. There was the Liberal Democrat MP, who's blind and has a a, a guide dog. The dog is called Jenny.

Mark D'Arcy: Who has her own Twitter feed incidentally.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so that's Steve Darling MP and then also Marsha De Cordova, who is a Labour MP, who's registered blind, partially blind, and Sarah Bool MP, who has type one diabetes. And it was just really interesting. Some of them obviously have physical disabilities, some of have sight disabilities, some of them have health conditions [00:28:00] that affect their ability to move around the estate, or to spend extensive periods of time in the chamber without access to food and drink and so on.

But it was an absolutely fascinating insight into how they experience the Palace and the building and the process in ways that are different to somebody like ourselves who's able-bodied. I mean, I found Marsha De Cordova's account of moving about the building when you're partially sighted as she is, you're registered blind.

Things like in the lifts, you don't know what floor you're on because you, it's, I mean you and I know they're very small lifts. This is this historic palace. Very small lifts. They're very dark, all wood paneling. Very difficult to see anyway, if you are, if you do have good sight. Absolutely hopeless, if you don't. Um, and she was saying, you know, you just need audio to announce what floor you're on.

Mark D'Arcy: So you need a voice saying. Third floor. Third floor. Yeah. Well, in in Common speak, of course, it would be principal floor. Yes. Committee corridor. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Which I'm not sure helps

Mark D'Arcy: Committee Corridor

Ruth Fox: If you're a new MP, I'm not sure that would be very helpful. [00:29:00] But there was an absolutely cracking story where she said that, uh, in the office block next to the palace, the more modern part of the building, Portcullis House, as you and I know, it's a lot of glass paneling, glass walls, glass doors.

And she said if you got a site problem, you can't necessarily see where the door is. And she'd sort of taken some officials round and suggested that one very quick, easy solution would be to put some colored labels on the doors so that it could be more easily identified, which they agreed to do. But the problem was they put colored stickers on, but they were gray.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, gray is technically speaking a color, I suppose.

Ruth Fox: Well, yes. So there were, there was that side of things. And then the interesting things in terms of the experience of the chambers, so. Sarah Bool said, type one diabetic. You know, she has to monitor her sugar levels and glucose levels and and blood and so on, and she has to have a, an iPhone app for that.

She needs perhaps to moderate the situation with food and drink during the course of the day. [00:30:00] Obviously, if you're sitting longer into the evenings, that can be problematic and there's this whole question about how long do you have to sit in the chamber to get called and this debate about whether or not there should be call lists or whether there are other ways in which members could know how long it is before they're gonna get called.

Or do they just have to sit there for hours on end? And both she and Marie Tidball were saying, you know, sitting five, six hours in the chamber waiting to be called is problematic and

Mark D'Arcy: Not especially comfortable or accessible seats for a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: I mean they, they're uncomfortable even for able-bodied people.

But if you have, for example, prosthetics. Very, very difficult. Sarah Bool was saying she might need to go out to get food and drink. That can be problematic, and is it gonna affect when she's gonna be called? Interestingly, the degree to which provision is made, you know what we'd call in HR terms, reasonable accommodations are made for people's disability needs, access needs, seems to be quite ad hoc. It clearly has got better over the years, judging by what Robert Halfon's [00:31:00] experience, was compared to what the new MPs have had in in this Parliament, but still pretty ad ad hoc and Sarah Bool for example, said, that, uh, the officials installed a small fridge in the Reasons Room.

That room we talked about some months ago on the podcast.

Mark D'Arcy: Just behind the speaker's chair. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Where they go to sort of negotiate their explanations back to the House of Lords about why they're rejecting amendments. So there's this small room and that they've installed a fridge in there so she can put her insulin in there.

So she's got ready access to that in the evenings if she needs it. Things like that. Clearly welcome. Very, very useful, but somewhat ad hoc and clearly, you know, just things like being able to move about the palace unaided without always having to stop and ask for help and for support.

Mark D'Arcy: And someone to open the door for you or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Marie Tidball was saying the longer they sit into the evenings and sometimes you know, if that means you're getting a very late train home or very late train back to the constituency, she needs help to move her bags. It's not just a question of her moving. It's [00:32:00] also her sort of luggage, her laptop, or whatever it may be.

So she has to have staff support. So not knowing when the House is gonna finish and uncertainty about timings doesn't just affect her, it affects staff. Mm-hmm. So it's a lot of issues. And clearly some of this can be done. I mean, Robert Halfon was keen to stress this. A lot of changes can be made, it's not just a question of money.

It doesn't need huge investment necessarily, but it does need a change of culture and a change of attitude and also a sort of a willingness to think more strategically and structurally about some of these issues. So it'd be interesting to see what the committee concludes, but I think a big issue is going to be the nature of the parliamentary timetable and can change be made to that and adjustments made to that may be slightly different sitting times or breaks in sitting times.

I mean, it did occur to me, that what the House of Lords does might be worth considering. So they have concept of a one hour dinner break business. Uh, you know, they have a question for short debate, which interrupts other business.

Mark D'Arcy: It's, it's a mini debate sandwich [00:33:00] between two longer debates. Yeah. And it does allow people a chance to sort of get out and move about a bit.

Yeah. And, uh, if necessary, take a bit of a break. They're dinner break business. Yeah. Sometimes referred.

Ruth Fox: I don't think I'd recommend the House call it that, but

Mark D'Arcy: I'm sure we can come up with some better language.

Ruth Fox: But you know, if you're in a Second Reading debate or you know, whatever it may be, you don't necessarily have five, six hours. That you might have a couple of hours and then a break and something else intervenes and then, and maybe,

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe the chair, maybe the occupant of the chair can just be aware that certain people might have to nip out for a minute to get a insulin or whatever it might be, and not as it were, penalize them afterwards. Yeah. And call them later because they've dared to leave the chamber for a second.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean it must be difficult for the speaker to keep track of all of this.

Oh, sure. And manage in the chamber. So yeah, a need to sort of think about creatively about that. Pretty clear, I think, that Lucy Powell is quite interested in and quite supportive of the, the concept of call list, so, mm-hmm, interesting to see how that debate develops.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean, I can see the case for call this.

But what I [00:34:00] really wouldn't like is to get into the position that you get in the US Congress where people are basically only there to deliver their own speeches and then they disappear. Yeah. And there's no response between speeches. Yeah. No more. It's a great pleasure to follow the honorable gentleman, but I disagree with his main argument.

Mm-hmm. Because you've just got a pre-written speech that you're gonna dispense. Yeah. Those kind of things need to happen in a proper debate. If a debate is going to be an actual debate, rather than simply a list of sort of pre packed contributions that are unfolded in the chamber.

Ruth Fox: Well talking of, uh, contributions in the chamber, in the US context, um, you have heard that, uh, Senator Cory Booker in the United States has delivered, uh, the longest speech on record in the US Senate.

So, uh, should we take a break, Mark, and come back and discuss that? Just before we go, I'll make my usual appeal to listeners to review us on your podcast app, whether that's Spotify, Apple, or whatever else you use, it really helps other listeners find us. So, uh, five star reviews would be...

Mark D'Arcy: But be warned, anyone who says anything nasty about us will have Her [00:35:00] Majesty's constabulary round on you.

Ruth Fox: And you won't be protected by parliamentary privilege.

So listeners do help us with that and we'll see you in a moment.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back Ruth and exciting times in the US Senate if they use the word exciting in a particular context here. Cory Booker, one of the fairly long serving Democrat senators, made a 25 hour count, a 25 hour, speech. I'm not quite sure how you do that. Do you get comfort breaks? Do you get no, uh, the chance for food to be brought out to you?

No. No, none of that. So you just have to stand there and, conduct a marathon and, and this was all in the cause of offering some token parliamentary resistance to Donald Trump's agenda.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. 25 hours broke Senate record for the longest speech ever in the US Senate.

Mark D'Arcy: I think the previous longest one was Strom Thurman, the segregationist from, I think South Carolina.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, [00:36:00] 1957 when he spoke against, uh, civil rights legislation. So there was, there was. Nice

Mark D'Arcy: man.

Ruth Fox: Yes. No, not listeners. So there was kind of a symbolism to the fact that, uh, Cory Booker, who is a black Democratic representative from New Jersey was sort of obliterating his record and he very clear that that was partly his intention as well.

He, he wanted, he wanted that record. But yes, it was a speech about, he described it as it's a moral moment, and he said his constituents were concerned about what was happening with Donald Trump and basically wanted them to do something different. And I think one of the, the concerns in the us, in the Democratic Party is the absence of leadership, the absence of clear voices and response to what the Republicans are doing.

So he decided that one way was to essentially take over the Senate floor and deliver this speech, and it was interesting afterwards, he explained how he'd prepared for it, which is pretty extraordinary. So in order to maintain the floor, he couldn't have food, couldn't go away and get food. He had a couple of glasses [00:37:00] of water.

That's all he stood all the way through. Couldn't sit down.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. He was leaning, I think, on a lectern at one point. Yeah. Which apparently is permissible.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So to prepare for this, he had basically dehydrated himself for 24 hours beforehand. Couldn't, go for a a comfort break. Couldn't go to the toilet. So dehydrated himself 24 hours beforehand.

Hadn't eaten for several days. Wow. Um, said afterwards to journalists. My apologies to the Senate doctor and my own doctor. I hope they're not too annoyed with me.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I suppose you could think of this as the senatorial diet, 'cause I'm sure you must lose a fair amount of weight by doing all that.

Ruth Fox: But one thing that could be done is that other senators could intervene to ask a question and he could yield the floor to them, but retain the right to speak.

So interestingly had a bit of paper on which he'd written the words explicitly that he had to say to maintain the floor. Otherwise, it would've given leave for the Republicans to have interrupted. So there was a, a lineup of Democratic senators realizing what he was doing had sort of [00:38:00] piled into the chamber to support him and to intervene at appropriate moments.

Mark D'Arcy: In the common context, this is known as in-flight refueling. You know, as someone is making a long speech, someone can intervene just to give you a moment's relief to sit down or whatever.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, question was asked, was, a lot of Republicans were saying, oh, it's just an absolute waste of time. I mean, this wasn't a formal filibuster because he wasn't stopping legislation, he wasn't stopping motions and or a budget or anything like that.

So it wasn't classed as a formal filibuster. But there was a question, you know, is it a good use of time. Well, it went viral. I mean, millions were watching. I mean, I stayed up to watch that sort of last half hour to see if he blew through Strom Thurman's record and was quietly cheering him on as I was watching C-span.

Oh, the joy of C-Span. Yeah. It was that sort of moment of, you know, he'd captured attention and, and he was, and, and

Mark D'Arcy: That I think was surely the point. Yeah. I mean, at the moment there's a lot of criticism that the actual Democrat leadership in the US Senate has been pretty limp in its opposition to Donald Trump.

Yeah. And Chuck Schumer, [00:39:00] the leader there, is in some sense, didn't fight over a passing the US budget in a way that he might have done. And he came under huge criticism for that. Yeah. And into that vacuum, I suspect moves Cory Booker. There are people who will want to assert leadership over the Democrat party.

Not perhaps formal leadership of the party group or anything like that,

Ruth Fox: Positioning, but

Mark D'Arcy: It's positioning. Does this tee him up as the presumptive front runner for the Democrat presidential nomination? It's a long way out, but it's a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well you did wonder what Charles Schumer thought about it 'cause he publicly, he was very supportive and saying very nice things and intervening to help.

But I did wonder privately, behind the scenes, was he thrilled.

Mark D'Arcy: Well always remember the political maxim from Yes Minister, in order to stab someone in the back, you first have to get behind them. One, one of my favorites. But I suppose the question arises and this kind of thing doesn't happen in Westminster and probably couldn't happen in Westminster.

No, there's no way you can see a 25 hour speech being made in either House of, on pretty much any occasion.

Ruth Fox: No, I mean the, [00:40:00] first of all, in terms of the sort of the agenda and the program, you have the moment of interruption, you have programming and and so on. One of the criticisms of course, is that too often the speeches that mps are, the time that they're given to speak, is too short.

Yeah. We talked about it on the podcast quite a bit, two of three minute increments.

Mark D'Arcy: If, if you're lucky. And the moment of interruption incident is the formal sort of stop point. Yeah, uh, which main Commons business ends, and there's then an adjournment debate for half an hour. Yeah. So you can't go on beyond that.

