• Dynamic alignment with EU rules - Our evidence to the House of Lords European Affairs Committee, Hansard Society

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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 this week:

Ruth Fox: 10 years on from Brexit, why the vote to leave provoked a full-on democratic crisis in Britain.

Mark D’Arcy: And all the same forces now at play in current rows about immigration? We talk to historian Dr Robert Saunders.

Ruth Fox: Plus it looked like a quiet week in politics, but then the Defence Secretary resigned. We look at what that means for Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Mark D’Arcy: But first, the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum later this month [00:01:00] is bound to provoke an avalanche of reappraisals, but we thought we’d get in first. Historian Dr Robert Saunders, of Queen Mary University of London and friend of the pod, has written an article for the English Historical Review that will be out shortly. It argues that what followed the referendum was far more than the normal political upheaval. We asked him into the studio to tell us more.

So, Robert, welcome to the pod again. Now, in your piece, you describe Brexit as not just a crisis within British democracy, but a crisis of British democracy, a crisis of the way the system works, of the assumptions behind the system. What are you getting at there?

Robert Saunders: So democracy is actually quite an explosive idea. Democracy teaches a basic principle that the people should govern, but it doesn’t tell us who the people are or how they should govern, or what kind of areas should be subject to democratic authority. So democracy has within it a tendency to splinter into different sects and denominations. We have parliamentary democracy, [00:02:00] presidential democracy, direct democracy, liberal democracy, industrial democracy, social democracy, Christian democracy, the democracy of the market, and unlike other kind of belief systems, what you can get is a kind of holy war in which different versions of democracy are wrestling against each other. Everyone is worshipping the same democratic gods, but they all see everybody else as some kind of heretic. And Brexit I think is quite an interesting example of that, in that it was very widely believed during the Brexit period by both leavers and remainers alike, that democracy was under attack, whether from remainer elites who were trying to overturn the will of the people, or from populist demagogues who were kind of driving a chainsaw through Britain’s democratic norms and institutions. And so you get judges denounced as enemies of the people. You have MPs castigated as saboteurs who must be crushed. We culminate in the suspension of Parliament. There’s a very palpable sense among MPs that their [00:03:00] personal safety is at threat here. So what people are arguing about in the Brexit crisis isn’t just, should we be in the common market or should we be in the customs union. What they’re arguing about is actually who has the right to take democratic decisions and who can speak for the people. And I think that’s partly what makes it such an explosive political moment.

Mark D’Arcy: I remember the day after the Brexit result, dawn, when Nigel Farage appeared on the news bulletin saying this was a victory for the real people of Britain. And that I think almost crystallises what you’re trying to say here, that there’s this whole idea that Parliament and government for years had been going against the settled will of the British people not to go further into Europe, and just trying to slide it past the voters without ever really creating a moment when they could decide for themselves.

Robert Saunders: Right. I think there’s a really interesting paradox here, which is that a lot of the case for leaving the European Union was couched in terms of restoring parliamentary democracy and restoring parliamentary sovereignty. And yet in many ways the case for having a [00:04:00] referendum in the first place was that Parliament could not be trusted with this decision, that Parliament had over decades, as you say, been defying the will of the people by breaking promises on Europe saying it would have referendums and then not holding them, and that what you needed was an instrument that would take this power out of the hands of Parliament and give it directly to the people. So the referendum was kind of a symptom of a loss of faith in parliamentary government, but it then, of course, amplified and magnified that because the result was that 52% of those voting did indeed back Leave, whereas three quarters of Members of Parliament had backed Remain. So it really exposed what appeared to be a gulf between Britain’s elected representatives and the people they were supposedly representing.

Ruth Fox: And a big problem here is actually the referendum process itself. We are going to an extensive discussion about how we ended up with a referendum involving private members; bills, backbench business committee, we won’t rehearse that, but the way in which the referendum was handled, the fact that it was a sort of binary [00:05:00] choice, do you want to stay in the EU or not, but what not staying in the EU would mean was not explored. That’s the big problem that Parliament then had to essentially try and resolve.

