• The Constitution under Labour: Constitution Unit Conference 24-25 June 2026: Labour took office two years ago promising change, including multiple reforms to the UK’s constitution and political institutions. As we near the halfway point of this parliament, how have those promises fared? What changes has the government actually made? What challenges and criticisms has it faced? And what further developments can we expect in the year ahead? This online conference will take stock of recent constitutional developments, and look ahead, with a range of parliamentarians, academics, and commentators

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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 pod.

Ruth Fox: Party rules, parliamentary rules, and electoral law collide in the imminent contest for the Labour leadership. We are joined by constitutional expert, Professor Meg Russell, to unravel the complexities in the battle for Downing Street.

Mark D'Arcy: Meanwhile, a pretty chunky King's Speech has just been delivered by His Majesty. We look at some of the pinch points ahead.

Ruth Fox: And how huge political uncertainty and the possible demise of two party politics could create a moment for serious constitutional reform.[00:01:00]

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, with the caveat that events are still unfolding on what's been quite a dramatic day in Westminster as we record this Thursday afternoon, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary has resigned. There's a leadership challenge in the air, and Westminster has resolved into an existential political drama in which the main candidate seems never to appear.

We are waiting for Andy. The open question now, as we see a Labour leadership contest on the horizon, is whether the King of the North can march south and seize Downing Street.

Ruth Fox: I'm sorry, but as a Yorkshire woman, I take exception to this King of the North.

Mark D'Arcy: Restarting the war of the roses here.

Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark, so literally as we're recording, Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary, but let's take that bit of the picture first. So we do not have a Health Secretary as we are recording this listeners. By the time you get it, you may know who it is going to [00:02:00] be, but there's gonna have to therefore be a ministerial reshuffle.

There was one a few days ago because of the number of the sort of junior ministers that resigned. So I think there were four appointments and a number of parliamentary private secretaries have been appointed, but we don't have a Secretary of State for Health. So that's the first thing.

And then the question is, what flows from that? Is that somebody coming back into Government who's been outside to be health Secretary or is it gonna be a reshuffle around the cabinet table? So there's implications there, I think.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. And there's also an interesting implication about payoffs because if you voluntarily depart government, do you get a payoff?

The four junior ministers who went earlier saying that Keir Starmer should resign and they couldn't continue to serve in his government, could they claim a payoff? Because certainly in previous leadership contests in the Tory years, it seemed to be that people did trouser a few thousand pounds when they left office.

Ruth Fox: They did, yeah, when, particularly the Boris Johnson mass resignations and their mass reappointment.

Mark D'Arcy: Considerable turnover.

Ruth Fox: So that was [00:03:00] a controversy and in fact the Labour Party then in opposition said that they would tackle it. So I actually got my colleague Matthew England, who does a lot of research for the Society.

We gave him a day off looking at delegated legislation and he's been looking at, what happens with severance payments. And, the government in 2025 last year revised the ministerial code to add a couple of new paragraphs to cover this issue. Ministers are now expected to waive on appointment their entitlement to a ministerial severance payment on leaving office if they served for less than six months, or there's other grounds around if they've breached the ministerial code and so on.

And if a former minister is appointed to a ministerial office within three months of leaving office, so if they come back into government, they'll be expected to forego their salary for the period overlapping with the severance payment period. So this is where the question of if there is going to be a Labour Party leadership contest, how long will it be?

And at what point would you then be reappointing ministers to a new [00:04:00] government under a new Prime Minister? Because if it's more than three months, and certainly on past time tables, it could be, then the ministers would indeed be entitled to their severance payment.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, indeed.

Ruth Fox: It doesn't look good, does it?

Mark D'Arcy: I think this merry-go-round in which people voluntarily leave a job and get money for doing so seems a bit odd to most people outside of the political world to put it at its gentlest.

Ruth Fox: And if we sack you, you're not getting a payment from the Hansard society. That's one aspect of this.

And then Wes Streeting has said in his letter of resignation that he wants the widest possible contest. This is where the Andy Burnham scenario comes into play. Can he get a seat to return to Westminster?

Mark D'Arcy: That's a very interesting question here, and it's one that a lot of people have been pondering.

Would he have to resign as Mayor of Greater Manchester before contesting a [00:05:00] parliamentary seat? Is one of the questions. Another is whether the Labour Party would let him be the candidate for a by-election. Yet another, is there an MP willing to stand down to allow a by-election to be held? So there are all sorts of ifs and buts clustering around a potential Burnham candidacy.

So let's start with the legislation. The English Devolution Act says that people in these kind of strategic mayoral positions are not allowed to simultaneously hold those offices after being elected to Parliament. Now the crucial word, doing the heavy lifting in that clause is after, so Andy Burnham could run for a parliamentary seat as Mayor of Greater Manchester and would only have to resign as mayor in law after winning a parliamentary seat. And if he didn't win it, he could go back to being mayor of Greater Manchester. So that's the letter of the law. Whether the politics would allow him to do that is another matter, but that's the actual legal constraint around him. So he doesn't [00:06:00] immediately have to resign as mayor of Greater Manchester.

What he needs is someone to move aside, after you Claude, and allow him to run for their seat, create a vacancy in the House of Commons, ideally somewhere in his kind of Manchester bailiwick. Meg Russell.

Meg Russell: One of the things which is puzzling me, and it's been puzzling me since before the Gorton and Denton by-election, is whether we shouldn't be looking at this requirement in the Labour Party rule book, that you have to be an MP in order to enter a leadership contest.

We're more than 25 years on since devolution. We've got some senior figures. The same applies to the Conservatives, by the way, First Ministers in Scotland and Wales, one of them now free of her seat, since last week, eluned Morgan and these mayoral figures who are really big political figures, some of them, not just Andy Burnham, Tracy Brabin, for example, who's another of the mayors.

They've got a lot of political experience under their belt, including experience at Westminster. Have we not reached a time when maybe MPs, if there were 81 MPs who wanted to nominate somebody in one of these [00:07:00] roles who didn't currently have a seat, would it not be simpler for them just to be able to do rather than for us to be able to go through this whole business where Andy Burnham has to look for a seat, win a by-election, come in, and then might not actually get the nominations, sufficient nominations when he arrives?

I think in the case of Andy Burnham, by the point that we're at, it feels fairly clear to me that he would get the nominations. But, why should these people not be able to throw their hat in the ring if MPs want them. I would suggest MPs should be able to get them on the ballot paper and maybe they can win a by-election later if they win the contest.

Ruth Fox: That's the issue, the link between the leadership and the premiership, isn't it? Can you imagine a scenario in which he gets onto the ballot whilst not going for a by-election, remaining mayor of Manchester, he's put on the ballot, the MPs are content with that, mPs vote for him to be leader of the Labour Party.

There is an assumption therefore, that he has to come into the House of Commons to be Prime Minister. He's got to command the confidence of the House of Commons. So he needs a seat in the Commons. He [00:08:00] goes for a by-election and he doesn't win it. Then what?

Meg Russell: I think these things should be looked at.

I think there are ways, I think there are, I think there are ways round these complications. Maybe you can have a rule that somebody has to have a seat within a certain number of months of becoming Prime Minister or something. At the end of the day, there's no legal requirement for ministers, let alone the Prime Minister, to be drawn from Parliament in the first place.

We have our flexible constitution that these are all conventions. The hard rule that exists is the rule in the Labour Party Rule Book that says you have to be an MP to enter the contest. And I think in a devolved world that's a bit of a strange, outdated rule and it's, also, I think we should at least have a conversation about it.

I think this whole business with Andy Burnham opens up a question that should be looked at and see whether people can get around the kind of complications that you mentioned. Look, Canada just elected Mark Carney, didn't it? That has not been a flop.

Mark D'Arcy: And he was Prime Minister for a while before becoming a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Meg Russell: He'd never been in Parliament before being elected as [00:09:00] the leader of the party and then becoming Prime Minister. Andy Burnham has done his time as a parliamentarian, he's been a cabinet minister, I think, hasn't he, in the past. He's got the political CV and he's doing a big job. He's a figurehead for the party. So I think maybe this stuff should be looked at after we've got through this because, this is the problem we have to deal with the system as it is right now that I think it deserves looking at.