And that's set in stone most of the time in Commons proceedings, unless there's a thing called an any hours motion passed. And in that case, again, the chair is rigorously monitoring how long MPs are allowed to speak. So in the Commons, the only occasion when you can really get a longer than usual speech is on Private Members' bill Fridays. Mm-hmm. And even there, you've still got the moment of interruption looming. You know, two 30 will come along and that's it. Mm. But I still have post-traumatic memories of watching people like Philip Davis and Andrew Dismore and, uh, David Nuttle of Blessed Memory, trying to talk [00:41:00] out unwelcome Private Members Bills.

I once got into trouble with Philip Davis for writing a yesterday in parliament, which included the words, on and on he droned, and he was, he was quite upset by this, but I felt it was fairly accurate reporting, to be honest.

Ruth Fox: Oh dear. Well, another issue, Mark has come up here about how elected members use their time.

So the criticism of Cory Booker was, you know, standing in the Senate chamber, you know, droning on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But possibly doing a good piece of political positioning while he did it. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And, and also political education, I think in his case. 'cause he's got a message out there about all the problems that are happening now and what might happen in the future.

And that is on record. But here, different question about how MPs use their times has come up when 20 MPs have signed a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, calling on him to sort out an issue in Kashmir in relation to an airport development in the city of Mirpur. Basically MPs calling on the [00:42:00] Pakistani authorities to build this airport, which is kind of interesting when quite a number of those signatories to the letter are opposed to development of airports in the uk.

Yeah. For climate change reasons.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, if you're against airports for climate change reasons, you're presumably against them whether they're in Mirpur or Heathrow. You'd hope so.

. So, so there is a, something of an inconsistency there. And I do think that there is a kind of political opening that's been provided here where they may find people campaigning against them on the basis that they seem more concerned with airports in Kashmir than they are with conditions in their constituency.

Now that's a, a bit of a travesty. I mean, it takes an an MP about 30 seconds to sign a, a letter. Yeah, of course it does. So, and I imagine they sign several dozen a day,

Ruth Fox: But it's about political and policy consistency, isn't it? Yeah. And whether you should be lobbying a foreign prime minister to do something that you're not willing to ask of your own prime minister for your own constituents, you're willing to ask it of an overseas prime minister for your constituents who happen to go back to that country as sort of part of the diaspora community, go back to visit and don't like the [00:43:00] fact they've got to travel several hours to get back to their relatives from the airport that they can land in. At the moment they'd like somewhere nearer.

Mark D'Arcy: It is. It is, of course a very large Kashmiri diaspora in Britain. Yeah. And Kashmiri derived voters, if you like, mm-hmm, are possibly swing voters in quite a number of constituencies now. And of course, Labour's relationship with a lot of Muslim voters has been very fraught because of the Gaza situation.

Yeah. I suppose this is one way in which they can kind of keep in touch with some of those voters.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but I go back to the point it's about consistency of, of message and consistency of politics. And this is a delicate question in the, in the Labour party, in Labour politics, but there is this concern about development of sectarian politics, you know, within particular constituencies.

And this kind of thing doesn't help and it just makes you look a bit frankly hypocritical.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a difficult area to go blundering into for all sorts of reasons. And while some people can sort of shrug and say consistency's overrated in politics, I think a little bit of it every now and then might be quite [00:44:00] welcome.

Ruth Fox: Useful. Well Mark with that, I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. We will have our next episode looking at the assisted dying bill next in our series of special mini pod, looking at the next stage, the Report Stage, which will be coming up on the 25th of April. So we've got our procedural guru, Mr Paul Evans, back to explain what to look out for at Report Stage and Third Reading.

Mark D'Arcy: The secrets of Report Stage. Always an interesting area to dive into.

Ruth Fox: So we are gonna hold that over because parliamentary recess is kicking in this week in the House of Lords, and the the Commons are back for a couple of days next week, but we'll be putting that, uh, special episode out next Thursday.

So look out for that in your podcast feed and then the following week. But just before Easter, we've got one of your special Whipping Yarns episodes, Mark

Mark D'Arcy: A, a special treat. The former chief whip under Rishi Sunak, Simon Hart, has written a tell all memoir or tell quite a lot memoir. One suspects there are a few secrets he didn't reveal in that [00:45:00] book and, and the names.

And he's spoken to us about his experience as the ringmaster of Conservative MPs in the dying days of Rishi Sunak's government after a long era of Conservative rule. And it's quite a tale.

Ruth Fox: It is. And then, uh, we'll be back after Easter for that assisted dying bill Report Stage. So we won't actually be recording on the Thursday as normal.

We'll be recording on the Friday the 25th. So that will drop into your podcast feed on the Saturday morning. So we're delaying proceedings in order so that we can watch and report back on, on what happens with that important bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Do join us then

Ruth Fox: And we'll see you then. Have a good break. Happy Easter and we'll see you, uh, see you back on the 26th.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye bye.

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 at Hansard [00:46:00] Society.

PMP E86 ===

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

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

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up in this week's episode.

Ruth Fox: The sentencing mess. How the government got into a tangle about new criminal sentencing guidelines and how it plans to untangle it.

Mark D'Arcy: A matter of privilege. Is heavy handed policing interfering in the work of MPs?

Ruth Fox: And after a 25 hour speech brought the US Senate to a halt, could it ever happen at Westminster?

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, let's begin by talking about, as you described it, the sentencing mess. The Sentencing Council, the independent arms length body, [00:01:00] which to some extent has had outsourced to it the policy on how many years tariff there should be for a particular offender who's committed a particular crime, all sorts of issues of sentencing procedure, has basically landed the government in a very difficult position.

It's supposed to be an arm's length body, but it's now recommended something that's very, very uncomfortable for a government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So what essentially it's done, uh, it has to consult on its guidelines, uh, periodically it held its consultation at the end of 2023, beginning of 2024. At the time, it was sort of passed over politically, both by the government and, and by the opposition.

Nobody really raised any questions about it.

Mark D'Arcy: Because this surfaced actually when the conservatives were still in government.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. Well, at least the consultation process was taking place and a Conservative minister, to some extent signed off on it in a rather perfunctory way, and now it's landed in the lap of their successes in the Labour government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and, and essentially this is quite an extensive consultation document that they've produced, but at the heart of, of this political [00:02:00] problem is the element of the new guidance, which deals with pre-sentencing reports. And essentially what the government and the opposition are concerned about is that it singles out differential treatment of ethnic minority offenders when ordering pre-sentencing reports, which then the judges would use to make their decisions on, on sentencing.

Now the argument is this is going to lead to a two tier system in which ethnic minority offenders, you know, have these pre-sentencing reports, but wouldn't necessarily have them for white offenders. Conversely, the argument is, well, we already have a two-tier justice system and sentencing system because all the evidence shows that white offenders are less likely to get an immediate custodial sentence or a longer custodial sentence than ethnic minority offenders.

Well, indeed, this is a part of, of the balancing process.

Mark D'Arcy: You can see exactly how the Sentencing Council got into this position, and incidentally, this is largely something composed of judges from the various different levels of the criminal justice system and magistrates and a few lay advisors of one sort or [00:03:00] another as well.

So you can see how it would've got into this position and has tried to do a bit of rebalancing, but you've ended up with something that's very, very politically toxic.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think it's important to stress, this is not about the Sentencing Council saying to judges, you've got to hand down lighter sentences.

It's simply about that you can order a pre-sentencing report to better understand the circumstances of the offender. Just important, I think, to, to set the parameters of that.

Mark D'Arcy: But the argument I suppose then is that that leads on, possibly, yes, to lighter sentences.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Yes. We know Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Opposition spokesperson, of course, was a member of the last government, very frustrated with the way the justice system is working.

Although a lot of these issues and problems were developed on his Government's watch, he raised it a few weeks ago. At the time in government, the then Conservative minister did not raise any concerns. The Government is consulted by the Sentencing Council on this. The Justice Committee in the House of Commons was consulted, didn't raise concerns about it, but all of a [00:04:00] sudden it's become, because of this campaign, a political hot potato, the Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood is very clear she doesn't want what she's described as two-tier sentencing.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But she got rebuffed when she said that to the Sentencing Panel.

Ruth Fox: So her response was, well, we're gonna legislate to stop this and we'll have emergency legislation if necessary. She's published this week a bill to do just that.

And that obviously has persuaded the sentencing council that, in fact, they should delay implementation of their guidance

Mark D'Arcy: And then just wait for the legislation to kick in.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: We've got the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Report) Bill 2025. Indeed. Will be debated by MPs after they come back from their Easter break. And will be, it's not quite emergency legislation because it's not being whacked through in a single day, but it's going through in a reasonably fast track.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so this is one of the things that is my bug bear, because politicians and the media, I'm sorry, mark the media, they often bandy around this concepts of emergency legislation. [00:05:00] If it was genuine emergency legislation, it would be going through yesterday, today. It would be on a very, very fast track and sometimes bills do, if you've got to respond to a, a court case, for example, or there's a national security issue or you know, you can put a bill through very, very quickly, drafted almost overnight.

And this is a very short bill, I think a couple of clauses.

Mark D'Arcy: So yeah, it's a very short bill indeed. It just basically says the Sentencing Council can't do what it wants to do, yes, on this.

Ruth Fox: But what, what it is going to be is what we would call fast track or expedited legislation in the, if it was an emergency bill, it would happen today.

Mark D'Arcy: Warp speed.

Ruth Fox: Warp speed.

If it's fast tracked, it would go through all its stages in a day. Second Reading through to Third Reading in the Commons. Now there've been 150 bills that have done that since 1979, so it wouldn't be unusual, but actually it's gonna be slightly slower than fast tracked because it's gonna have its Second Reading immediately after Easter, and then the following week it'll have its Committee, Report [00:06:00] Stage, Third Reading. So basically two weeks after Easter it will have gone through its Common stages and then it'll be kicked into the to the Lords. So it will mean that best practice around decent intervals of time between each stage won't happen.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean there is that problem with it, but it is, as you say, a very short bill.

The urgency has been slightly drained out of the issue by the Sentencing Council pausing the implementation of these guidelines to give Parliament time to legislate. Yeah. So they don't have to act to stop new sentencing guidelines coming in immediately. Yeah. Uh, otherwise it probably would've had to have been emergency legislation.

Yes. But it's all been a bit more civilized than that. I could predict that there will be a bit of fun when this hits the House of Lords. I think all the sort of massively senior ex- Law Lords and ex Supreme Court judges and ex judges who sit in the House of Lords will not be entirely amused, no, by this.

And we'll be a bit worried about possibly the end of arm's length determination of sentencing policy.

Ruth Fox: No. Well, when the, uh, the minister in the Lords, it was the prisons minister, Lord Timpson, delivered the same statement that Shabana Mahmood had [00:07:00] delivered in the Commons announcing this, it was very notable the number of eminent lawyers who rose to express concerns on all sides of the house, including some Labour peers as well.

But, um, the one that did amuse me was, um, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who'd been former head of the Sentencing Guidelines Council, so, which is the predecessor body of, of this particular Sentencing Council. But, um, yes, that's where the expertise is.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, absolutely. So, uh, there might be a little bit of fun.

Who knows? There might even be ping pong on this bill, which would keep us all entertained. But I think one of the points to watch on this is the genesis, uh, of all this, how did the government get into this mess in the first place. And my long-term theory of what's been going on in this country for a decade plus now, possibly since 2008, is that British government has been bouncing from one crisis to another.

In 2008, you had the financial crisis and that reverberated through the ensuing four or five years causing austerity amongst other things. [00:08:00] 2016 we get Brexit and the run up to the Brexit referendum had begun a couple of years before that really. You then had Brexit dominating politics, bringing down Prime Ministers at regular intervals for some years after that.

And then just as we managed to get a breath after the Brexit deal had been done, Covid hit and you had a couple of years of covid crisis, and then again, barely drawing breath or into the energy crisis occasion by the vast rise in global energy prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So it's been one crisis after another and a great deal of bread and butter governance, mm, has fallen by the wayside, both because there's an overriding crisis and because of the kind of governmental churn, yeah, the constant change in Prime Ministers and therefore in cabinets and therefore in ministers. The revolving doors in, in and out, of government meant that a lot of stuff just wasn't getting the attention it would otherwise have had.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There's also a question about where people's political antennae is directed.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Um, so both ministers, special advisors, supporting those ministers, there's churn there as [00:09:00] well. Do officials know what it is that ministers want in respect to these policies when, you know, they're directed to keep an, an eye on what they're doing?

There's sort of arms length, there's oversight. Ministers have representatives on some of these bodies. But do those representatives really know what it is that their ministers want from them or their departments want from them?