Robert Saunders: Exactly. It’s a very odd referendum structurally, in that referendums in parliamentary systems are usually what are called confirmatory referendums. So Parliament has decided to do something and then the referendum decides whether that goes ahead or not. So Scottish devolution, for example, you legislate to create a Scottish Parliament and then the public either veto it or allow it to go forward. This was what we might call an abdicatory referendum. Parliament never actually debated the question on which the referendum was fought. It never debated whether Britain should or should not leave the EU. It simply passed that question over, and that creates a really difficult scenario in which there was a mandate for leaving, but there was no mandate on any of the questions that would then follow from that. What should the future relationship look like? Do we want to stay in the [00:06:00] customs union or the single market? How is the border in Northern Ireland going to work? Those questions still had to be answered, but it wasn’t clear who actually had the authority to answer them. Normally the answer would be Parliament, but most MPs had just lost the referendum. Classically, the right of an MP to make decisions comes from the fact that they have won an election in their constituency. Something like two thirds of MPs had in fact lost the referendum in their own constituency. So there was no agreement on what Brexit should look like, and actually no agreement on whether it was the right of Parliament or the executive or the courts or a second referendum or some other mechanism to make those decisions.

Mark D’Arcy: You could imagine a kind of ideal decision-making process where maybe there was an initial referendum on the principle of should we leave the EU, to be followed by a confirmatory referendum on the terms that the UK had then negotiated, something like that. So a two-stage process, so the public could at least theoretically turn around and say, oh, on these terms, I think it’s better to [00:07:00] stay, if they wanted to. You’d then have a much clearer system. But as you say, in this you needed someone to come in and fill the gap and say what Brexit meant. Theresa May, who became Prime Minister after David Cameron very rapidly resigned, famously remarked that Brexit meant Brexit, but no one knew what that meant. So there we were again.

Robert Saunders: Yes, Dominic Cummings, actually before the referendum, had suggested precisely that model, that you might have a second referendum on the terms. And of course the people we’re talking about here are not political philosophers, they are people who are engaging in political warfare. So that was partly done for a strategic reason, so that you could park the issue of what a future Brexit would look like during the course of the campaign. But then that question re-erupts afterwards. And a problem here was that the referendum had given a mandate for leaving, but it hadn’t given a mandate for any version of leaving. And every version of leaving is less popular than leaving in the abstract. Whether you are leaving with Theresa May’s deal or Boris Johnson’s deal or no deal, [00:08:00] or some other kind of arrangement, that is always going to fracture the Leave coalition. So you have a mandate to leave, but not for any of the doors through which you might actually depart.

Mark D’Arcy: And that’s where it gets really complicated, isn’t it? And all the fractiousness of the politics that followed flows from the point that there wasn’t a clear idea of where we went after we crossed the threshold out of the EU. And so you had Theresa May trying to set up her deal. And you got to the bizarre position where MPs who had voted for every Brexit deal Theresa May put on the table were being denounced as people who were blocking Brexit because it wasn’t enough of a Brexit for her critics or those who wanted to ride into Downing Street on the back of discontent with her deal.

Robert Saunders: Yes. I mean, a remarkable thing is that of the, I think, 21 Conservative MPs who were expelled from the party by Boris Johnson and who became a sort of traitor’s gallery of people who tried to block Brexit, I think 17 of them had voted on every occasion for every deal that had ever been put before Parliament.

Mark D’Arcy: The Rory [00:09:00] Stewarts, the Dominic Grieves, people like that.