Mark D'Arcy: And the precedents for this are all slightly temporary states of affairs.

Alec Douglas Hume having to get into the House of Commons after having been chosen as Conservative Prime Minister in succession to Harold MacMillan when I was three. You've got Patrick Gordon Walker being part of the victorious Labour government that was elected in 1964, but actually losing his seat in that general election and serving for a few months as Foreign Secretary before contesting another by-election, which he then, as Ruth was describing, failed to get elected in and had to resign as Foreign Secretary, eventually coming back, rather later on with his prospects for higher office rather stymied.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean my concern is just that what happens if, and given the febrile, if I can [00:10:00] use that word, perhaps overused in recent weeks, but the febrile nature of politics, I don't think any candidate in the main parties can guarantee that they're gonna get elected to Parliament. And there is, there's a degree of disrespect to the electorate in all of this, which I think is getting lost in the debate.

He ran to be mayor of Greater Manchester. He's got a set a number of years in the term. It's gonna cause turmoil in the northwest, if there's gotta be a another election. There's gonna have to be a by-election as well. Immense cost to the public purse. I just think some of that's getting lost in the debate because of this focus on one person.

And ultimately if he didn't get elected, what then are the consequences that flow from that if he'd already won the leadership of the party, if the rules were different.

Meg Russell: Politics is all about trade offs, isn't it? And I think we've seen some of the downsides of the system with the by-election requirement in advance in recent days.

There was a time, it's three days ago or [00:11:00] something, an awful lot has happened, doesn't it, this week, where I felt that what was probably happening was that Streeting supporters, I dunno about Streeting, Streeting supporters looked to be wanting to get everything done as quickly as possible in order that it could be done before Andy Burnham arrived.

Whereas maybe Burnham supporters are trying to say, oh, we must have a phased process. We must have a date by which the Prime Minister will go in order to give him enough time to arrive. And that was distorting people's views on whether the Prime Minister should go, which also seems pretty problematic to me.

Mark D'Arcy: But Wes Streeting has in fact said in his resignation letter now that he wants a process that includes the widest possible range of candidates, which is widely being assumed to be code for having Andy Burnham as a contestant in a leadership election. So perhaps that has fallen by the wayside for now.

And we are in a weird limbo situation here where everyone's expecting a leadership contest, Wes Streeting quite possibly has the 81 nominations available to him to trigger such [00:12:00] a leadership contest. And so we're again, waiting for godot if you like. We are waiting for this to start happening for someone to pull the trigger and start the whole thing going presumably after the possible arrival of Andy Burnham into Westminster, if that can be arranged.

So amongst other things, we're waiting to see if there is really an MP out there who's willing to step down from their seat to give Andy Burnham and into the House of Commons before we get to the mild formality of whether the voters in that seat will actually vote him in.

Ruth Fox: And the issue here, I think, Mark, is that a by-election timetable could be anything between 21 to 27 days from the point at which the writ is issued.

That's not taking account of things like bank holidays, of which there is at least one coming up fairly soon. So you've gotta add that on. That's the start of the timetable. You've gotta have that first to know whether Andy Burnham can get into Westminster to be a candidate. And then at that point you've got the nomination process for the Labour leadership and it's been a hundred plus [00:13:00] days, somewhere between a hundred and 120 days, I think for recent Labour leadership campaigns to take place.

So you are heading into quite deep into late summer, early autumn. Obviously they will want this done September, October, certainly for party conference in October. That's an awful long period of time. What happens to governing? Is Keir Starmer a candidate or not? Or has he gone from the process and he's almost a caretaker Prime Minister, a bit of a lame duck, can he govern, can they make big decisions. Concerns that coming down the pipe in terms of the economy, the situation in the Middle East, if it gets worse, the cost of living implications that might hit in the autumn.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not as if these are quiet times, no.

Ruth Fox: Meg, you wanted to come in on the Keir Starmer point.

Meg Russell: Yes. it was on the point that you just mentioned that Keir Starmer might be a contestant in this process because it's worth reflecting on a key difference between the Labour and Conservative rules here.

Because obviously we have [00:14:00] had a surprisingly large number of changes of leader in recent years. We've already had six prime ministers in the last 10 years. I don't think we'll quite fit in a seventh before the anniversary of David Cameron resigning over Brexit. But what we haven't had is a contest where the leader whose hand has just been forced being able to be in that contest because in the Conservative Party there's a rule that they can vote no confidence in their leader. The famous letters going into Sir Graham Brady to say that people have lost confidence in the leader. And if that reaches a threshold, then there's a contest sparked and the leader isn't allowed to be in that contest.

Whereas you'll remember that in 2016, again after the referendum, when Labour MPs expressed no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, it was soon realised that there is no official process to express no confidence in a Labour leader. And it was clarified that Corbyn was entitled to be in the contest. Now, of course, he was leader of the opposition at the time, he was not Prime Minister, so it would be quite unprecedented to have a leadership contest where the Prime Minister is out on the stump.[00:15:00]

Honestly, I can't see how that works. I think the Labour Party rule is silly. I think it was made to look silly in the Corbyn time, and I think they ought to have an ability for MPs to vote no confidence, and that's the end of the leader. But if he wants to fight it through the summer, we have had some of these leadership contests through the summer, but when it was, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, that was relatively smooth. This would be chaotic, I think, if Starmer were in the contest.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose you have to go back to the days when Margaret Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine and that famous statement, I fight on, I fight to win, that she issued shortly before, not fighting on that was a rare occasion and it was pretty chaotic, but in those days it was just a vote by MPs. So it was all over fairly rapidly, I think

Meg Russell: A lot of this, the status of Parliament and what's happened to the status of Parliament is really key, I think, to some of this. Because effectively what Corbyn did was say, I don't care if my MPs don't have confidence in me, I'm gonna take it over your heads and I'm going to go to the members.

And the [00:16:00] members then voted him back in again, even though it was clear that the MPs didn't want him. That to me is an unsustainable situation. He didn't have adequate authority in his own party to be really doing what he was doing. In his own parliamentary party.

If he had have become Prime Minister, would he have had the confidence of Parliament because so many of his own MPs didn't actually support him? We've moved completely from the system where MPs would pick the leader of the PLP, who became the leader of the party, which actually in retrospect, it got gradually opened out in the Labour Party.

It went to the electoral college, and then the electoral college was done away with. It used to include unions and MPs with blocks of votes alongside the members. And then that was swept away, and it's just an all member ballot. MPs have no more power than anybody else in picking their leader. They can nominate. The only power that they have is the nominating power. Otherwise they've gotta vote like everybody else.

And I think that is in effect, that's disempowered [00:17:00] Parliament. To say that people outside Parliament can impose a leader on Members of Parliament and Members of Parliament just left to deal with it, I think, is a bit disastrous.

Ruth Fox: And this Mark does become pertinent, again, going back to the timetable, because whether Keir Starmer is part of this race or not I think will test the question about how much the government can govern during this period.

You might recall used to be called purdah for a general election where activites are restricted. This is the question, I think, and, Keir Starmer's role or not in a contest, I think would dictate that. I think we don't call it purdah anymore. We call it a period of sensitivity. But during a leadership contest, there's no formal restriction on government activity if the Prime Minister resigns as leader of their party.

But the assumption is that they're resigning as leader, but continuing as Prime Minister until an alternative is agreed. This potentially, if Keir Starmer were a candidate and decides, [00:18:00] everybody says he's very stubborn, he's very motivated to carry on, he may well want to face it down, then what would happen? The implication of that might be that actually government activity would have to be restricted to a degree affecting, for example, any initiatives, any policies, which implied significant sums of money being spent. It would be one area that might be affected.

Meg Russell: So it'd be interesting to see how it would play out.