Mark D'Arcy: And you do suspect actually, that if you had a minister who was facing a challenge from Reform, rather than say from the Liberal Democrats, they might be rather more alive to the politics of this kind of process than appears to have been the case, shall we say delicately

Ruth Fox: And, and also interesting that when it was a Conservative minister, you might have thought they'd have been alive to this kind of issue, but evidently the then Conservative minister at the time, Gareth Bacon passed through, his officials passed, presumably passed his, his special advisors passed his desk.

He signed off on it, presumably thought it was okay, and didn't spot the elephant trap.

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe they're all busy looking at the impending general election, Gotterdamerung, that was, uh, visibly ahead of them. But there's [00:10:00] also a legislative side to this. Oh, yes. The, the, the fashion for outsourcing difficult areas of government policy to semi-independent or supposedly independent bodies, I think is something that's been going on for quite a while now. You saw it with NHS England, although the idea that closing a hospital would suddenly not lead to politicians being blamed because it was NHS England and not ministers making the decision was always, I think, a complete illusion.

Similarly with sentencing policy, when people are unhappy with sentencing policy, they're not gonna say, oh, it's all determined by an independent body of judges.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: They're gonna say, ministers do something.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and essentially if you go back to sort of this Sentencing Council set up in 2009, so this is a decision initially taken by Jack Straw when he was Justice Secretary, and again, you know, to bring some coherence to sentencing guidelines.

It was in response to various independent reviews and official working groups and bodies that made these recommendations from the judiciary themselves. But, it's interesting if you look at the [00:11:00] sort of back history on this, 1998, so very early in the Labour administration, they set up the Sentencing Advisory Panel in the Crime and Disorder Act.

Five years later, they're setting up the Sentencing Guidelines Council in the Criminal Justice Act. Four years later, they're having a review of prisons to look at the advantages of a Permanent Sentencing Commission for England and Wales. And this is all tied up with the debate about prison places and the cost of prison spaces and, and so on 2009, then you get the Coroners and Justice Bill, in which this structured sentencing body that we are now dealing with the after effects of is established in the Coroners and Justice Act.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course this was a bill that was going through in the dying days of Gordon Brown's Labour government and possibly wasn't getting quite as much attention as it might have deserved. I mean, when we're talking about these pieces of legislation, they're all, all singing, all dancing, giant pieces of multipurpose Home Office legislation, which tweak the criminal law here, reform coroners courts [00:12:00] there, do lots of other things and often have 20 different prime purposes within them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean that bill that sets up the Sentencing Council was if ever there was one, a Christmas tree bill. You know, it had lots and lots of policy bells hanging off its, its various arms and branches. Such a lovely expression.

Um, everything from, you know, as you say, the coroner's system, freedom of information, that was Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, security of the courts, provision on legal aid. I mean, the short title was very, very long, um, one, you've got the problem that you're. You're constantly legislating, which we know in the sort of home affairs and the justice area has been a constant problem.

Regular legislation every few years and,

Mark D'Arcy: And sort of sedimentary layers.

Yeah. And half of any given criminal justice bill is correcting the mistakes in the previous one, one.

Ruth Fox: Previous one. So nothing sort of settles for very long, but then you've got the problem. You have a very, very big bill like this one with lots of provisions, quite different in character, [00:13:00] all scrutinized together in one job lot, and it becomes, it is more difficult for, for MPs and peers to, in terms of where they focus their attention.

Yes. The Sentencing Council issue was raised, it was, there was a brief discussion of it at Second Reading in the debate back in 2009, for example, but it perhaps didn't get the kind of focus that it might have had if it had been a slimmer, smaller, more focused bill.

Mark D'Arcy: So if there'd been the Sentencing Council (Establishment) Bill, and people have then looked at the powers, abilities and the parameters in which this organization would work, it might have been a much more focused effort.

Yeah. And you might, as a result, not have gone into the elephant track that it's subsequently blundered into.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and, and back in, in 2009, a lot of the focus ended up being on other provisions because the bill got into a complete procedural tangle in the House of Lords, amending the bill around secret inquests in sensitive cases.

They got into a whole mess about including new amendments to make provisions for this, but then didn't deal with the [00:14:00] consequential amendments later in the bill. So they've got sections of a bill that they were proposing to send to the House of Commons about, a provision that they'd taken out and they ended up this huge procedural debate about how on earth you then remove them.

Because you know, the clerks said, it can't be done at third reading in the House of Lords. And it can't be done at ping pong because that's about resolving differences between the two Houses. It's not about removing mistakes. They eventually resolved it, but up against, you know, prorogation was heading, uh mm-hmm, end of the session was heading, uh, in the direction of the bill. It had been going on for months. So all of these issues mean that things get lost and it highlights the problems, I think, of scrutiny of legislation.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So 15 years later here we stand with, um, problems perhaps that might have been avoided, if there'd been more focus at the time on what a Sentencing Council was gonna do.

Ruth Fox: And one of the things that they could have focused on, but didn't, interestingly, was what is the role of Parliament in relation to this body.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm.

Ruth Fox: So at the time in 2009, [00:15:00] Alan Beith asked the question, should the role of the council be subject to scrutiny by parliament?

Mark D'Arcy: I think he was at the time, the chair of the Justice Committee.

Was he?

Ruth Fox: He might've been. I'm, I'm not sure, but no, no,

Mark D'Arcy: Sorry, it's in the subsequent parliament. Okay.

Ruth Fox: Um, but yes, I mean, he's had a longstanding interest in these matters. So you raised the question, what's Parliament's role here and Jack Straw indicated there had been a discussion about whether Parliament should have to approve these guidelines by the affirmative order, essentially requiring both Houses of parliament to debate them and to approve them.

And he said, um, there would be many objections to that. Now, interestingly, he didn't articulate them, he didn't detail them. No, he didn't, didn't articulate what those objections would be, and didn't seem to be challenged on it in the Second Reading debate. So we never got that provision for Parliament having a role here, that it might have highlighted these issues if it had to come to a debate and might have avoided the problems.

Interestingly, another aspect of the bill, they did make provision for Parliament having to approve things, [00:16:00] but but not on this, and again, you ask, why, what, what's the difference?

Mark D'Arcy: You thought sentencing policy was a pretty important issue for Parliament to be distanced from?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so all that Parliament got on, on the sentencing guidelines was that the, the Justice Committee is a statutory consultee, and of course they were consulted and um, didn't see any problem.

And here we are. And here we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Well with that Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's do that. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

And we are back. And Ruth, let's talk about another area where perhaps officiousness has become a problem for Members of Parliament. And this is the police investigation into comments made on a parent's WhatsApp about the appointment of a teacher in a primary school. And what seemed to flow from it, which was that local elected representatives up to and possibly including local MPs were basically being warned off intervening on behalf of parents who'd been [00:17:00] arrested by police, over comments that have been made on a WhatsApp forum, and there is a general thought here that maybe the police are getting a bit too concerned with policing nasty things or even innocuous things that are said online. And possibly are not concerned enough with bread and butter policing about boring stuff like crime.

But it gets particularly toxic when it impinges on the work of elected representatives who are told that they should keep their distance from something that's surely their job.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I'd missed this mark until you actually pointed it out to me in the, the Sunday Times story this weekend. I'd completely missed it.

But, um, this is the story of the two parents who seemingly got arrested by six police officers held in a cell overnight by my own police force, Hertfordshire Constabulary,, thank you for that. And, uh, the local elected representatives, I think both local councillors, and an MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, former Deputy Prime Minister, no less, I mean, not an insignificant figure.[00:18:00]

They got involved, obviously, and, and were, were looking into it and what seems to have happened is that a police officer seems to have told a local councillor off via email. He was asking questions about this case and had copied in Oliver Dowden and others that, uh, if they didn't stop asking questions about it and cease communications on the issue, they might find themselves liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation.

Which is, um, pretty extraordinary and understandably, Oliver Dowden has basically said, well, first of all, you've got police overreach here. And, and secondly, this is a curtailment of democracy. I'm quite entitled to ask questions on behalf of my constituents about what on earth the police are doing.

Mark D'Arcy: This gave me a little bit of a flashback to a case some years ago now, where the Conservative MP in one of the Worthing seats, Tim Laughton, at the time, he's not there anymore, got into a spat with a constituent. Mm-hmm. One of these chronic correspondence that a lot of mps have, people who are [00:19:00] constantly firing in angry letters, demanding this, demanding that, turning up at the surgery haranguing the mp. And it's often something that the MP can't do anything about. Or is something completely illusory.

I mean, I'm pretty sure most MPs have someone who fits this kind of description. Oh, yes.

Ruth Fox: I, I can imagine all the parliamentary staff listening to this podcast, I've now got in their mind's eye exactly who the constituent is in their particular case.

Mark D'Arcy: Eye strays to a bulging file of correspondence. Uh, but, uh, Tim Loughton in this case got quite irate and made a speech in the Commons about how he had sacked this person as his constituent.

He was so sick of the constant correspondence that he is basically saying that he's not gonna deal with him anymore. And he sent a Hansard of this to the constituent who then complained to the police, who then interviewed Mr. Laughton.

Ruth Fox: Oh goodness.

Mark D'Arcy: So what had been a, dare I say it slightly silly spat, suddenly escalated into something where the Sussex Constabulary were wandering along to talk to an elected Member of Parliament about his relationship with or non-relationship with a [00:20:00] constituent.

Tim Loughton was sufficiently unhappy that he actually referred this to the Commons Privileges Committee, who very quickly decided that the act of an MP sending a Hansard of a Commons debate to a constituent was covered by parliamentary privilege, and that the police's action in this case had been a contempt of parliament.

And I will remember going along to the Privileges Committee hearing in which the Chief Constable of Sussex took, um, a hell of a thrashing.

Ruth Fox: I, we should probably explain to listeners that when we sort of talk about parliamentary privilege, what we mean, so essentially it's, it grants some legal immunities to MPs.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: To enable them, basically to perform their duties.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm. Without interference, speaking free, speaking freely in the chamber is, is probably the biggest of these. Yep. In the sense that you can't be prosecuted for libel for something said inside, yeah, the inside the Commons or at a committee a, a number of other sort of Commons related contexts.

Yeah. But at at the same time, there's also, as you say, the ability of an MP to do their job is also a right for an [00:21:00] impeded access to the buildings of Parliament itself. So there's a whole load of things covered by parliamentary privilege. But the idea that the police should get involved in something to do with the correspondence between an MP and one of their constituents is actually quite alarming.

And I don't think there was a great deal of sympathy for the Sussex constabulary in Parliament over this 'cause it was just the most extraordinary overreach.

Ruth Fox: No, well, I don't, there's an awful lot of sympathy for Hertfordshire Constabulary, also who have some form and they, I think, the chief constable himself has basically admitted that they probably could and should have handled it better.

We should say that the parents, in this case, the police have concluded there's no case to answer. There's no case to be pursued, but nonetheless, it raises lots of questions about what the role of the MP is. How do you deal with these kinds of cases? And frankly, what the ability of, of organizations like schools and others is to deal with potentially, it might have been, vexatious correspondence, it might have been, you know, excessive. But lots of organizations, lots of public bodies have to deal with that. And you can't keep calling in the police every time [00:22:00] you don't like it.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it, it is a bit going nuclear, isn't it? Mm-hmm. I think a lot of schools have parental WhatsApp groups where teachers are discussed, perhaps in ways that those teachers don't particularly like.

But I'm afraid that's show business, you know, you've gotta put up with that.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think the lesson here is just get off WhatsApp.

Can, can we tariff it?

Mark D'Arcy: Very good life lesson there. I think. Meanwhile, Ruth, it's been a very, very busy week on the committee corridor. Mm-hmm. It's pretty humdrum in the main chamber, but on the committee corridor, there've been two whole hearings of the Treasury Committee dedicated to looking at the intricacies of Rachel Reeves' spring statement. We were talking about it last week, and the Treasury Committee had, first of all, the usual panel of experts, Paul Johnson, making his now traditional and possibly constitutionally required appearance before the Treasury Committee.

Ruth Fox: Probably his last one, isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, quite possibly his last one, because he's going off to run an Oxford College, I think. Yeah. But um, he was there and a whole load of other experts from the, uh, OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility were there as well. Teeing up the following day on [00:23:00] Wednesday, an appearance by Rachel Reeves herself and, the weirdness of this occasion is that rather reminded me of the day that Boris Johnson, the final day of his premiership, was in front of the Liaison Committee solemnly discussing policies that he was never going to actually implement. In this case, you had Rachel Reeves solemnly discussing a budget that had been completely upended by Donald Trump's big.