Robert Saunders: Exactly. That they had voted for Theresa May’s deal three times. They had voted for Boris Johnson’s deal. The only thing they objected to was leaving without a deal. But I think that speaks to what was genuinely a difficult problem here, that the question wasn’t: are you willing to vote for Brexit? In some form it’s: are you willing to enact what we believe to be the will of the people as expressed in the referendum? So you had this almost kind of godly instruction, which the humans down on earth were trying to translate into reality. They were trying to kind of express the will of God. So I talk in the article about this idea of prophetic democracy, the idea that just as in the Old Testament you have prophets coming out of the wilderness, centre in the courts of kings and princes and saying, thus says the Lord. We also had for three years after 2016 a whole series of politicians standing up and saying, thus says the people, that I know what the people want and the people do not want this. And therefore, actually it is possible logically to argue that somebody [00:10:00] who votes for Theresa May’s deal is voting to frustrate the referendum outcome because people didn’t vote for what she was offering.

Ruth Fox: I think it’s fair to say in that period, Parliament didn’t cover itself in glory. You know, I remember from the despatch box, I think it was the then Attorney General, we had the Prime Minister attacking that Parliament for blocking the will of the people, as they would see it. It got itself into an awful lot of procedural problems and difficulties. So you ended up with the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the House of Commons at loggerheads over choices he made. How do you reflect on it now? Because Mark and I, we are scarred. Our memories are scarred by covering these events.

Mark D’Arcy: Post-traumatic.

Ruth Fox: Yes, live on BBC Parliament, that’s where this podcast started, Mark, really, wasn’t it? On BBC Parliament.

Mark D’Arcy: That was the genesis.

Ruth Fox: The Brexit years commentating on the big votes and invariably Theresa May losing them. So how do you reflect on how Parliament performed?

Robert Saunders: I think it would be hard to reach any conclusion other than the fact that Parliament fails to handle this question. And I [00:11:00] think remainers and leavers would both think that. I don’t think there’s anybody who feels that they got what they wanted out of that process. And so actually, whether we’re remainers or leavers or somewhere in the middle, we should want to think about why that was the case. Why did our democratic institutions actually come so close to breakdown over this major question? How can we try and make sure this doesn’t actually happen again?

I think it’s worth saying perhaps first of all, that Parliament, of course, is not an agency. Parliament doesn’t have a mind. Parliament is an arena in which people argue and fight. So part of the problem here was that it was always easier for party leaders to blame Parliament for the failure to get Brexit through than to say, my own backbenchers are rebelling, or my own party leadership is doing the wrong thing. So Parliament became to some extent a useful whipping boy.

But I think we also should recognise that Parliament was trying to do something fantastically difficult, and I think probably unprecedented, which is that it was trying to carry through a planetary-sized reform. [00:12:00] Brexit was possibly the biggest activity that the British state has undertaken in peacetime, and it was trying to do that in a hung parliament in which no party actually has an effective majority, and that almost never happens. Normally, governments either have substantial majorities, which mean that they can dominate Parliament, or they recognise that they don’t have a majority, and so they trim their ambitions and they don’t try to carry through very contentious policies. That simply wasn’t an option in this situation. So we had a terrible mismatch between the instruction of the referendum and the delivery system of Parliament. We might have resolved that by working across party, but Britain doesn’t have much of a tradition of working across party. And in Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, we had two party leaders who were particularly tribal and particularly averse to working across party lines.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose the other factor here is that the party lines themselves were pretty badly scrambled. You had the Brexit vote cutting across party lines, so you had staunch Remainers in heavily Leave constituencies wondering [00:13:00] what on earth to do. You had people who were very Remain in Remain constituencies finding they were defying their party line if they were Conservatives. You had all sorts of complications like that, which just made the whipping aspect of this trying to get a government majority together an absolute nightmare. And in retrospect, it’s almost surprising to me that party royalties held as much as they did under the circumstances.