I'm curious, isn't this curious, I'm just thinking to myself now, what happened in that contest with Rishi Sunak? But Rishi Sunak had resigned from the government, hadn't he? He wasn't fighting it as Chancellor. Yeah. And Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary and maybe fighting it without being in the cabinet.

Yeah. Could the Prime Minister seriously be fighting it as Prime Minister? I just don't see how that can work.

Ruth Fox: I guess the point is, if Wes Streeting has got enough numbers and nominations and potentially another candidate, Andy Burnham or somebody else might come to the fall, the whole Wes Streeting initiative might lead other ministers behind the [00:19:00] scenes to decide the game is up. And to actually say to the Prime Minister, I'm sorry, but you've got to go. So this is speculative about what is the role of the Prime Minister in this process going forward. If it were a sort of one-on-one contest with Wes Streeting alone. But it does, again, it raises, interesting questions about this meshing, this interrelationship of rules and procedures between party and government activity and parliament.

Meg Russell: But also what's politically possible.

That was what Jeremy Corbyn failed to realise. I think almost anybody would've realised because it was about a 70% of his MPs or something voted no confidence, most people would've realised at that point, this is not a sustainable situation. It is time for me to go. I'm not saying that's happening to Starmer, but Theresa May of course did not fight on in the Conservative Party.

Theresa May did a quite dignified thing, as you say, she came out and said, I'm not gonna be the leader of the party anymore, but I will continue steering the ship while the leadership contest is going on. And it [00:20:00] somehow worked.

Ruth Fox: And if you remember during that period, she actually took some quite big initiatives.

Not least that net zero commitment. She made some commitments on modern slavery and so on. It was almost like the shackles were off and she was thinking about her legacy. And that may be indeed what Keir Starmer will have to start thinking about.

Mark D'Arcy: That's one of the interesting contrasts. I remember having a fascinating conversation with Bernard Donoghue, Lord Donoghue, who was first a special advisor to Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, and then to his successor, James Callaghan. And he described how in Downing Street during the leadership election that Labour had in 1976, everything stopped. And in an environment where normally the decisions are coming at you thick and fast, there was an eerie stillness and silence for several weeks while the leadership campaign unfolded.

And if Keir Starmer is going to be sitting there as a caretaker leader waiting to be replaced by a successor, then you'd imagine that's pretty much what would happen. That the civil service would not be sending big decisions to him. But there may be big decisions that can't [00:21:00] be avoided. Suppose something happens in the Gulf, suppose you have to take action. There's some huge economic crisis. You are Prime Minister, even if you are waiting to be replaced, you are still the person in charge. So you may have to take big decisions, perhaps in consultation with the contenders to replace you, but you'd have to take them. The buck would still stop with you. Just as we are saying that, it's just flashed up on my newsfeed that Keir Starmer has in fact confirmed that he will fight on, if there's a leadership contest, he will be a candidate. And unlike all the other contenders, he doesn't even need to get nominated. If he wants to fight, he's automatically on the ballot.

Ruth Fox: There you go. There's gonna be a few issues to unravel if that's the way things are heading. The other thing that's bothering me a bit, Mark, is the implications of the timetable. Looking ahead in the parliamentary calendar, what might this mean for the budget? As I'm slightly obsessed with financial scrutiny and there's implications for the budget timetable, because that would be coming in the Autumn. Normally you'd expect it probably early November. It could slip as it had to last year into [00:22:00] December. But the Office of Budget Responsibility has to be given 12 weeks notice of a date in order to do their work in advance. Now, it might be that the candidates could agree a deal on what the date would be. It might be that the chancellor would just set it and everybody would have to work to it, whether the chancellor is in post by the time the budget arrives or not. But there's those kinds of implications for the business of governing and Parliament's calendar.

Mark D'Arcy: It takes us back to the kind of questions we were discussing. What's in a budget is pretty critical to a government's whole programme. If you get a new leader with a very different idea of what the government should be doing and a new chancellor with a very different idea of how to pay for that, then all previous budgetary planning is inoperative a bit, isn't it?

And it may just not be physically possible to have a budget on the normal timetable, so you can well see it being pushged back into the situation with a new leader and a new chancellor delivering a jolly Christmas budget and package of tax rises just before the holiday.

Ruth Fox: I think you [00:23:00] hit the nail on the head.

This goes to the heart of the question of if there is to be a leadership race, isn't it, is this going to be genuinely about policy? Do they think they've got the wrong policies? Do they think they need to adopt different initiatives in different areas? Do they need a new economic strategy or actually, do they think broadly the manifesto they ran on and the strategy they've got and the policies that they've been working on in departments are broadly okay, but they need a man with a bit more charisma and communication skills, political nous and judgement to deliver it. And if it's the former, then the budget might be more problematic. If it's the latter, then it might be almost business as usual underneath the hood, but what you publicly see and how it's presented might be given a makeover.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and the problem here is if Labour chooses to depart dramatically from the manifesto on which Sir Keir Starmer was elected as Prime Minister. You're not directly elected as Prime Minister. I know before anybody starts writing in. But if Labour depart dramatically from that [00:24:00] manifesto, then the pressure for a general election and the case for a new general election and a new mandate is much the greater.

Meg Russell: There's nothing that says that you have to have a general election just because you've changed leader.

And I think that's, again, exacerbated this concern about the lack of a general election is again exacerbated by this system where we have members outside Parliament picking leaders. Did people call for a general election when Harold Wilson gave over to James Callaghan? I was too young to remember.

Mark D'Arcy: I think Margaret Thatcher did, but I'm not sure anyone took it seriously.

Meg Russell: I think it was less controversial when it was clear that the leader of the party was the leader of the parliamentary party. The parliamentary party was responsible for picking the leader. And basically Parliament is at the heart of everything.

And I mean there's changes of leader in many other systems without there being general elections. That's quite well established in other countries. I think the thing that's made it more controversial than it used to be is the fact that there's a [00:25:00] process going on, including, we saw this when Rishi Sunak was fighting Liz Truss. Is it really right that the next Prime Minister should be chosen by the membership of the Conservative Party? Should the public not have a say? I think it's much more defensible for the MPs to be choosing the person that heads their organisation. The MPs themselves are all elected, so there is an accountability chain there.

The other thing, of course, about the MPs, being in control, and I'm not pretending we're gonna be able to do it here, but it's also a lot quicker. All of the discussions that you're having about the timing of the budgets and all the rest of it, and. what on earth are we doing in Downing Street during this, if the MPs are doing the picking, it can be done and dusted within a week or so.

Mark D'Arcy: But I suppose you can make the point too, that it is in fact more usual for a Prime Minister to take office midterm than to take office as the result of having won a general election. If you just look back at recent history, Tony Blair was succeeded by Gordon Brown in midterm.

Meg Russell: That was controversial, yeah. But I didn't think it should have been as controversial as it [00:26:00] was at that time, really.

Mark D'Arcy: David Cameron was succeeded by Theresa May who was succeeded by Boris Johnson, who was succeeded by Liz Truss, who was succeeded by Rishi Sunak. And in each case, there wasn't a general election around that process.

Meg Russell: In each case people complained that there should have been. Yes, I think it's fair. Absolutely think it's fair to say, we are a parliamentary system. Parliament is supposed to be at the heart of what we're doing, but oddly enough, I think it's fair enough for Parliament to be choosing its leaders.

And there is a distinction, clearly, when Cameron went, it was slightly unexpected, wasn't it? But when Cameron went and was replaced by May, it actually was all over very quickly. Because Andrea Leadsom dropped out of the contest. It never went to the members. And actually for all the chaos that ensued and all the chaos that had already begun after the Brexit referendum, that handover was relatively smooth.

Mark D'Arcy: It's something about the way we talk about politics that, that you hit here, which is that although we have a parliamentary system, we talk as if our Prime Minister is a president. Keir Starmer was elected by the people of the country. No he wasn't. He was elected by the people of his constituency.