Tariff announcement. Mm-hmm. I suppose it's the way of Western democracy now that you have world trade government by narcissistic episode up, up gets the president of the United States and announces something, and all previous calculations are therefore an operative. So all of Rachel Reeve's carefully calculated.

X billion pounds of headroom have been completely upended by the slack that's been given to UK industry by these tariffs, 25% on cars, 10% and everything else, wham.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't see it. Was the discussion actually in the committee about tariffs or was that just sort of, off the side.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, of course it was before the announcement had been made, so, but we knew, we knew it was [00:24:00] coming.

Well, we, we knew, we knew it was coming. We didn't quite what was coming. We didn't know that the UK was gonna get a 10% tariff and everybody else was gonna get 20% or more. Mm. So there was that side of it, but it was essentially Rachel Reeves issuing a plea for calm and saying the government would keep a cool head and, uh, react to whatever emerged, because of course, the government didn't know what was gonna be announced.

Apparently half the White House didn't know what was gonna be announced either, so they just had to sort of wait and see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah, the committee is chaired by Dame Meg Hillier. And of course the committees now are so dominated by Labour members. Did they give her a real grilling? Because that's the question I think with a lot of us have got an eye on, is, you know, how is it gonna work with Labour ministers and in very difficult circumstances at the minute being grilled by select committees that are so heavily dominated by Labour members.

Mark D'Arcy: It wasn't that great. I think at the moment, new Labour MPs are still a little bit diffident about giving ministers, particularly senior ministers like the Chancellor, who's the most senior minister other than the Prime Minister, yeah, uh, a bit of a grilling. So I think [00:25:00] that's going to wait. I think the other side of it is I think that Rachel Reeves is one of those very highly evolved politicians who somewhere in the course of their evolution has developed a blow hole, which enables them to inhale while still talking. Talking and she just talks and talks and talks and talks and talks, and there's never a gap to leap into.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: In the way that when you're dealing with Treasury mandarins, for example. Yeah. There's usually sort of well spaced pauses in their answers to questions, which allow people to leap in with Rachel Reeves. That just that the word stream, if you like, is such that it's actually quite difficult to interrupt her.

Ruth Fox: Hmm. Interesting. And I understand the, uh, the Transport Committee also gave a, a grilling to representatives from Heathrow and, uh, the National Grid about the, uh, the disaster at Heathrow Airport a couple weeks ago.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. They, they, they had the chief executive of Heathrow in there, and he gave a very, very abject apology right at the start of proceedings.

I mean, uh, Ruth Cadbury, the chair of the transport Committee, another Labour MP just pointed out at the beginning that something like two [00:26:00] to 300,000 passengers had had their journeys disrupted, possibly canceled altogether, by the power outage that crippled Heathrow for a while. So in that context, this guy began with an apology. I haven't seen anything quite like it since the masters of the banking universe had to come in one by one in two sessions, I think of the, of the Treasury Committee at the time, back in 2008 and apologize. And this was at that level of abject apology. And then there was a discussion of why it was that there was this sort of point failure possibility one substation goes out and Heathrow has to close. When Heathrow's actually supplied with power from three electricity substations, but apparently elaborate cross wiring had to take place before another one of them could fill the gap. So there was something very odd about the way the whole system was configured and it wasn't very resilient.

And I think that point sunk home pretty hard.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't catch those Mark, but I did catch a, a session of the Modernization Committee. This is, the committee's been established, uh, under the leadership of the leader of the [00:27:00] House of Commons, Lucy Powell. And, uh, they had a session with a group of current and former MPs who have some form of disability to talk about the access of Parliament, both as a building and also its procedures around things like voting and actually just the length of time you have to sit in the chamber to get called to speak.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so as we were talking about that with Marie Tidball, a Labour MP, last week because she'd been lobbying very hard on this issue. And indeed she featured.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, she was one of the MPs. Former MP for Harlow, whose office she now occupies. Robert Halfon was also there. There was the Liberal Democrat MP, who's blind and has a a, a guide dog. The dog is called Jenny.

Mark D'Arcy: Who has her own Twitter feed incidentally.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so that's Steve Darling MP and then also Marsha De Cordova, who is a Labour MP, who's registered blind, partially blind, and Sarah Bool MP, who has type one diabetes. And it was just really interesting. Some of them obviously have physical disabilities, some of have sight disabilities, some of them have health conditions [00:28:00] that affect their ability to move around the estate, or to spend extensive periods of time in the chamber without access to food and drink and so on.

But it was an absolutely fascinating insight into how they experience the Palace and the building and the process in ways that are different to somebody like ourselves who's able-bodied. I mean, I found Marsha De Cordova's account of moving about the building when you're partially sighted as she is, you're registered blind.

Things like in the lifts, you don't know what floor you're on because you, it's, I mean you and I know they're very small lifts. This is this historic palace. Very small lifts. They're very dark, all wood paneling. Very difficult to see anyway, if you are, if you do have good sight. Absolutely hopeless, if you don't. Um, and she was saying, you know, you just need audio to announce what floor you're on.

Mark D'Arcy: So you need a voice saying. Third floor. Third floor. Yeah. Well, in in Common speak, of course, it would be principal floor. Yes. Committee corridor. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Which I'm not sure helps

Mark D'Arcy: Committee Corridor

Ruth Fox: If you're a new MP, I'm not sure that would be very helpful. [00:29:00] But there was an absolutely cracking story where she said that, uh, in the office block next to the palace, the more modern part of the building, Portcullis House, as you and I know, it's a lot of glass paneling, glass walls, glass doors.

And she said if you got a site problem, you can't necessarily see where the door is. And she'd sort of taken some officials round and suggested that one very quick, easy solution would be to put some colored labels on the doors so that it could be more easily identified, which they agreed to do. But the problem was they put colored stickers on, but they were gray.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, gray is technically speaking a color, I suppose.

Ruth Fox: Well, yes. So there were, there was that side of things. And then the interesting things in terms of the experience of the chambers, so. Sarah Bool said, type one diabetic. You know, she has to monitor her sugar levels and glucose levels and and blood and so on, and she has to have a, an iPhone app for that.

She needs perhaps to moderate the situation with food and drink during the course of the day. [00:30:00] Obviously, if you're sitting longer into the evenings, that can be problematic and there's this whole question about how long do you have to sit in the chamber to get called and this debate about whether or not there should be call lists or whether there are other ways in which members could know how long it is before they're gonna get called.

Or do they just have to sit there for hours on end? And both she and Marie Tidball were saying, you know, sitting five, six hours in the chamber waiting to be called is problematic and

Mark D'Arcy: Not especially comfortable or accessible seats for a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: I mean they, they're uncomfortable even for able-bodied people.

But if you have, for example, prosthetics. Very, very difficult. Sarah Bool was saying she might need to go out to get food and drink. That can be problematic, and is it gonna affect when she's gonna be called? Interestingly, the degree to which provision is made, you know what we'd call in HR terms, reasonable accommodations are made for people's disability needs, access needs, seems to be quite ad hoc. It clearly has got better over the years, judging by what Robert Halfon's [00:31:00] experience, was compared to what the new MPs have had in in this Parliament, but still pretty ad ad hoc and Sarah Bool for example, said, that, uh, the officials installed a small fridge in the Reasons Room.

That room we talked about some months ago on the podcast.

Mark D'Arcy: Just behind the speaker's chair. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Where they go to sort of negotiate their explanations back to the House of Lords about why they're rejecting amendments. So there's this small room and that they've installed a fridge in there so she can put her insulin in there.

So she's got ready access to that in the evenings if she needs it. Things like that. Clearly welcome. Very, very useful, but somewhat ad hoc and clearly, you know, just things like being able to move about the palace unaided without always having to stop and ask for help and for support.

Mark D'Arcy: And someone to open the door for you or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Marie Tidball was saying the longer they sit into the evenings and sometimes you know, if that means you're getting a very late train home or very late train back to the constituency, she needs help to move her bags. It's not just a question of her moving. It's [00:32:00] also her sort of luggage, her laptop, or whatever it may be.

So she has to have staff support. So not knowing when the House is gonna finish and uncertainty about timings doesn't just affect her, it affects staff. Mm-hmm. So it's a lot of issues. And clearly some of this can be done. I mean, Robert Halfon was keen to stress this. A lot of changes can be made, it's not just a question of money.

It doesn't need huge investment necessarily, but it does need a change of culture and a change of attitude and also a sort of a willingness to think more strategically and structurally about some of these issues. So it'd be interesting to see what the committee concludes, but I think a big issue is going to be the nature of the parliamentary timetable and can change be made to that and adjustments made to that may be slightly different sitting times or breaks in sitting times.

I mean, it did occur to me, that what the House of Lords does might be worth considering. So they have concept of a one hour dinner break business. Uh, you know, they have a question for short debate, which interrupts other business.

Mark D'Arcy: It's, it's a mini debate sandwich [00:33:00] between two longer debates. Yeah. And it does allow people a chance to sort of get out and move about a bit.

Yeah. And, uh, if necessary, take a bit of a break. They're dinner break business. Yeah. Sometimes referred.

Ruth Fox: I don't think I'd recommend the House call it that, but

Mark D'Arcy: I'm sure we can come up with some better language.

Ruth Fox: But you know, if you're in a Second Reading debate or you know, whatever it may be, you don't necessarily have five, six hours. That you might have a couple of hours and then a break and something else intervenes and then, and maybe,

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe the chair, maybe the occupant of the chair can just be aware that certain people might have to nip out for a minute to get a insulin or whatever it might be, and not as it were, penalize them afterwards. Yeah. And call them later because they've dared to leave the chamber for a second.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean it must be difficult for the speaker to keep track of all of this.

Oh, sure. And manage in the chamber. So yeah, a need to sort of think about creatively about that. Pretty clear, I think, that Lucy Powell is quite interested in and quite supportive of the, the concept of call list, so, mm-hmm, interesting to see how that debate develops.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean, I can see the case for call this.

But what I [00:34:00] really wouldn't like is to get into the position that you get in the US Congress where people are basically only there to deliver their own speeches and then they disappear. Yeah. And there's no response between speeches. Yeah. No more. It's a great pleasure to follow the honorable gentleman, but I disagree with his main argument.

Mm-hmm. Because you've just got a pre-written speech that you're gonna dispense. Yeah. Those kind of things need to happen in a proper debate. If a debate is going to be an actual debate, rather than simply a list of sort of pre packed contributions that are unfolded in the chamber.

Ruth Fox: Well talking of, uh, contributions in the chamber, in the US context, um, you have heard that, uh, Senator Cory Booker in the United States has delivered, uh, the longest speech on record in the US Senate.

So, uh, should we take a break, Mark, and come back and discuss that? Just before we go, I'll make my usual appeal to listeners to review us on your podcast app, whether that's Spotify, Apple, or whatever else you use, it really helps other listeners find us. So, uh, five star reviews would be...

Mark D'Arcy: But be warned, anyone who says anything nasty about us will have Her [00:35:00] Majesty's constabulary round on you.

Ruth Fox: And you won't be protected by parliamentary privilege.

So listeners do help us with that and we'll see you in a moment.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back Ruth and exciting times in the US Senate if they use the word exciting in a particular context here. Cory Booker, one of the fairly long serving Democrat senators, made a 25 hour count, a 25 hour, speech. I'm not quite sure how you do that. Do you get comfort breaks? Do you get no, uh, the chance for food to be brought out to you?

No. No, none of that. So you just have to stand there and, conduct a marathon and, and this was all in the cause of offering some token parliamentary resistance to Donald Trump's agenda.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. 25 hours broke Senate record for the longest speech ever in the US Senate.

Mark D'Arcy: I think the previous longest one was Strom Thurman, the segregationist from, I think South Carolina.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, [00:36:00] 1957 when he spoke against, uh, civil rights legislation. So there was, there was. Nice

Mark D'Arcy: man.

Ruth Fox: Yes. No, not listeners. So there was kind of a symbolism to the fact that, uh, Cory Booker, who is a black Democratic representative from New Jersey was sort of obliterating his record and he very clear that that was partly his intention as well.

He, he wanted, he wanted that record. But yes, it was a speech about, he described it as it's a moral moment, and he said his constituents were concerned about what was happening with Donald Trump and basically wanted them to do something different. And I think one of the, the concerns in the us, in the Democratic Party is the absence of leadership, the absence of clear voices and response to what the Republicans are doing.