And [00:27:00] no one else got a chance to directly vote for Keir Starmer. And so we refract our votes through the prism of individual constituency elections and get a Prime Minister as a result of the total of MPs that we elect. But we don't talk about it that way. We talk about it much more as if it was an American presidential system.

Ruth Fox: Dare I say, Mark, I think some of your former colleagues in the lobby and the press bare some responsibility for that in terms of the way they talk about politics and the theatre of politics and the focus on personalities rather than policy.

Mark D'Arcy: As his running story keeps on running, we now know that Andy Burnham does indeed have a parliamentary constituency that's going to be vacated so that he can run and try and get into Parliament in time to run for the Labour leader.

Quite a lot of elections for one man to take in quite a short period of time. It seems that Josh Simons, the Labour MP for Makerfield, a Greater Manchester seat is going to stand down, ideally in Andy Burnham's favour. And I suppose they then cross their fingers and hope that the Labour [00:28:00] NEC will let the Mayor of Manchester run for that seat.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. this is breaking news Mark, but Makerfield doesn't look on the face of it, perhaps, the most propitious territory in the northwest that Andy could have run for. Josh Simon's had a 5,399 vote majority. Apparently Reform was second in that general election, but, apparently they won all the local council seats at the local elections the other week.

Mark D'Arcy: So a pretty good test of whether the Burnham charisma is really the electoral antidote to Reform that a lot of Labour MPs are hoping it's gonna be.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So it's breaking news and we'll find out more, no doubt in the coming hours and days, this is gonna run and run.

Mark D'Arcy: Turn on, tune in and drop out with future pods.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But I think we take a break now, Mark, and come back, in a few minutes once we've, we've had time for refreshment to recover. But in the meantime, listeners, if you're enjoying the podcast, do rate and review it for us on Apple and Spotify. It really helps others find us and helps us to [00:29:00] grow the audience.

And of course, forward it on to your friends and family and coworkers and, perhaps put a positive comment, a five star review, on social media.

Mark D'Arcy: Take a break, now. See you in a few moments.

Ruth Fox: And we're back and, Mark, we have a King's Speech despite the events of the week. And it's quite a big. 37 bills, but actually eight of them are carryovers from the last session. So regular listeners will know, we've talked about these carryover bills in recent weeks.

There's three draft bills for pre legislative scrutiny. So for select committees to get their teeth into the detail and recommend changes to the government before the government formally lays the bill before the House of Commons or indeed the House of Lords. And one of them has already, one of those three has already been going through pre-legislative scrutiny with the Housing Committee, Florence Eshalomi's committee, looking at the commonhold and leasehold issues.

But as we're talking listeners, [00:30:00] it's Thursday lunchtime and the government is presenting five of these bills to the Commons and the Lords today already. So we are getting two big bills in the Commons, the NHS Modernisation bill and the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill. Now of course the NHS Modernisation bill is an interesting one because it's Wes Streeting's bill and, literally Wes Streeting as we've been on air has resigned from the government.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. So the bill is supposedly presented by Mr. Secretary Streeting and Mr. Secretary Streeting is no longer Mr. Secretary. So some, his successor as Health Secretary or possibly even one of his junior ministers may end up being the person pushing that measure through. And I do wonder whether Wes Streeting might decide that this is a good moment to make a speech, maybe turn it into a bit of a resignation statement as well. Sound constructive, but also make a case for him as leader. We'll have to wait and see. And of course we've also got a couple of bills in front of the House of Lords as well, including the rather interesting bill which will restrict the right to buy for social [00:31:00] housing, push up the qualifying time in which you have to live in a council house before you can cash in on the right to buy.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There's also some Labour MPs are flagging important measures in that bill around tenancy rights for victims of domestic violence. So it'll, it'd be interesting to see what happens with that one and the other two bills that are hitting the Lords today. Civil aviation and sporting events.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, sporting events about ticket touts, I think.

I'm not quite sure what the civil aviation bill is, but Meg, since you've actually been round the table when King's Speeches have been constructed in your days working for Robin Cook when he was a Leader of the House in the Tony Blair era. Perhaps you can tell us how this works. Do you start with a kind of ceiling?

We can only bring in so many bills, so there's a lot of competition to get in. So it's the first act to say this is the number, this is how many bills we propose to bring in. Does it work that way?

Meg Russell: I don't think it's a magic number. No, but clearly you do have to contain the overall volume, 'cause some bills are huge, long, complicated. Other [00:32:00] bills are small and technical and maybe quite quick. So I wouldn't say it's a number, it's almost a constant process I think. Obviously it's normally an annual process, but we have had these two year sessions, so we don't yet know how long this one's going to run. One would normally assume that it would be a year, but it's all run, at least ostensibly out of the Leader of the House's office who has a major coordinating role and communicates to all of the departments, will write round all the departments saying, have you got a bill or bills that you want in the next speech?

And we'll gather together a list and then they'll look at the size and scope of that. But also it is quite a political process, so it's administered via the Leader of the House. The Whips are involved as well in terms of how much trouble are we gonna get into on these things? Can we realistically get all this stuff through in time?

But also Number 10 and Number 10 are obviously very concerned about delivering on the manifesto, but also looking like the government is [00:33:00] dynamic and has ideas and is doing things for people. So if they write around the departments and all the departments send in ideas, but it looks all a bit lacklustre, a bit low key, then it's most likely to be Number 10 who will be stepping in and saying, no, we need some sort of big headline stuff in the speech.

And then might be going to individual Secretaries of State, individual departments, some of the more high profile ones like maybe health or welfare or whatever the stuff that people care about and saying, surely do you not need a bill to deliver on this major manifesto commitment that we made?

Or maybe you've asked for something small, but can we not be a bit more ambitious and get some more of the big stuff done now? But generally I would say that departments don't need much encouragement. The department, the departments, themselves are very keen to get their moment in the sun and to deliver the things that they care about.

So it's more gonna be a matter usually of trying to winnow it down and get some of the smaller, more technical things out of the speech. And that's how of [00:34:00] course you end up with handout bills. Sometimes if departments just wanna do little things that could be handled in a private member's bill, then that stuff might get squeezed out to make room for the big stuff.

So you go through this whole process and then having gone through it, it won't be long. Now they may already be in the process of beginning to think about what's in the next one. Because it's obviously an iterative process where you go back from the centre to the department back and forth and try and craft something that will hang together, as a programme.

Mark D'Arcy: And presumably the Leader of the House also has a kind of batting order. So first we'll do this bill, and then we've got a big bill from say, the Home Office coming up, and we'll phase that in. So that will have its second reading down in November sometime, and there's another bill that we'll put in that we might have to rush through a bit to get it through the House of Lords before the end of the session. That kind of phasing is worked out as well.

Meg Russell: You'd hope so. Would be great. I think it may be a bit less rational than that. There's also the fact that these bills have to be written.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Meg Russell: So [00:35:00] a bill will start with a germ of an idea. It will start with a line in a manifesto, and then it will gradually be worked up.

So I think during the process that I'm talking about, initially it would be, tell us in a line what your bill's gonna do. And then they would have to flesh it out more and more. But then actually, technically, legally writing the bill is a major thing for parliamentary counsel. And so you have to have the bill ready to go in at the right time.

You will have questions about the ones that may take longer because they're bigger and more controversial. You maybe want to get them started earlier on. You've got the question about which ones will start in the Commons and which ones will start in the Lords. When I was working for Robin, he was a great champion of carryover. He used to talk a lot about the kind of constraints of the sessional cutoff.

Ruth Fox: I agree with him.

Meg Russell: He was very frustrated that you couldn't just have a kind of regular pipeline of bills going in, which would get around some of these problems of having to think, have we got time to get this big home office bill through before the end of the session and so on. And carryover helps to ease those pressures a [00:36:00] bit.

Ruth Fox: And one of the critiques of the King's Speech and the whole sort of state opening exercise is that it's turns the legislative programme into basically an extended press release. The government wants this big parliamentary moment in the year. Essentially it's the King Speech and the Budget, the two preeminent ones in a parliamentary year. So it wants this moment, but it's very much focused on the messaging and the communications around it. And sometimes it feels like the actual legislative requirements are secondary to the need to have everything ready for this day and to put this communication of a message, of a plan, a vision, together. That seems to me to be the wrong way around it when it comes to legislating, but it's how the system works.

Meg Russell: Yeah, I very much agree with that. Generally there are conundrums in the legislative process that it is on the one hand a highly technical legal process, but on the other hand it's a highly political process and there's a little bit of a sharing there between the Commons and the Lords. The Lords does a bit more of the technical and the Commons does more of the political. But [00:37:00] when you're looking at what's incentivizing people to move amendments, but what's incentivizing the opposition to take positions, it's not always the high-minded kind of getting things right in a technical sense. There's a lot of politics to it as well.

And I agree some people in the process probably, and I don't mean to cast any aspersions on this Number 10 at all, 'cause I think this is absolutely normal. Number 10 is most concerned about getting the headlines on the day of the speech. And continuing, I suppose on some of the big bills, it's an immigration bill or something, to continue to get the headlines that they're tackling a problem that the public cares about.

And it's a little bit secondary whether you really need new legislation to do that or whether the government can do an awful lot administratively without needing to change the law. But we don't focus on that so much. So this is a bit of a problem. It's a bit of a conundrum.

Mark D'Arcy: This King's speech was being sold in advance as a moment of reset reasserting that the government had energy and ideas and was moving forward despite the shellacking it had taken in the local elections.

Now that's all been rather [00:38:00] overshadowed by the leadership contest that we were talking about just now. And I suppose the question arises, is this King's Speech really for real? So there's nothing to stop an incoming Prime Minister junking some of the bills that were promised in the King's Speech and perhaps introducing different ones, is there?

Meg Russell: No, that's quite true. There's always flexibility in the programme. Who knows what's gonna happen in the next year. Maybe there'll be some urgent thing they want to legislate on or whatever. But I think that whatever happens with the Labour Party leadership and whoever the Prime Minister is, these people did all stand on the same manifesto. They all do broadly all want to go in the same political direction. So I wouldn't expect it to be that disruptive really. So maybe some changes around the edges, but not much more than that.

Ruth Fox: The other thing to add, Mark, is this list of 37 bills, of course does not include the Finance Bill.

It's always one and possibly two in a year. And it doesn't include the Supply and Appropriation Bills for the expenditure. You are looking at 40, 41 bills ultimately that they could be trying to get through, which seems to me to be at the high end of a number of bills for a [00:39:00] session, assuming that it's gonna be roughly 12 months long.

So we might indeed see more carryover into the next session. But should we just have a look at some of the constitutional bills that have been mentioned? The ones that the constitutional nerds like us Meg will be taking most interest in.

Let's start with the Removal of Peerages Bill. This is the one that's emerged outta the Mandelson scandal. It seems to me that quite a bit of the commentary over the last few days, there seems to be some confusion amongst the commentariat about the difference between membership of the House of Lords and a peerage. So what is the problem that this bill is going to tackle?

Meg Russell: We think, I think, we don't entirely know, I did go and have a look at the notes on the bill and I think it's still not a hundred percent clear how much this bill is actually about the House of Lords because you are quite right and I've been tearing my hair out at times with some of the commentary, not just to be fair, journalists actually sometimes [00:40:00] words coming from the mouths of ministers who seem to be rather confused.

So if we start with Peter Mandelson, that was in a sense the problem that was being dealt with.

Ruth Fox: He's the original sin.

Meg Russell: And people were very offended that Lord Mandelson should be sitting in our legislature. And that was dealt with actually pretty quickly because he resigned. So he's no longer a member of the House of Lords. He's permanently gone from the House of Lords, but he still has his title. He can still call himself Lord Mandelson. It doesn't give him any rights to do anything in particular politically, but he's still got the title. To me, those are two quite separate things and we could get into a conversation about how it might be sensible to break the link between the peerage and membership of the House of Lords and do they really all have to have titles?

But that's the system that we have now. Removing a title, a peerage, from somebody is a much more complicated business. So in terms of leaving the House of Lords, he chose to leave. He jumped before he was pushed, if you like. But there is a process inside the Lords to look into people who are seen to have behaved badly [00:41:00] against sort of objective criteria.

There's a committee that will look at it and might recommend to the House that somebody should be thrown out. So even if he hadn't resigned, that could potentially have happened. It might have taken a little bit of time, but I think it's perfectly appropriate, I think, to have due process. If you talk about Olly Robbins for example, I think it was a shame that Olly Robbins didn't have due process. It might or might not have come to the same conclusion, but it's fair enough for people to look at the evidence, take a bit of time.

Mark D'Arcy: You certainly don't want a system that just allows the government to casually throw out members of the legislature.

Meg Russell: Exactly. Or even the legislature itself to casually throw its members out if it doesn't like them. For whatever reason, in terms of people having honours, there is a committee that can potentially strip people of, not a parliamentary committee, but a committee that can potentially strip people who've been given a knighthood or a damehood or something if they have been seen to be behaving badly.

And that has happened quite frequently over the years. But you can't strip somebody of a peerage without legislation. Because they've been made a life peer by the Monarch [00:42:00] using legislation and they would need to then be removed again using legislation. So the key thing that this bill seems to want to do is to ease that process that I just referred to of removing the peerage.

And rather than having to have a kind of, let's strip Peter Mandelson of his peerage bill followed by whoever might be next, you create a mechanism so that peers can be stripped of their titles. And I assume it would be something a bit like this governmental process for knighthoods and damehoods versus the kind of process inside the Lords.

But I dunno what it would be. The thing that isn't clear is whether they also want to tighten up the Lords process, the process for removing people from the Lords because it is actually an untested process.

We have had some people leave in disgrace, if I can put it that way, the Lords, but they've done so voluntarily in the way that Mandelson did.

We haven't really tested the system as to the ability to throw people out. And it's not clear to me whether the bill is going to try and cover that. Or whether it's only gonna be about peerages.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Because the Standards Committee has [00:43:00] quite recently actually produced some reports into peers' conduct, where they have recommended very heavy sanctions and peers themselves have voluntarily decided to go, rather than face the music and particularly face the prospects of their colleagues having to vote against them.

Mark D'Arcy: Exactly. But we don't know what would happen if someone decided to face the music and dance. Would there be tracks left gouged in the woodwork and the fingernails as they were dragged out of the Lords?

Meg Russell: There's a parallel here, isn't there, with the Privileges Committee and Boris Johnson?

Because obviously he went through a process, very high profile process, the committee wrote quite a damning report about him, he was liable to be voted on in the Commons and, liable to be subject to a by-election if the Commons would've suspended him, and then his electors would've been able to sign a petition saying that they wanted to have an election in the seat and so on. That bit doesn't exist for the Lords. So he in the end went, he chose to go rather than submitt himself to that process. And if an MP fights it, it's clear that it's gonna come down to their electorate, in the end. But [00:44:00] you don't have that in the Lords. So they might wanna tidy that up. They might want to give the Lords more power to remove members as well, or create a clearer process for that.

Ruth Fox: And talking about removal of members or voluntary departure of members, Mark, you've been very exercised this week by the news that several new councillors elected in the local elections have already had to stand down because it turns out they weren't actually eligible to be councillors. And you're pretty annoyed about this and think that maybe the actions could be taken in the elections bill that's already before the House of Commons.

Mark D'Arcy: It is something that just infuriates me. The spectacle of people who get elected to say a county council, then suddenly discover, whoops, I'm a teacher and I'm employed by that same county council. I'm therefore ineligible to be on there if I keep my job. And it's a choice between the job and the council seat. And they say, oops, I can't afford to lose my job, so I'm resigning my council seat. This all takes place like 48 hours after polling day. That is extraordinarily annoying and [00:45:00] expensive.