So he decided that one way was to essentially take over the Senate floor and deliver this speech, and it was interesting afterwards, he explained how he'd prepared for it, which is pretty extraordinary. So in order to maintain the floor, he couldn't have food, couldn't go away and get food. He had a couple of glasses [00:37:00] of water.

That's all he stood all the way through. Couldn't sit down.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. He was leaning, I think, on a lectern at one point. Yeah. Which apparently is permissible.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So to prepare for this, he had basically dehydrated himself for 24 hours beforehand. Couldn't, go for a a comfort break. Couldn't go to the toilet. So dehydrated himself 24 hours beforehand.

Hadn't eaten for several days. Wow. Um, said afterwards to journalists. My apologies to the Senate doctor and my own doctor. I hope they're not too annoyed with me.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I suppose you could think of this as the senatorial diet, 'cause I'm sure you must lose a fair amount of weight by doing all that.

Ruth Fox: But one thing that could be done is that other senators could intervene to ask a question and he could yield the floor to them, but retain the right to speak.

So interestingly had a bit of paper on which he'd written the words explicitly that he had to say to maintain the floor. Otherwise, it would've given leave for the Republicans to have interrupted. So there was a, a lineup of Democratic senators realizing what he was doing had sort of [00:38:00] piled into the chamber to support him and to intervene at appropriate moments.

Mark D'Arcy: In the common context, this is known as in-flight refueling. You know, as someone is making a long speech, someone can intervene just to give you a moment's relief to sit down or whatever.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, question was asked, was, a lot of Republicans were saying, oh, it's just an absolute waste of time. I mean, this wasn't a formal filibuster because he wasn't stopping legislation, he wasn't stopping motions and or a budget or anything like that.

So it wasn't classed as a formal filibuster. But there was a question, you know, is it a good use of time. Well, it went viral. I mean, millions were watching. I mean, I stayed up to watch that sort of last half hour to see if he blew through Strom Thurman's record and was quietly cheering him on as I was watching C-span.

Oh, the joy of C-Span. Yeah. It was that sort of moment of, you know, he'd captured attention and, and he was, and, and

Mark D'Arcy: That I think was surely the point. Yeah. I mean, at the moment there's a lot of criticism that the actual Democrat leadership in the US Senate has been pretty limp in its opposition to Donald Trump.

Yeah. And Chuck Schumer, [00:39:00] the leader there, is in some sense, didn't fight over a passing the US budget in a way that he might have done. And he came under huge criticism for that. Yeah. And into that vacuum, I suspect moves Cory Booker. There are people who will want to assert leadership over the Democrat party.

Not perhaps formal leadership of the party group or anything like that,

Ruth Fox: Positioning, but

Mark D'Arcy: It's positioning. Does this tee him up as the presumptive front runner for the Democrat presidential nomination? It's a long way out, but it's a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well you did wonder what Charles Schumer thought about it 'cause he publicly, he was very supportive and saying very nice things and intervening to help.

But I did wonder privately, behind the scenes, was he thrilled.

Mark D'Arcy: Well always remember the political maxim from Yes Minister, in order to stab someone in the back, you first have to get behind them. One, one of my favorites. But I suppose the question arises and this kind of thing doesn't happen in Westminster and probably couldn't happen in Westminster.

No, there's no way you can see a 25 hour speech being made in either House of, on pretty much any occasion.

Ruth Fox: No, I mean the, [00:40:00] first of all, in terms of the sort of the agenda and the program, you have the moment of interruption, you have programming and and so on. One of the criticisms of course, is that too often the speeches that mps are, the time that they're given to speak, is too short.

Yeah. We talked about it on the podcast quite a bit, two of three minute increments.

Mark D'Arcy: If, if you're lucky. And the moment of interruption incident is the formal sort of stop point. Yeah, uh, which main Commons business ends, and there's then an adjournment debate for half an hour. Yeah. So you can't go on beyond that.

And that's set in stone most of the time in Commons proceedings, unless there's a thing called an any hours motion passed. And in that case, again, the chair is rigorously monitoring how long MPs are allowed to speak. So in the Commons, the only occasion when you can really get a longer than usual speech is on Private Members' bill Fridays. Mm-hmm. And even there, you've still got the moment of interruption looming. You know, two 30 will come along and that's it. Mm. But I still have post-traumatic memories of watching people like Philip Davis and Andrew Dismore and, uh, David Nuttle of Blessed Memory, trying to talk [00:41:00] out unwelcome Private Members Bills.

I once got into trouble with Philip Davis for writing a yesterday in parliament, which included the words, on and on he droned, and he was, he was quite upset by this, but I felt it was fairly accurate reporting, to be honest.

Ruth Fox: Oh dear. Well, another issue, Mark has come up here about how elected members use their time.

So the criticism of Cory Booker was, you know, standing in the Senate chamber, you know, droning on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But possibly doing a good piece of political positioning while he did it. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And, and also political education, I think in his case. 'cause he's got a message out there about all the problems that are happening now and what might happen in the future.

And that is on record. But here, different question about how MPs use their times has come up when 20 MPs have signed a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, calling on him to sort out an issue in Kashmir in relation to an airport development in the city of Mirpur. Basically MPs calling on the [00:42:00] Pakistani authorities to build this airport, which is kind of interesting when quite a number of those signatories to the letter are opposed to development of airports in the uk.

Yeah. For climate change reasons.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, if you're against airports for climate change reasons, you're presumably against them whether they're in Mirpur or Heathrow. You'd hope so.

. So, so there is a, something of an inconsistency there. And I do think that there is a kind of political opening that's been provided here where they may find people campaigning against them on the basis that they seem more concerned with airports in Kashmir than they are with conditions in their constituency.

Now that's a, a bit of a travesty. I mean, it takes an an MP about 30 seconds to sign a, a letter. Yeah, of course it does. So, and I imagine they sign several dozen a day,

Ruth Fox: But it's about political and policy consistency, isn't it? Yeah. And whether you should be lobbying a foreign prime minister to do something that you're not willing to ask of your own prime minister for your own constituents, you're willing to ask it of an overseas prime minister for your constituents who happen to go back to that country as sort of part of the diaspora community, go back to visit and don't like the [00:43:00] fact they've got to travel several hours to get back to their relatives from the airport that they can land in. At the moment they'd like somewhere nearer.

Mark D'Arcy: It is. It is, of course a very large Kashmiri diaspora in Britain. Yeah. And Kashmiri derived voters, if you like, mm-hmm, are possibly swing voters in quite a number of constituencies now. And of course, Labour's relationship with a lot of Muslim voters has been very fraught because of the Gaza situation.

Yeah. I suppose this is one way in which they can kind of keep in touch with some of those voters.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but I go back to the point it's about consistency of, of message and consistency of politics. And this is a delicate question in the, in the Labour party, in Labour politics, but there is this concern about development of sectarian politics, you know, within particular constituencies.

And this kind of thing doesn't help and it just makes you look a bit frankly hypocritical.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a difficult area to go blundering into for all sorts of reasons. And while some people can sort of shrug and say consistency's overrated in politics, I think a little bit of it every now and then might be quite [00:44:00] welcome.

Ruth Fox: Useful. Well Mark with that, I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. We will have our next episode looking at the assisted dying bill next in our series of special mini pod, looking at the next stage, the Report Stage, which will be coming up on the 25th of April. So we've got our procedural guru, Mr Paul Evans, back to explain what to look out for at Report Stage and Third Reading.

Mark D'Arcy: The secrets of Report Stage. Always an interesting area to dive into.

Ruth Fox: So we are gonna hold that over because parliamentary recess is kicking in this week in the House of Lords, and the the Commons are back for a couple of days next week, but we'll be putting that, uh, special episode out next Thursday.

So look out for that in your podcast feed and then the following week. But just before Easter, we've got one of your special Whipping Yarns episodes, Mark

Mark D'Arcy: A, a special treat. The former chief whip under Rishi Sunak, Simon Hart, has written a tell all memoir or tell quite a lot memoir. One suspects there are a few secrets he didn't reveal in that [00:45:00] book and, and the names.

And he's spoken to us about his experience as the ringmaster of Conservative MPs in the dying days of Rishi Sunak's government after a long era of Conservative rule. And it's quite a tale.

Ruth Fox: It is. And then, uh, we'll be back after Easter for that assisted dying bill Report Stage. So we won't actually be recording on the Thursday as normal.

We'll be recording on the Friday the 25th. So that will drop into your podcast feed on the Saturday morning. So we're delaying proceedings in order so that we can watch and report back on, on what happens with that important bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Do join us then

Ruth Fox: And we'll see you then. Have a good break. Happy Easter and we'll see you, uh, see you back on the 26th.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye bye.

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 at Hansard [00:46:00] Society.

PMP E86 ===

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

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

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up in this week's episode.

Ruth Fox: The sentencing mess. How the government got into a tangle about new criminal sentencing guidelines and how it plans to untangle it.

Mark D'Arcy: A matter of privilege. Is heavy handed policing interfering in the work of MPs?

Ruth Fox: And after a 25 hour speech brought the US Senate to a halt, could it ever happen at Westminster?

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, let's begin by talking about, as you described it, the sentencing mess. The Sentencing Council, the independent arms length body, [00:01:00] which to some extent has had outsourced to it the policy on how many years tariff there should be for a particular offender who's committed a particular crime, all sorts of issues of sentencing procedure, has basically landed the government in a very difficult position.

It's supposed to be an arm's length body, but it's now recommended something that's very, very uncomfortable for a government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So what essentially it's done, uh, it has to consult on its guidelines, uh, periodically it held its consultation at the end of 2023, beginning of 2024. At the time, it was sort of passed over politically, both by the government and, and by the opposition.

Nobody really raised any questions about it.

Mark D'Arcy: Because this surfaced actually when the conservatives were still in government.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. Well, at least the consultation process was taking place and a Conservative minister, to some extent signed off on it in a rather perfunctory way, and now it's landed in the lap of their successes in the Labour government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and, and essentially this is quite an extensive consultation document that they've produced, but at the heart of, of this political [00:02:00] problem is the element of the new guidance, which deals with pre-sentencing reports. And essentially what the government and the opposition are concerned about is that it singles out differential treatment of ethnic minority offenders when ordering pre-sentencing reports, which then the judges would use to make their decisions on, on sentencing.

Now the argument is this is going to lead to a two tier system in which ethnic minority offenders, you know, have these pre-sentencing reports, but wouldn't necessarily have them for white offenders. Conversely, the argument is, well, we already have a two-tier justice system and sentencing system because all the evidence shows that white offenders are less likely to get an immediate custodial sentence or a longer custodial sentence than ethnic minority offenders.

Well, indeed, this is a part of, of the balancing process.

Mark D'Arcy: You can see exactly how the Sentencing Council got into this position, and incidentally, this is largely something composed of judges from the various different levels of the criminal justice system and magistrates and a few lay advisors of one sort or [00:03:00] another as well.

So you can see how it would've got into this position and has tried to do a bit of rebalancing, but you've ended up with something that's very, very politically toxic.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think it's important to stress, this is not about the Sentencing Council saying to judges, you've got to hand down lighter sentences.

It's simply about that you can order a pre-sentencing report to better understand the circumstances of the offender. Just important, I think, to, to set the parameters of that.

Mark D'Arcy: But the argument I suppose then is that that leads on, possibly, yes, to lighter sentences.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Yes. We know Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Opposition spokesperson, of course, was a member of the last government, very frustrated with the way the justice system is working.

Although a lot of these issues and problems were developed on his Government's watch, he raised it a few weeks ago. At the time in government, the then Conservative minister did not raise any concerns. The Government is consulted by the Sentencing Council on this. The Justice Committee in the House of Commons was consulted, didn't raise concerns about it, but all of a [00:04:00] sudden it's become, because of this campaign, a political hot potato, the Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood is very clear she doesn't want what she's described as two-tier sentencing.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But she got rebuffed when she said that to the Sentencing Panel.

Ruth Fox: So her response was, well, we're gonna legislate to stop this and we'll have emergency legislation if necessary. She's published this week a bill to do just that.

And that obviously has persuaded the sentencing council that, in fact, they should delay implementation of their guidance

Mark D'Arcy: And then just wait for the legislation to kick in.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: We've got the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Report) Bill 2025. Indeed. Will be debated by MPs after they come back from their Easter break. And will be, it's not quite emergency legislation because it's not being whacked through in a single day, but it's going through in a reasonably fast track.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so this is one of the things that is my bug bear, because politicians and the media, I'm sorry, mark the media, they often bandy around this concepts of emergency legislation. [00:05:00] If it was genuine emergency legislation, it would be going through yesterday, today. It would be on a very, very fast track and sometimes bills do, if you've got to respond to a, a court case, for example, or there's a national security issue or you know, you can put a bill through very, very quickly, drafted almost overnight.