And of course, there's the category of people who get elected and thought, oh, I never really expected to get elected. It looks like an awful lot of work. I don't really want to do it and therefore decide to stand down. And in each case, I'm coming round to the view that there ought to be the ability to surcharge, to charge the cost of the resulting by-election, to those individuals. It's just wildly irresponsible to get into this position.

It costs other people an awful lot of money, and it really shouldn't happen. Partly the parties should take some responsibility for making sure their candidates are in fact eligible to serve in the bodies in which they're trying to be elected. That would be a start. Really it's amateur hour when you allow that sort of thing to happen.

But the individual should take some responsibility for it as well. So I would like to see people surcharge for the cost of these instant by elections, because I think that would be a fairly exemplary deterrent, and suddenly this nonsense wouldn't happen nearly so often. Now, maybe you'd need a get out clause, if someone's diagnosed with a serious illness during the course of a campaign, I've really got to go and have my treatment and I can't effectively serve as a councillor. That's a [00:46:00] reasonable excuse. What's not a reasonable excuse is, oh, I didn't know it was gonna be so much work.

Ruth Fox: We have lots of MPs and peers who listen to this podcast, so there you go, everyone there's an idea for amendment. And, Mark, another bill that, we talked about on the podcast quite recently with Catherine Barnard from University of Cambridge, where we're talking about dynamic alignment and the Eu reset. So we have got confirmation that the bill is going to be called the European Partnership Bill, not the European Reset Bill, so the European Partnership Bill. And that is going to basically, I suspect, we, again, Meg, much like your peerages bill, I don't quite know what's gonna be in this one either, but it looks like it's gonna be a bill filled with delegated powers. My favourite subject. To enable the government to reach, strike, deals with the EU in the three areas of phyto sanitary provisions, European energy market, and the emissions trading scheme. But the thing to look [00:47:00] out for in the bill is whether or not the powers will enable the government to use those powers again in other areas to strike other deals.

Mark D'Arcy: Eg, by rejoining the customs union or rejoining the single market. And while, yeah, I may not be actually against those things, what I am against is all that being done with a 90 minute debate in the House of Commons on a statutory instrument under this bill.

Ruth Fox: You might not even get that because if it was a negative scrutiny procedure, it wouldn't even warrant that. So there will be an awful lot to look out for. The European Relations Committee in the House of Lords is already looking at this question of dynamic alignment and will be eagle eyed looking out for the bill as soon as it arrives. We're expecting it to be one of the early ones. So it's not been presented this week, but we're hearing that it will be fairly soon. We won't have long to wait and get our teeth into it.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I suppose the other thing to bear in mind in all this is, the European Commission looking at the election results from last week might wonder how much effort it wanted to put into [00:48:00] detailed negotiations with the UK when the subsequent government might walk away from any arrangement that the Starmer government had made.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, that's the cost of instability, isn't it? We will see what happens. So let's come back after the break and in a few moments to talk to Meg about whether this electoral and political uncertainty might actually create some opportunities, some new opportunities, for democratic reform.

Mark D'Arcy: Join us in a moment.

And we are back and having discussed the King's Speech, let's have a look at ways in which other bits of legislation might get changed, perhaps not with the connivance of the Government, even. Meg Russell, in your farewell speech to the constitutional nerd circuit earlier this week, you suggested that a window of opportunity might now be opening for cross party cooperation to bolster the constitution. Why would they do that? And what is the window, so to speak?

Meg Russell: I suppose last week's [00:49:00] elections were obviously a very clear indication of the way we've moved from a two party world that we traditionally had, although arguably we haven't had that for a long time, to a multi-party world. And the nature of that multi-party world, when you apply it at Westminster, is that everything is highly unpredictable.

We know that the current government won in 2024 on a record low share of the vote. You can potentially get a landslide on 30 something percent of the vote in the Westminster system. And the way that votes are moving around, we don't know who's gonna be in government. We don't even know who the lead opposition party is going to be.

Reform could be up. The greens could be up. Labour could be down. Conservatives could be down. And what I called it was a kind of veil of ignorance situation, which is an idea taken from John Rawls about how, if you don't know where you are going to be in the system, your best bet is to design a system that's fair, that doesn't overly advantage anybody. And [00:50:00] our system does, particularly at Westminster, strongly advantage the government in many things, which is often controversial, but also to an extent, strongly advantage the main opposition party over other opposition parties. If we're going into an election where we dunno whether we're gonna have a majority government, a minority government, a coalition government, a minority coalition government, who's gonna be the main opposition party, I think everybody has an incentive at the moment to think, what I want is a situation which would be as good as it could be, irrespective of where I am in the system. I don't wanna give all the cards to the government. I don't wanna give all the cards to the main opposition party. And so things like the fact that we have non statutory regulators, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, also the Ethics and Integrity Commission that was created by this government, has no statutory footing.

If an incoming government wanted to get rid of that, they could just get rid of it overnight. You don't need any legislation for it. The fact that the Prime Minister can make as many [00:51:00] appointments to the House of Lords as they want whenever they want with whatever party balance they want is something that you might hanker after if you are looking to be the government.

But if nobody knows, but particularly if the two main parties fear that neither of them is gonna be the government, this might be the time when they could come together and say, let's have some rules of the game, which don't overly advantage whoever happens to be at that specific moment the governing party.

Let's try and design a constitutional system that's fair and based on some clear principles.

Mark D'Arcy: So you have a situation where pretty much any of the political parties could be anything from a majority government to a rump of 10 or less MPs in the next House of Commons. So they want to make sure that they've got a decent piece of the procedural cake wherever they are.

Meg Russell: Yeah, exactly. You might be a junior coalition partner, you might be the senior coalition partner, or you might be somewhere on the opposition benches. And one of the other points that I made in the lecture was that we've obviously been living through very unpredictable [00:52:00] times. All sorts of strange stuff has been happening.

I was Constitution Unit director for just over 10 and a half years. I came in just before the Brexit referendum, which was one of those unexpected things for a lot of people. And after the referendum, an awful lot of unexpected stuff went on to happen, including minority government. And a point that I made was that we were in no way ready for the aftermath of a leave vote in the Brexit referendum. That got us in a lot of trouble.

I think in many ways we weren't ready for coalition government and two came on top of each other. We're now facing an election when genuinely pretty much anything could happen. And yet we have a system which is still designed around the idea of a single party majority government, and whoever's just left government winds up being the main opposition party.

It may well not be like that. And I think what we need is a system that isn't just gonna lead us into kind of chaos and uncertainty on the other side. We need to build the system now so that it can deal with any eventuality. And that includes Commons Standing Orders.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I was gonna say that's [00:53:00] critical, isn't it?

Because you just look at the result after the last election, we can already see a degree of unfairness on the opposition benches, where once upon a time, the main party of opposition would've expected to get 70% plus of the seats, and they're now down at 50%, and yet they get the continuing lion's share of opportunities and prioritisation in the House of Commons for opposition parties.

So we were talking about that very soon after the general election. Mark, you remember one of our other regular guests, Paul Evans, wrote a blog post for us on that. So we have been championing this idea that there needs to be a review of the Standing Orders because they're not prepared for the kind of scenarios that might emerge, where we might have potentially four, five opposition parties that are relatively small.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Or 20 seats a piece or whatever.

Meg Russell: Clearly we don't have a proportional electoral system for the House of Commons. That's a totally separate argument. There are arguments on both sides of that, but I think there is a strong argument that we should have [00:54:00] proportionality within the House of Commons in terms of how your seats in the House of Commons translate into your ability to do things in the House of Commons.

And the fact that yes, I remember Paul's post, it was a very timely and sensible intervention saying that, the liberal Democrats are not that far behind the Conservatives in terms of seats in this Parliament, and yet the Conservatives have the lion's share of the opposition days.

If you try mentioning this, the Conservatives get a bit twitchy about it but I'm just wondering whether we might be about to arrive in a moment, when people think that third opposition party, that second or third opposition party could be me. And I don't wanna be squeezed out. So actually let's have a system of proportionally, fairly sharing things out so that everybody knows they're gonna get something rather than fearing whether the Conservatives, if they go from first opposition party to second opposition party, they're gonna be very sorry that they didn't change it.