And this is a very short bill, I think a couple of clauses.

Mark D'Arcy: So yeah, it's a very short bill indeed. It just basically says the Sentencing Council can't do what it wants to do, yes, on this.

Ruth Fox: But what, what it is going to be is what we would call fast track or expedited legislation in the, if it was an emergency bill, it would happen today.

Mark D'Arcy: Warp speed.

Ruth Fox: Warp speed.

If it's fast tracked, it would go through all its stages in a day. Second Reading through to Third Reading in the Commons. Now there've been 150 bills that have done that since 1979, so it wouldn't be unusual, but actually it's gonna be slightly slower than fast tracked because it's gonna have its Second Reading immediately after Easter, and then the following week it'll have its Committee, Report [00:06:00] Stage, Third Reading. So basically two weeks after Easter it will have gone through its Common stages and then it'll be kicked into the to the Lords. So it will mean that best practice around decent intervals of time between each stage won't happen.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean there is that problem with it, but it is, as you say, a very short bill.

The urgency has been slightly drained out of the issue by the Sentencing Council pausing the implementation of these guidelines to give Parliament time to legislate. Yeah. So they don't have to act to stop new sentencing guidelines coming in immediately. Yeah. Uh, otherwise it probably would've had to have been emergency legislation.

Yes. But it's all been a bit more civilized than that. I could predict that there will be a bit of fun when this hits the House of Lords. I think all the sort of massively senior ex- Law Lords and ex Supreme Court judges and ex judges who sit in the House of Lords will not be entirely amused, no, by this.

And we'll be a bit worried about possibly the end of arm's length determination of sentencing policy.

Ruth Fox: No. Well, when the, uh, the minister in the Lords, it was the prisons minister, Lord Timpson, delivered the same statement that Shabana Mahmood had [00:07:00] delivered in the Commons announcing this, it was very notable the number of eminent lawyers who rose to express concerns on all sides of the house, including some Labour peers as well.

But, um, the one that did amuse me was, um, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who'd been former head of the Sentencing Guidelines Council, so, which is the predecessor body of, of this particular Sentencing Council. But, um, yes, that's where the expertise is.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, absolutely. So, uh, there might be a little bit of fun.

Who knows? There might even be ping pong on this bill, which would keep us all entertained. But I think one of the points to watch on this is the genesis, uh, of all this, how did the government get into this mess in the first place. And my long-term theory of what's been going on in this country for a decade plus now, possibly since 2008, is that British government has been bouncing from one crisis to another.

In 2008, you had the financial crisis and that reverberated through the ensuing four or five years causing austerity amongst other things. [00:08:00] 2016 we get Brexit and the run up to the Brexit referendum had begun a couple of years before that really. You then had Brexit dominating politics, bringing down Prime Ministers at regular intervals for some years after that.

And then just as we managed to get a breath after the Brexit deal had been done, Covid hit and you had a couple of years of covid crisis, and then again, barely drawing breath or into the energy crisis occasion by the vast rise in global energy prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So it's been one crisis after another and a great deal of bread and butter governance, mm, has fallen by the wayside, both because there's an overriding crisis and because of the kind of governmental churn, yeah, the constant change in Prime Ministers and therefore in cabinets and therefore in ministers. The revolving doors in, in and out, of government meant that a lot of stuff just wasn't getting the attention it would otherwise have had.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There's also a question about where people's political antennae is directed.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Um, so both ministers, special advisors, supporting those ministers, there's churn there as [00:09:00] well. Do officials know what it is that ministers want in respect to these policies when, you know, they're directed to keep an, an eye on what they're doing?

There's sort of arms length, there's oversight. Ministers have representatives on some of these bodies. But do those representatives really know what it is that their ministers want from them or their departments want from them?

Mark D'Arcy: And you do suspect actually, that if you had a minister who was facing a challenge from Reform, rather than say from the Liberal Democrats, they might be rather more alive to the politics of this kind of process than appears to have been the case, shall we say delicately

Ruth Fox: And, and also interesting that when it was a Conservative minister, you might have thought they'd have been alive to this kind of issue, but evidently the then Conservative minister at the time, Gareth Bacon passed through, his officials passed, presumably passed his, his special advisors passed his desk.

He signed off on it, presumably thought it was okay, and didn't spot the elephant trap.

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe they're all busy looking at the impending general election, Gotterdamerung, that was, uh, visibly ahead of them. But there's [00:10:00] also a legislative side to this. Oh, yes. The, the, the fashion for outsourcing difficult areas of government policy to semi-independent or supposedly independent bodies, I think is something that's been going on for quite a while now. You saw it with NHS England, although the idea that closing a hospital would suddenly not lead to politicians being blamed because it was NHS England and not ministers making the decision was always, I think, a complete illusion.

Similarly with sentencing policy, when people are unhappy with sentencing policy, they're not gonna say, oh, it's all determined by an independent body of judges.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: They're gonna say, ministers do something.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and essentially if you go back to sort of this Sentencing Council set up in 2009, so this is a decision initially taken by Jack Straw when he was Justice Secretary, and again, you know, to bring some coherence to sentencing guidelines.

It was in response to various independent reviews and official working groups and bodies that made these recommendations from the judiciary themselves. But, it's interesting if you look at the [00:11:00] sort of back history on this, 1998, so very early in the Labour administration, they set up the Sentencing Advisory Panel in the Crime and Disorder Act.

Five years later, they're setting up the Sentencing Guidelines Council in the Criminal Justice Act. Four years later, they're having a review of prisons to look at the advantages of a Permanent Sentencing Commission for England and Wales. And this is all tied up with the debate about prison places and the cost of prison spaces and, and so on 2009, then you get the Coroners and Justice Bill, in which this structured sentencing body that we are now dealing with the after effects of is established in the Coroners and Justice Act.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course this was a bill that was going through in the dying days of Gordon Brown's Labour government and possibly wasn't getting quite as much attention as it might have deserved. I mean, when we're talking about these pieces of legislation, they're all, all singing, all dancing, giant pieces of multipurpose Home Office legislation, which tweak the criminal law here, reform coroners courts [00:12:00] there, do lots of other things and often have 20 different prime purposes within them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean that bill that sets up the Sentencing Council was if ever there was one, a Christmas tree bill. You know, it had lots and lots of policy bells hanging off its, its various arms and branches. Such a lovely expression.

Um, everything from, you know, as you say, the coroner's system, freedom of information, that was Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, security of the courts, provision on legal aid. I mean, the short title was very, very long, um, one, you've got the problem that you're. You're constantly legislating, which we know in the sort of home affairs and the justice area has been a constant problem.

Regular legislation every few years and,

Mark D'Arcy: And sort of sedimentary layers.

Yeah. And half of any given criminal justice bill is correcting the mistakes in the previous one, one.

Ruth Fox: Previous one. So nothing sort of settles for very long, but then you've got the problem. You have a very, very big bill like this one with lots of provisions, quite different in character, [00:13:00] all scrutinized together in one job lot, and it becomes, it is more difficult for, for MPs and peers to, in terms of where they focus their attention.

Yes. The Sentencing Council issue was raised, it was, there was a brief discussion of it at Second Reading in the debate back in 2009, for example, but it perhaps didn't get the kind of focus that it might have had if it had been a slimmer, smaller, more focused bill.

Mark D'Arcy: So if there'd been the Sentencing Council (Establishment) Bill, and people have then looked at the powers, abilities and the parameters in which this organization would work, it might have been a much more focused effort.

Yeah. And you might, as a result, not have gone into the elephant track that it's subsequently blundered into.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and, and back in, in 2009, a lot of the focus ended up being on other provisions because the bill got into a complete procedural tangle in the House of Lords, amending the bill around secret inquests in sensitive cases.

They got into a whole mess about including new amendments to make provisions for this, but then didn't deal with the [00:14:00] consequential amendments later in the bill. So they've got sections of a bill that they were proposing to send to the House of Commons about, a provision that they'd taken out and they ended up this huge procedural debate about how on earth you then remove them.

Because you know, the clerks said, it can't be done at third reading in the House of Lords. And it can't be done at ping pong because that's about resolving differences between the two Houses. It's not about removing mistakes. They eventually resolved it, but up against, you know, prorogation was heading, uh mm-hmm, end of the session was heading, uh, in the direction of the bill. It had been going on for months. So all of these issues mean that things get lost and it highlights the problems, I think, of scrutiny of legislation.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So 15 years later here we stand with, um, problems perhaps that might have been avoided, if there'd been more focus at the time on what a Sentencing Council was gonna do.

Ruth Fox: And one of the things that they could have focused on, but didn't, interestingly, was what is the role of Parliament in relation to this body.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm.

Ruth Fox: So at the time in 2009, [00:15:00] Alan Beith asked the question, should the role of the council be subject to scrutiny by parliament?

Mark D'Arcy: I think he was at the time, the chair of the Justice Committee.

Was he?

Ruth Fox: He might've been. I'm, I'm not sure, but no, no,

Mark D'Arcy: Sorry, it's in the subsequent parliament. Okay.

Ruth Fox: Um, but yes, I mean, he's had a longstanding interest in these matters. So you raised the question, what's Parliament's role here and Jack Straw indicated there had been a discussion about whether Parliament should have to approve these guidelines by the affirmative order, essentially requiring both Houses of parliament to debate them and to approve them.

And he said, um, there would be many objections to that. Now, interestingly, he didn't articulate them, he didn't detail them. No, he didn't, didn't articulate what those objections would be, and didn't seem to be challenged on it in the Second Reading debate. So we never got that provision for Parliament having a role here, that it might have highlighted these issues if it had to come to a debate and might have avoided the problems.

Interestingly, another aspect of the bill, they did make provision for Parliament having to approve things, [00:16:00] but but not on this, and again, you ask, why, what, what's the difference?

Mark D'Arcy: You thought sentencing policy was a pretty important issue for Parliament to be distanced from?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so all that Parliament got on, on the sentencing guidelines was that the, the Justice Committee is a statutory consultee, and of course they were consulted and um, didn't see any problem.

And here we are. And here we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Well with that Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's do that. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

And we are back. And Ruth, let's talk about another area where perhaps officiousness has become a problem for Members of Parliament. And this is the police investigation into comments made on a parent's WhatsApp about the appointment of a teacher in a primary school. And what seemed to flow from it, which was that local elected representatives up to and possibly including local MPs were basically being warned off intervening on behalf of parents who'd been [00:17:00] arrested by police, over comments that have been made on a WhatsApp forum, and there is a general thought here that maybe the police are getting a bit too concerned with policing nasty things or even innocuous things that are said online. And possibly are not concerned enough with bread and butter policing about boring stuff like crime.

But it gets particularly toxic when it impinges on the work of elected representatives who are told that they should keep their distance from something that's surely their job.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I'd missed this mark until you actually pointed it out to me in the, the Sunday Times story this weekend. I'd completely missed it.

But, um, this is the story of the two parents who seemingly got arrested by six police officers held in a cell overnight by my own police force, Hertfordshire Constabulary,, thank you for that. And, uh, the local elected representatives, I think both local councillors, and an MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, former Deputy Prime Minister, no less, I mean, not an insignificant figure.[00:18:00]

They got involved, obviously, and, and were, were looking into it and what seems to have happened is that a police officer seems to have told a local councillor off via email. He was asking questions about this case and had copied in Oliver Dowden and others that, uh, if they didn't stop asking questions about it and cease communications on the issue, they might find themselves liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation.

Which is, um, pretty extraordinary and understandably, Oliver Dowden has basically said, well, first of all, you've got police overreach here. And, and secondly, this is a curtailment of democracy. I'm quite entitled to ask questions on behalf of my constituents about what on earth the police are doing.

Mark D'Arcy: This gave me a little bit of a flashback to a case some years ago now, where the Conservative MP in one of the Worthing seats, Tim Laughton, at the time, he's not there anymore, got into a spat with a constituent. Mm-hmm. One of these chronic correspondence that a lot of mps have, people who are [00:19:00] constantly firing in angry letters, demanding this, demanding that, turning up at the surgery haranguing the mp. And it's often something that the MP can't do anything about. Or is something completely illusory.

I mean, I'm pretty sure most MPs have someone who fits this kind of description. Oh, yes.

Ruth Fox: I, I can imagine all the parliamentary staff listening to this podcast, I've now got in their mind's eye exactly who the constituent is in their particular case.

Mark D'Arcy: Eye strays to a bulging file of correspondence. Uh, but, uh, Tim Loughton in this case got quite irate and made a speech in the Commons about how he had sacked this person as his constituent.

He was so sick of the constant correspondence that he is basically saying that he's not gonna deal with him anymore. And he sent a Hansard of this to the constituent who then complained to the police, who then interviewed Mr. Laughton.

Ruth Fox: Oh goodness.

Mark D'Arcy: So what had been a, dare I say it slightly silly spat, suddenly escalated into something where the Sussex Constabulary were wandering along to talk to an elected Member of Parliament about his relationship with or non-relationship with a [00:20:00] constituent.

Tim Loughton was sufficiently unhappy that he actually referred this to the Commons Privileges Committee, who very quickly decided that the act of an MP sending a Hansard of a Commons debate to a constituent was covered by parliamentary privilege, and that the police's action in this case had been a contempt of parliament.

And I will remember going along to the Privileges Committee hearing in which the Chief Constable of Sussex took, um, a hell of a thrashing.

Ruth Fox: I, we should probably explain to listeners that when we sort of talk about parliamentary privilege, what we mean, so essentially it's, it grants some legal immunities to MPs.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: To enable them, basically to perform their duties.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm. Without interference, speaking free, speaking freely in the chamber is, is probably the biggest of these. Yep. In the sense that you can't be prosecuted for libel for something said inside, yeah, the inside the Commons or at a committee a, a number of other sort of Commons related contexts.

Yeah. But at at the same time, there's also, as you say, the ability of an MP to do their job is also a right for an [00:21:00] impeded access to the buildings of Parliament itself. So there's a whole load of things covered by parliamentary privilege. But the idea that the police should get involved in something to do with the correspondence between an MP and one of their constituents is actually quite alarming.

And I don't think there was a great deal of sympathy for the Sussex constabulary in Parliament over this 'cause it was just the most extraordinary overreach.

Ruth Fox: No, well, I don't, there's an awful lot of sympathy for Hertfordshire Constabulary, also who have some form and they, I think, the chief constable himself has basically admitted that they probably could and should have handled it better.

We should say that the parents, in this case, the police have concluded there's no case to answer. There's no case to be pursued, but nonetheless, it raises lots of questions about what the role of the MP is. How do you deal with these kinds of cases? And frankly, what the ability of, of organizations like schools and others is to deal with potentially, it might have been, vexatious correspondence, it might have been, you know, excessive. But lots of organizations, lots of public bodies have to deal with that. And you can't keep calling in the police every time [00:22:00] you don't like it.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it, it is a bit going nuclear, isn't it? Mm-hmm. I think a lot of schools have parental WhatsApp groups where teachers are discussed, perhaps in ways that those teachers don't particularly like.

But I'm afraid that's show business, you know, you've gotta put up with that.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think the lesson here is just get off WhatsApp.

Can, can we tariff it?

Mark D'Arcy: Very good life lesson there. I think. Meanwhile, Ruth, it's been a very, very busy week on the committee corridor. Mm-hmm. It's pretty humdrum in the main chamber, but on the committee corridor, there've been two whole hearings of the Treasury Committee dedicated to looking at the intricacies of Rachel Reeves' spring statement. We were talking about it last week, and the Treasury Committee had, first of all, the usual panel of experts, Paul Johnson, making his now traditional and possibly constitutionally required appearance before the Treasury Committee.

Ruth Fox: Probably his last one, isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, quite possibly his last one, because he's going off to run an Oxford College, I think. Yeah. But um, he was there and a whole load of other experts from the, uh, OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility were there as well. Teeing up the following day on [00:23:00] Wednesday, an appearance by Rachel Reeves herself and, the weirdness of this occasion is that rather reminded me of the day that Boris Johnson, the final day of his premiership, was in front of the Liaison Committee solemnly discussing policies that he was never going to actually implement. In this case, you had Rachel Reeves solemnly discussing a budget that had been completely upended by Donald Trump's big.

Tariff announcement. Mm-hmm. I suppose it's the way of Western democracy now that you have world trade government by narcissistic episode up, up gets the president of the United States and announces something, and all previous calculations are therefore an operative. So all of Rachel Reeve's carefully calculated.

X billion pounds of headroom have been completely upended by the slack that's been given to UK industry by these tariffs, 25% on cars, 10% and everything else, wham.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't see it. Was the discussion actually in the committee about tariffs or was that just sort of, off the side.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, of course it was before the announcement had been made, so, but we knew, we knew it was [00:24:00] coming.

Well, we, we knew, we knew it was coming. We didn't quite what was coming. We didn't know that the UK was gonna get a 10% tariff and everybody else was gonna get 20% or more. Mm. So there was that side of it, but it was essentially Rachel Reeves issuing a plea for calm and saying the government would keep a cool head and, uh, react to whatever emerged, because of course, the government didn't know what was gonna be announced.

Apparently half the White House didn't know what was gonna be announced either, so they just had to sort of wait and see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah, the committee is chaired by Dame Meg Hillier. And of course the committees now are so dominated by Labour members. Did they give her a real grilling? Because that's the question I think with a lot of us have got an eye on, is, you know, how is it gonna work with Labour ministers and in very difficult circumstances at the minute being grilled by select committees that are so heavily dominated by Labour members.

Mark D'Arcy: It wasn't that great. I think at the moment, new Labour MPs are still a little bit diffident about giving ministers, particularly senior ministers like the Chancellor, who's the most senior minister other than the Prime Minister, yeah, uh, a bit of a grilling. So I think [00:25:00] that's going to wait. I think the other side of it is I think that Rachel Reeves is one of those very highly evolved politicians who somewhere in the course of their evolution has developed a blow hole, which enables them to inhale while still talking. Talking and she just talks and talks and talks and talks and talks, and there's never a gap to leap into.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: In the way that when you're dealing with Treasury mandarins, for example. Yeah. There's usually sort of well spaced pauses in their answers to questions, which allow people to leap in with Rachel Reeves. That just that the word stream, if you like, is such that it's actually quite difficult to interrupt her.

Ruth Fox: Hmm. Interesting. And I understand the, uh, the Transport Committee also gave a, a grilling to representatives from Heathrow and, uh, the National Grid about the, uh, the disaster at Heathrow Airport a couple weeks ago.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. They, they, they had the chief executive of Heathrow in there, and he gave a very, very abject apology right at the start of proceedings.

I mean, uh, Ruth Cadbury, the chair of the transport Committee, another Labour MP just pointed out at the beginning that something like two [00:26:00] to 300,000 passengers had had their journeys disrupted, possibly canceled altogether, by the power outage that crippled Heathrow for a while. So in that context, this guy began with an apology. I haven't seen anything quite like it since the masters of the banking universe had to come in one by one in two sessions, I think of the, of the Treasury Committee at the time, back in 2008 and apologize. And this was at that level of abject apology. And then there was a discussion of why it was that there was this sort of point failure possibility one substation goes out and Heathrow has to close. When Heathrow's actually supplied with power from three electricity substations, but apparently elaborate cross wiring had to take place before another one of them could fill the gap. So there was something very odd about the way the whole system was configured and it wasn't very resilient.

And I think that point sunk home pretty hard.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I didn't catch those Mark, but I did catch a, a session of the Modernization Committee. This is, the committee's been established, uh, under the leadership of the leader of the [00:27:00] House of Commons, Lucy Powell. And, uh, they had a session with a group of current and former MPs who have some form of disability to talk about the access of Parliament, both as a building and also its procedures around things like voting and actually just the length of time you have to sit in the chamber to get called to speak.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so as we were talking about that with Marie Tidball, a Labour MP, last week because she'd been lobbying very hard on this issue. And indeed she featured.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, she was one of the MPs. Former MP for Harlow, whose office she now occupies. Robert Halfon was also there. There was the Liberal Democrat MP, who's blind and has a a, a guide dog. The dog is called Jenny.

Mark D'Arcy: Who has her own Twitter feed incidentally.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so that's Steve Darling MP and then also Marsha De Cordova, who is a Labour MP, who's registered blind, partially blind, and Sarah Bool MP, who has type one diabetes. And it was just really interesting. Some of them obviously have physical disabilities, some of have sight disabilities, some of them have health conditions [00:28:00] that affect their ability to move around the estate, or to spend extensive periods of time in the chamber without access to food and drink and so on.

But it was an absolutely fascinating insight into how they experience the Palace and the building and the process in ways that are different to somebody like ourselves who's able-bodied. I mean, I found Marsha De Cordova's account of moving about the building when you're partially sighted as she is, you're registered blind.

Things like in the lifts, you don't know what floor you're on because you, it's, I mean you and I know they're very small lifts. This is this historic palace. Very small lifts. They're very dark, all wood paneling. Very difficult to see anyway, if you are, if you do have good sight. Absolutely hopeless, if you don't. Um, and she was saying, you know, you just need audio to announce what floor you're on.

Mark D'Arcy: So you need a voice saying. Third floor. Third floor. Yeah. Well, in in Common speak, of course, it would be principal floor. Yes. Committee corridor. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Which I'm not sure helps

Mark D'Arcy: Committee Corridor

Ruth Fox: If you're a new MP, I'm not sure that would be very helpful. [00:29:00] But there was an absolutely cracking story where she said that, uh, in the office block next to the palace, the more modern part of the building, Portcullis House, as you and I know, it's a lot of glass paneling, glass walls, glass doors.

And she said if you got a site problem, you can't necessarily see where the door is. And she'd sort of taken some officials round and suggested that one very quick, easy solution would be to put some colored labels on the doors so that it could be more easily identified, which they agreed to do. But the problem was they put colored stickers on, but they were gray.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, gray is technically speaking a color, I suppose.

Ruth Fox: Well, yes. So there were, there was that side of things. And then the interesting things in terms of the experience of the chambers, so. Sarah Bool said, type one diabetic. You know, she has to monitor her sugar levels and glucose levels and and blood and so on, and she has to have a, an iPhone app for that.

She needs perhaps to moderate the situation with food and drink during the course of the day. [00:30:00] Obviously, if you're sitting longer into the evenings, that can be problematic and there's this whole question about how long do you have to sit in the chamber to get called and this debate about whether or not there should be call lists or whether there are other ways in which members could know how long it is before they're gonna get called.

Or do they just have to sit there for hours on end? And both she and Marie Tidball were saying, you know, sitting five, six hours in the chamber waiting to be called is problematic and

Mark D'Arcy: Not especially comfortable or accessible seats for a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: I mean they, they're uncomfortable even for able-bodied people.

But if you have, for example, prosthetics. Very, very difficult. Sarah Bool was saying she might need to go out to get food and drink. That can be problematic, and is it gonna affect when she's gonna be called? Interestingly, the degree to which provision is made, you know what we'd call in HR terms, reasonable accommodations are made for people's disability needs, access needs, seems to be quite ad hoc. It clearly has got better over the years, judging by what Robert Halfon's [00:31:00] experience, was compared to what the new MPs have had in in this Parliament, but still pretty ad ad hoc and Sarah Bool for example, said, that, uh, the officials installed a small fridge in the Reasons Room.

That room we talked about some months ago on the podcast.

Mark D'Arcy: Just behind the speaker's chair. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Where they go to sort of negotiate their explanations back to the House of Lords about why they're rejecting amendments. So there's this small room and that they've installed a fridge in there so she can put her insulin in there.

So she's got ready access to that in the evenings if she needs it. Things like that. Clearly welcome. Very, very useful, but somewhat ad hoc and clearly, you know, just things like being able to move about the palace unaided without always having to stop and ask for help and for support.

Mark D'Arcy: And someone to open the door for you or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Marie Tidball was saying the longer they sit into the evenings and sometimes you know, if that means you're getting a very late train home or very late train back to the constituency, she needs help to move her bags. It's not just a question of her moving. It's [00:32:00] also her sort of luggage, her laptop, or whatever it may be.

So she has to have staff support. So not knowing when the House is gonna finish and uncertainty about timings doesn't just affect her, it affects staff. Mm-hmm. So it's a lot of issues. And clearly some of this can be done. I mean, Robert Halfon was keen to stress this. A lot of changes can be made, it's not just a question of money.

It doesn't need huge investment necessarily, but it does need a change of culture and a change of attitude and also a sort of a willingness to think more strategically and structurally about some of these issues. So it'd be interesting to see what the committee concludes, but I think a big issue is going to be the nature of the parliamentary timetable and can change be made to that and adjustments made to that may be slightly different sitting times or breaks in sitting times.