Ruth Fox: And [00:55:00] this also has the potential to crack through on other issues. Dare I raise Mark my favourite subject delegated legislation. So it's not just about things like sharing out the spoils in the House of Commons in terms of debating time and or in terms of select committee seats and so on. But the regular concern that organisations like ours may have is, of course the opposition will criticise things in opposition that they don't like.

And then things like the delegated legislation scrutiny system. And then when they get into government, it helps them, they like it, so they stick with it. But in these circumstances, they don't know who's gonna be in government. They don't know which one of them will be in office. So being able to put in place some constraints on the potential likelihood that they might not be.

That's an opportunity to start rethinking that selfish interest perspective.

Meg Russell: Exactly. I think we have traditionally had this pattern whereby, and you see it played out in parliamentary reform and why it can be difficult that the opposition party [00:56:00] thinks, yeah, it's a great idea to change the system, and then as the election gets closer and they begin to wonder whether they're going to be the governing party, there's a kind of tacit understanding between the two sides that the power will be passed from one to the other. They'll get it back in due course. They're both quite responsible parties.

Nobody's gonna do totally crazy stuff. But if we're entering a situation where you don't know who's gonna get the power and when you don't know when it's gonna be coming back to you again, are you gonna die out as a political party, are you not gonna get power back for five general elections? Because it's gonna cycle through all these different possible party combinations. Then surely the system should be designed to be as fair and defensible based on the election outcome as it can be.

Mark D'Arcy: This is going to require quite a big cultural break for the big players in the House of Commons. I can remember at the end of the Labour years when there was talk of having a House of Commons Business Committee that would control the House of Commons agenda as well. So MPs got to vote on it. Something you've been pressing for a very long time, Meg. [00:57:00] I can remember a quote floating out to me attributed to the then Labour chief whip Nick Brown, that he wouldn't want to bequeath to Patrick McLaughlin, who's the opposition Chief Whip and would become the government chief whip, he wouldn't want to bequeath to him a system that he wouldn't like to live with himself. So it was very much about the courtesy of the two big players to one another and the assumption that each would have their turn and that assumptions now dissolving and that's the centre of what you're arguing.

Meg Russell: And of course, yes, I mean I was the specialist advisor to the Wright Committee, which made the recommendation of the Backbench Business Committee and the election of select committee chairs. And that bit that you've just mentioned is the bit of unfinished business from the Wright Committee. The bit that was never implemented.

But the element of that package that I thought was the most important that wasn't implemented was not so much the House Business Committee, although I think there are arguments for that and increasing arguments for that actually, if you're in a multi-party situation and you do have something like that in a lot of parliaments, which are elected on a more proportional basis where the sort of the [00:58:00] uncertainty and the multi-party nature of it is more ingrained. So they have systems to deal with it.

But the Wright Committee also crucially suggested that the House of Commons should decide its own agenda. And should vote on it on a weekly basis rather than it being brought as a kind of fait accompli by the government. And I think the lack of that kind of system became really problematic in the Brexit years when we had minority government because the degree of control that the government has over the House of Commons agenda, which developed gradually in the late 19th century into the early 20th century, was predicated on this idea that was the norm that it would be a majority government. So it would be a majority single party government. So of course if they came to the House every week and said, will you pass this, then they'd pass it.

But actually it turns out that we've given that power by entrenching it in Standing Orders. We've given that power to a minority government. And that seems much less appropriate that the government can just push on and say what the agenda is day to day and equally what the agenda [00:59:00] isn't.

And there were majorities against Theresa May's minority government, which had to do all that business that you remember of the seizing of the agenda.

People saying there were all sorts of procedural shenanigans going on. But what they were doing was fighting to get control of the agenda of their own institution, of a government, which did not have a majority, and I think rightfully shouldn't have been controlling everything. So I think that needs thinking about again as well.

Ruth Fox: And didn't that whole question of the business committee and a voteable motion, didn't that run into difficulties in the question of, what would you do then with backbench business? Because the Backbench Business Committee, if you were making government business subject to a vote, wouldn't you make backbench business subject to a vote?

And the concern was that the government of the day on those issues might therefore use that vote to stymie backbench initiatives, essentially.

Meg Russell: Yeah. Clearly some of the fine detail on these things does need working out. But there, I think, if I remember right, there was a [01:00:00] mechanism in the Wright Committee report to prevent that. In the Backbench Business Committee, obviously itself is a cross party body, which has deliberated, which has gone through a fairly democratic process of people putting ideas to it and it itself is elected. So I think you could ringfence the backbench time and say that's the process for deciding that part. But one of the problems, another problem that we have with government control of the agenda is that the government decides when backbench business days happen, it decides when Opposition Days happen, there's no certainty to any of these things. It can keep things off the agenda. There was a period in that Brexit time when the government didn't allow an Opposition Day for five months.

You also have the problem that the way that Standing Orders are written. And of course it's the government that decides when to dissolve Parliament. It's the government that decides when to prorogue Parliament and therefore how long parliamentary sessions are, which I also think is problematic.

But we've had a lot of [01:01:00] long sessions recently, and the way that Standing Order is written is that there's a fixed number per session of opposition days, backbench days, and private members bill days. But we've had a lot of sessions that have run to two years now and there's no guarantee you're relying on the goodwill of the government to give parliamentarians that time. That just seems completely inappropriate. You depending on there being a kind of benevolent government.

Mark D'Arcy: The good chaps theory can run out here.

Meg Russell: And even with the governments we've had to date, it hasn't always worked. They haven't always been as benevolent as we might have liked. Any sort of chaotic situation in the future could see parliamentarians shut out. So I just think all of this stuff needs looking at and dealing with and ahead of the next election.

Ruth Fox: Playing devil's advocate, the current system has benefited the two main parties. That's why it's so difficult to reform the system. The whole point about this discussion is we don't know what the outcome of the next election is gonna be and there's such a high degree of uncertainty. But if you are the two [01:02:00] insurgent parties on left and right, Green Party and Reform, now who knows, three years is a long time, a lot can happen in the interim and they might not get themselves in a position where they could be a majority government or perhaps more likely a part of a minority government.

But if you were looking at this having suffered on the backbenchers from this system for quite a few years, wouldn't this look a bit like the two main parties trying to then fix the system for the future to help them going forward? And they, as the insurgent parties that might get into office and enjoy some of the procedural spoils that the two main parties have enjoyed in the past, they're gonna be in a less beneficial position.

Meg Russell: So they are the people who are, what you're saying I think is that they are in the situation that oppositions have often been, if you are Nigel Farage, you're saying wanting to get hold of the power that the other people have enjoyed. and using it to the maximum.

Mark D'Arcy: If you are Nigel Farage, you are saying, we are gonna be the [01:03:00] next government. They're trying to make sure we can't do anything.

Meg Russell: Somebody did raise this in a question at my lecture as to whether this looked like it was being unfair to a particular party. And in my own defence I was particularly talking about appointments to the Lords and the crazy level of discretion that the Prime Minister has in deciding how many should be appointed and the ability they have to appoint very much to the advantage of their own side.

I've been complaining about this for nearly 25 years. I was complaining about Tony Blair having this power. I was then complaining about David Cameron having this power. I will complain about anybody having this power. I think it's inappropriate. It might be that there's a degree of opportunism that suddenly the parties that have been thinking that these kind of things aren't a great idea.

Suddenly think they are a great idea. But actually I'm prepared to celebrate that because I think there are principles here, there are principled cases for this kind of, what I'm calling fairness. And I will welcome any government or any set of cross party agreements that some of [01:04:00] this stuff should happen 'cause it's long overdue.

And people like me and you, Ruth, and the Institute for Government and others have been calling for changes along these lines to the standards system, to Parliament, for many years.

Mark D'Arcy: But, if you are Prime Minister Farage or Prime Minister Polanski, and you don't have much strength in the House of Lords, one of your first acts just to get your stuff through the legislature is gonna have to be to appoint like a couple of hundred Green peers or a couple of hundred Reform peers just to beef up your numbers in the House of Lords.

And if you have the parties in the previous Parliament foreclosing that option, that looks very much like a direct hostile move against you.

Meg Russell: When you say you are gonna have to, I would challenge that. I think that's very imbued with the assumptions of our system. The idea that you can pack the Lords, it was inappropriate when people talk about these in the 19th century, arguably it's certainly inappropriate for people to be talking about doing it now. The House of Lords is primarily a delaying chamber, the House of Commons can get its way on stuff if it comes to the [01:05:00] crunch and the House of Lords is blocking things, it deliberates, it considers, it proposes amendments.

And if the House of Commons doesn't like them, the House of Commons can spit them back. And if the House of Lords insists on its amendments, then if necessary, you can bring things in via the Parliament Act. In all of the proposals for changing the appointment system to the Lords to make it fairer have said that incoming groups of peers ought to be proportional roughly to how people have voted in general elections.

But that means, if you're appointing 10, 15, 20 peers a year, then you are bringing in each new set proportional to the last election. But the people who've been there before who may have served for, 10 or 20 years previously, they are leaving gradually. So the makeup of the place changes only gradually, which I find perfectly appropriate for a chamber, which is not the primary decision making chamber.

Mark D'Arcy: I just wonder if either of Reform or the Greens would feel very comfortable in government with a completely hostile House of Lords [01:06:00] dominated by their political opponents throwing out their legislation, forcing them to Parliament Act every other bill.

Meg Russell: Okay, I think these are reasonable questions, but it's a bit hard to predict. That's the very nature of what we're talking about, these very unpredictable situations. The general proposal, which came for example, from the Lord Speakers Committee on the size of the House, is that there ought to be a cap on the number of members of the House of Lords. And that like pretty much every parliamentary chamber around the world, we should be looking at filling vacancies as they occur, rather than making a chamber bigger and bigger with uncontrolled patronage. And I think that is a very defensible position.

The Constitution Unit, we did polling about this during the hereditary peers bill and the public were very strongly, about 90% plus, in favour of the Prime Minister having limited powers to appoint to the House of Lords.

Some people have talked about the need to have provision to appoint ministers beyond that allowance on those special occasions of general elections. So there might be a detail that could be brought in there. But at the end of the [01:07:00] day, I think if you implemented a system like that, which most people seem to think is fair, I think the likeliest thing, to be honest, is that the House of Lords would continue to act with a significant level of restraint because they are always very respectful of the fact that you have an elected government and that in an elected chamber and you ought to defer to the House of Commons. So I don't think it would be all out war between the Lords and the Commons. We haven't seen that historically.

Of course it would be a new situation with new parties. So we don't entirely know. You've got the Parliament Act that the government can fall back on. And at the end of the day, if there's a government that thinks that this new situation with a size limited House of Lords and limited appointments is an unfair one, they can try and legislate to reverse it.

Everything that we do, every bit of legislation that we have in this country, can always be reversed by more legislation. But you have to make the case, if they think they can make a case for reinstituting [01:08:00] unlimited prime ministerial appointments to the Lords, good luck to them. I'm not sure that the public would think that was a good idea.

Ruth Fox: Best way to do this is through some kind of cross party body. Do you think there's genuinely the appetite for that?

Meg Russell: I don't know. I think people are maybe just beginning to focus, I mean I hope that the lecture got some people thinking, and there was some discussion about this afterwards and the example that I gave was in the run up to the 1997 election, of course they were in opposition, but Labour and the Liberal Democrats had this committee, they called it the Cook McLennan Committee, chaired by Robin Cook and Bob McLennan to think about where they could reach agreement on the principles of constitutional reform. And they were quite successful. And that went on to inform the incoming Labour government.

Of course this is a different situation. It would need to be a bit quicker than that. And we're talking about things to inform the government that is there now and lots of these things we've been talking about for years. I made the point that the Constitution Unit and Institute for Government made a set of [01:09:00] proposals on constitutional standards and strengthening regulators and so on in advance of the 2024 election. So we're not actually asking for new things. We're just asking for people to seize the moment to introduce some of the things, which frankly, there have been some disappointments from this Labour government in not going further to make some of these changes that people have been calling for years.

And the Labour manifesto did say that the House of Lords had become too big. So deliver on that implied promise. That's all we're saying.

Mark D'Arcy: It's been one of the hallmarks of your career as the director of the Constitution Unit that you've been a prophet crying in the wilderness for a lot of these issues.

But I'm interested in how you think

Meg Russell: We win some occasionally.

Mark D'Arcy: You do win some, and maybe there are some more that you could win soon. But I'm just interested in how this might occur.

Can you imagine, for example, a cross party alliance of backbench peers perhaps rooted in things like the Lords Constitution Committee, amending, passing bills with suitable [01:10:00] changes and throwing them back to the Commons to see whether the Commons would take on board, for example, some entrenching the House of Lords Appointments Commission or requiring the Prime Minister to have an ethics advisor or some other bolstering of the constitutional safeguards.

Meg Russell: That's interesting and possibly, and possibly there are things in the King's speech or things not in the King's Speech, which will follow, which could be used as vehicles for some of these things. But ahead of that, maybe there are gonna be some leadership candidates looking for a manifesto to implement.

There are plenty of ideas on the table and maybe there will be some divergence from what's in the King's Speech and some additional things that weren't in the King's Speech if there's a change of leadership. So uncertainty doesn't start at the next general election. I think uncertainty is with us now and there may be political opportunities to get people talking about things that have not been talked about enough for the last couple of years.

Mark D'Arcy: And the government's also talking about bringing forward proposals to strengthen the accountability and independence of the civil service. We don't [01:11:00] quite know what form it's going to take yet. There's a bill about the deprivation of peerages. So there's a whole series of pieces of legislation that might in some way be amended if people were minded to try and add in extra constitutional safeguard to existing legislation.

Meg Russell: And you mentioned the Lords. Why not The Commons? Be more ambitious. Why not The Commons? They are quite a lot of frustrated Labour backbenchers who might want to make faster progress on things. And I would encourage them to think about making faster progress on improving and strengthening and future proofing, as I put it, our constitution.

Ruth Fox: And they've got two committees for this purpose. The Modernisation Committee and the Procedure Committee. Modernisation is moving quite slowly.

Meg Russell: On the level of procedure, yes, very much. But there's also PACAC, the Political and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which thinks more in the round.

So it would be thinking about things like the makeup of the House of Lords, the strengthening of the standards system, and so on. And I think there is appetite for this stuff. I would very much like the Procedure Committee to think about future proofing the Standing Orders. And I think there may be some [01:12:00] interest in that.

We'll have to see what they come up with in this new session. Because we haven't heard yet what their agenda's gonna be.

Ruth Fox: And I first wrote about reviewing the Standing Orders in 2019 and encouraged the Speaker, the new Speaker of the House of Commons to push for that. So we've also been calling for quite some time on a principled position.

Mark D'Arcy: You heard it here first. Watch the space.

Ruth Fox: Let's see what happens, Mark. I think that's probably all we've got time for, today. Meg, thank you very much for joining us.

Meg Russell: Thank you for having me.

Ruth Fox: So 10 years at the Constitution unit, tremendous effort. And you're heading off for a bit of a break.

Meg Russell: A bit of a break.

Ruth Fox: You're not going away, basically, entirely.

Meg Russell: Well, as I put it after the lecture in answer to that question. I'm looking for a break from administration, organising, shepherding, but I've got some things I want to write on Parliament, so that's what I'm gonna be thinking about over the summer, but also hoping to work a bit less, take a bit of refreshment. I'm going part-time actually in the autumn, so I hope that come the autumn. I [01:13:00] might get a bit of time to refresh and then come back renewed at the beginning of 2027.

Mark D'Arcy: So like the Terminator, you'll be back

Ruth Fox: And listeners we will be back next week as well. So see you then. Bye.

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