I mean, it did occur to me, that what the House of Lords does might be worth considering. So they have concept of a one hour dinner break business. Uh, you know, they have a question for short debate, which interrupts other business.

Mark D'Arcy: It's, it's a mini debate sandwich [00:33:00] between two longer debates. Yeah. And it does allow people a chance to sort of get out and move about a bit.

Yeah. And, uh, if necessary, take a bit of a break. They're dinner break business. Yeah. Sometimes referred.

Ruth Fox: I don't think I'd recommend the House call it that, but

Mark D'Arcy: I'm sure we can come up with some better language.

Ruth Fox: But you know, if you're in a Second Reading debate or you know, whatever it may be, you don't necessarily have five, six hours. That you might have a couple of hours and then a break and something else intervenes and then, and maybe,

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe the chair, maybe the occupant of the chair can just be aware that certain people might have to nip out for a minute to get a insulin or whatever it might be, and not as it were, penalize them afterwards. Yeah. And call them later because they've dared to leave the chamber for a second.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean it must be difficult for the speaker to keep track of all of this.

Oh, sure. And manage in the chamber. So yeah, a need to sort of think about creatively about that. Pretty clear, I think, that Lucy Powell is quite interested in and quite supportive of the, the concept of call list, so, mm-hmm, interesting to see how that debate develops.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I mean, I can see the case for call this.

But what I [00:34:00] really wouldn't like is to get into the position that you get in the US Congress where people are basically only there to deliver their own speeches and then they disappear. Yeah. And there's no response between speeches. Yeah. No more. It's a great pleasure to follow the honorable gentleman, but I disagree with his main argument.

Mm-hmm. Because you've just got a pre-written speech that you're gonna dispense. Yeah. Those kind of things need to happen in a proper debate. If a debate is going to be an actual debate, rather than simply a list of sort of pre packed contributions that are unfolded in the chamber.

Ruth Fox: Well talking of, uh, contributions in the chamber, in the US context, um, you have heard that, uh, Senator Cory Booker in the United States has delivered, uh, the longest speech on record in the US Senate.

So, uh, should we take a break, Mark, and come back and discuss that? Just before we go, I'll make my usual appeal to listeners to review us on your podcast app, whether that's Spotify, Apple, or whatever else you use, it really helps other listeners find us. So, uh, five star reviews would be...

Mark D'Arcy: But be warned, anyone who says anything nasty about us will have Her [00:35:00] Majesty's constabulary round on you.

Ruth Fox: And you won't be protected by parliamentary privilege.

So listeners do help us with that and we'll see you in a moment.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back Ruth and exciting times in the US Senate if they use the word exciting in a particular context here. Cory Booker, one of the fairly long serving Democrat senators, made a 25 hour count, a 25 hour, speech. I'm not quite sure how you do that. Do you get comfort breaks? Do you get no, uh, the chance for food to be brought out to you?

No. No, none of that. So you just have to stand there and, conduct a marathon and, and this was all in the cause of offering some token parliamentary resistance to Donald Trump's agenda.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. 25 hours broke Senate record for the longest speech ever in the US Senate.

Mark D'Arcy: I think the previous longest one was Strom Thurman, the segregationist from, I think South Carolina.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, [00:36:00] 1957 when he spoke against, uh, civil rights legislation. So there was, there was. Nice

Mark D'Arcy: man.

Ruth Fox: Yes. No, not listeners. So there was kind of a symbolism to the fact that, uh, Cory Booker, who is a black Democratic representative from New Jersey was sort of obliterating his record and he very clear that that was partly his intention as well.

He, he wanted, he wanted that record. But yes, it was a speech about, he described it as it's a moral moment, and he said his constituents were concerned about what was happening with Donald Trump and basically wanted them to do something different. And I think one of the, the concerns in the us, in the Democratic Party is the absence of leadership, the absence of clear voices and response to what the Republicans are doing.

So he decided that one way was to essentially take over the Senate floor and deliver this speech, and it was interesting afterwards, he explained how he'd prepared for it, which is pretty extraordinary. So in order to maintain the floor, he couldn't have food, couldn't go away and get food. He had a couple of glasses [00:37:00] of water.

That's all he stood all the way through. Couldn't sit down.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. He was leaning, I think, on a lectern at one point. Yeah. Which apparently is permissible.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So to prepare for this, he had basically dehydrated himself for 24 hours beforehand. Couldn't, go for a a comfort break. Couldn't go to the toilet. So dehydrated himself 24 hours beforehand.

Hadn't eaten for several days. Wow. Um, said afterwards to journalists. My apologies to the Senate doctor and my own doctor. I hope they're not too annoyed with me.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I suppose you could think of this as the senatorial diet, 'cause I'm sure you must lose a fair amount of weight by doing all that.

Ruth Fox: But one thing that could be done is that other senators could intervene to ask a question and he could yield the floor to them, but retain the right to speak.

So interestingly had a bit of paper on which he'd written the words explicitly that he had to say to maintain the floor. Otherwise, it would've given leave for the Republicans to have interrupted. So there was a, a lineup of Democratic senators realizing what he was doing had sort of [00:38:00] piled into the chamber to support him and to intervene at appropriate moments.

Mark D'Arcy: In the common context, this is known as in-flight refueling. You know, as someone is making a long speech, someone can intervene just to give you a moment's relief to sit down or whatever.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, question was asked, was, a lot of Republicans were saying, oh, it's just an absolute waste of time. I mean, this wasn't a formal filibuster because he wasn't stopping legislation, he wasn't stopping motions and or a budget or anything like that.

So it wasn't classed as a formal filibuster. But there was a question, you know, is it a good use of time. Well, it went viral. I mean, millions were watching. I mean, I stayed up to watch that sort of last half hour to see if he blew through Strom Thurman's record and was quietly cheering him on as I was watching C-span.

Oh, the joy of C-Span. Yeah. It was that sort of moment of, you know, he'd captured attention and, and he was, and, and

Mark D'Arcy: That I think was surely the point. Yeah. I mean, at the moment there's a lot of criticism that the actual Democrat leadership in the US Senate has been pretty limp in its opposition to Donald Trump.

Yeah. And Chuck Schumer, [00:39:00] the leader there, is in some sense, didn't fight over a passing the US budget in a way that he might have done. And he came under huge criticism for that. Yeah. And into that vacuum, I suspect moves Cory Booker. There are people who will want to assert leadership over the Democrat party.

Not perhaps formal leadership of the party group or anything like that,

Ruth Fox: Positioning, but

Mark D'Arcy: It's positioning. Does this tee him up as the presumptive front runner for the Democrat presidential nomination? It's a long way out, but it's a start. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well you did wonder what Charles Schumer thought about it 'cause he publicly, he was very supportive and saying very nice things and intervening to help.

But I did wonder privately, behind the scenes, was he thrilled.

Mark D'Arcy: Well always remember the political maxim from Yes Minister, in order to stab someone in the back, you first have to get behind them. One, one of my favorites. But I suppose the question arises and this kind of thing doesn't happen in Westminster and probably couldn't happen in Westminster.

No, there's no way you can see a 25 hour speech being made in either House of, on pretty much any occasion.

Ruth Fox: No, I mean the, [00:40:00] first of all, in terms of the sort of the agenda and the program, you have the moment of interruption, you have programming and and so on. One of the criticisms of course, is that too often the speeches that mps are, the time that they're given to speak, is too short.

Yeah. We talked about it on the podcast quite a bit, two of three minute increments.

Mark D'Arcy: If, if you're lucky. And the moment of interruption incident is the formal sort of stop point. Yeah, uh, which main Commons business ends, and there's then an adjournment debate for half an hour. Yeah. So you can't go on beyond that.

And that's set in stone most of the time in Commons proceedings, unless there's a thing called an any hours motion passed. And in that case, again, the chair is rigorously monitoring how long MPs are allowed to speak. So in the Commons, the only occasion when you can really get a longer than usual speech is on Private Members' bill Fridays. Mm-hmm. And even there, you've still got the moment of interruption looming. You know, two 30 will come along and that's it. Mm. But I still have post-traumatic memories of watching people like Philip Davis and Andrew Dismore and, uh, David Nuttle of Blessed Memory, trying to talk [00:41:00] out unwelcome Private Members Bills.

I once got into trouble with Philip Davis for writing a yesterday in parliament, which included the words, on and on he droned, and he was, he was quite upset by this, but I felt it was fairly accurate reporting, to be honest.

Ruth Fox: Oh dear. Well, another issue, Mark has come up here about how elected members use their time.

So the criticism of Cory Booker was, you know, standing in the Senate chamber, you know, droning on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But possibly doing a good piece of political positioning while he did it. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And, and also political education, I think in his case. 'cause he's got a message out there about all the problems that are happening now and what might happen in the future.

And that is on record. But here, different question about how MPs use their times has come up when 20 MPs have signed a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, calling on him to sort out an issue in Kashmir in relation to an airport development in the city of Mirpur. Basically MPs calling on the [00:42:00] Pakistani authorities to build this airport, which is kind of interesting when quite a number of those signatories to the letter are opposed to development of airports in the uk.

Yeah. For climate change reasons.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, if you're against airports for climate change reasons, you're presumably against them whether they're in Mirpur or Heathrow. You'd hope so.

. So, so there is a, something of an inconsistency there. And I do think that there is a kind of political opening that's been provided here where they may find people campaigning against them on the basis that they seem more concerned with airports in Kashmir than they are with conditions in their constituency.

Now that's a, a bit of a travesty. I mean, it takes an an MP about 30 seconds to sign a, a letter. Yeah, of course it does. So, and I imagine they sign several dozen a day,

Ruth Fox: But it's about political and policy consistency, isn't it? Yeah. And whether you should be lobbying a foreign prime minister to do something that you're not willing to ask of your own prime minister for your own constituents, you're willing to ask it of an overseas prime minister for your constituents who happen to go back to that country as sort of part of the diaspora community, go back to visit and don't like the [00:43:00] fact they've got to travel several hours to get back to their relatives from the airport that they can land in. At the moment they'd like somewhere nearer.

Mark D'Arcy: It is. It is, of course a very large Kashmiri diaspora in Britain. Yeah. And Kashmiri derived voters, if you like, mm-hmm, are possibly swing voters in quite a number of constituencies now. And of course, Labour's relationship with a lot of Muslim voters has been very fraught because of the Gaza situation.

Yeah. I suppose this is one way in which they can kind of keep in touch with some of those voters.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but I go back to the point it's about consistency of, of message and consistency of politics. And this is a delicate question in the, in the Labour party, in Labour politics, but there is this concern about development of sectarian politics, you know, within particular constituencies.

And this kind of thing doesn't help and it just makes you look a bit frankly hypocritical.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a difficult area to go blundering into for all sorts of reasons. And while some people can sort of shrug and say consistency's overrated in politics, I think a little bit of it every now and then might be quite [00:44:00] welcome.

Ruth Fox: Useful. Well Mark with that, I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. We will have our next episode looking at the assisted dying bill next in our series of special mini pod, looking at the next stage, the Report Stage, which will be coming up on the 25th of April. So we've got our procedural guru, Mr Paul Evans, back to explain what to look out for at Report Stage and Third Reading.

Mark D'Arcy: The secrets of Report Stage. Always an interesting area to dive into.

Ruth Fox: So we are gonna hold that over because parliamentary recess is kicking in this week in the House of Lords, and the the Commons are back for a couple of days next week, but we'll be putting that, uh, special episode out next Thursday.

So look out for that in your podcast feed and then the following week. But just before Easter, we've got one of your special Whipping Yarns episodes, Mark

Mark D'Arcy: A, a special treat. The former chief whip under Rishi Sunak, Simon Hart, has written a tell all memoir or tell quite a lot memoir. One suspects there are a few secrets he didn't reveal in that [00:45:00] book and, and the names.

And he's spoken to us about his experience as the ringmaster of Conservative MPs in the dying days of Rishi Sunak's government after a long era of Conservative rule. And it's quite a tale.

Ruth Fox: It is. And then, uh, we'll be back after Easter for that assisted dying bill Report Stage. So we won't actually be recording on the Thursday as normal.

We'll be recording on the Friday the 25th. So that will drop into your podcast feed on the Saturday morning. So we're delaying proceedings in order so that we can watch and report back on, on what happens with that important bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Do join us then

Ruth Fox: And we'll see you then. Have a good break. Happy Easter and we'll see you, uh, see you back on the 26th.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye bye.

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 at Hansard [00:46:00] Society.