Robert Saunders: I think that’s right. And of course there were very few people in Parliament actually after 2016 whose primary interest was Brexit or the European Union. This is a Parliament that is full of people who have mostly come into Parliament to do and to talk about other things, and they still care about those things. So Brexit is one element of a much larger kind of political kaleidoscope. You have for much of this period a civil war going on inside the Labour Party over the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. His own backbenchers had tried to replace him and he had then been reinserted by the party membership. So there’s a big battle over the future of the Labour Party going on. There’s also, from very early on, a succession [00:14:00] struggle going on in the Conservative Party. It’s pretty obvious from the 2017 election onwards that Theresa May is not long for this political world and that somebody else is going to replace her, and this is probably going to be Boris Johnson. So MPs are having to make all sorts of different calculations. What is this going to mean for the leadership of the party? What’s this going to mean for our ability to reunite the party after Brexit has done? What’s it going to mean for our ability not just to win an election, but to win the voters that we feel we ought to be winning? Because parties usually have a sense of who their proper voters are. So it matters to the Labour Party that they’re still winning their traditional industrial heartlands in the north. It matters to some Conservative MPs that they’re still winning in Middle England. So all of this is swirling around and complicating the situation.

Mark D’Arcy: And it’s particularly striking actually as of the last election, the extent to which the Conservatives lost a large chunk of Middle England, seats in Sussex, seats in Surrey, seats in Hampshire, going to other parties in a way that was quite unimaginable really not all that long ago. Blue-chip seats. It’s quite clear that the [00:15:00] Conservatives have lost a large chunk of their base, at least partly over Brexit.

Robert Saunders: Yes. I think another thing that makes Brexit very difficult is that to some extent it’s simply a kind of an accelerant of things that are already happening inside British politics, inside the party system. So we can look at voting patterns over a long period of time and see that attachment to the big two parties had been declining. I think in 1951 something like 97% of voters who go to the polls vote either Labour or Conservative. By 2010, that’s down to about 60%. If you include non-electors, actually the share of the total electorate that goes out and votes Labour or Conservative halves over that period. So we’ve got weakening party loyalties, and then Brexit drops a bomb on that. To an extent, it gives voters permission to break and to change their party alliances, and we’re living in that much more fractured moment now. But there is an attempt in 2016-17 to kind of build new party bases. The Conservative party, to some extent, makes a conscious decision it’s going to [00:16:00] rebuild its base on the Leave votes. The Labour Party takes longer to decide that it’s going to rebuild itself on the Remain vote, but it’s kind of moving in that direction. So the parties are trying to carry this through, are kind of going round and round in the tumble dryer at the time.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And you end up with Conservative MPs in places like Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old seat, after the 2019 election. So the Conservative MPs in some very improbable places. Was this an anomaly? Was this something that would kind of unravel very rapidly or was this the new dispensation of politics?

Robert Saunders: Yes. One of the oddities about the 2017 election is in lots of ways it looked like an election that had rebuilt the two party system. Suddenly actually by and large the Leave vote coalesced around the Conservatives. The Remain vote was a little bit more splintered, but broadly around the Labour Party. And the paradox of that election actually is that it was nominally a Brexit election that was barely about Brexit at all. Because actually neither party disagreed on the principle. They both went to the poll saying, we will do Brexit. Neither of them said how they would do it. I think [00:17:00] Labour promised a Brexit for jobs. The Conservative party was advertising a red, white and blue Brexit. And oddly, that didn’t give voters a great deal to work on, but it did look for a period as if the two party system was now back, and that Brexit, in a funny way, might actually have created a new kind of polarity in British politics.

Ruth Fox: But that hasn’t really happened.

Robert Saunders: No.

Ruth Fox: The Red Wall collapsed pretty soon. You say in the article, Brexit was a symptom, not just a cause of Britain’s democratic discontent. One side of the debate wanting a buccaneering free trade nation at a time when, not long after, that concept, with the advent of the Trump administration, falls apart, really.

Robert Saunders: Yes. So I suppose there’s sort of two parts to that. I mean, firstly about the sense that this is a symptom rather than a cause. Almost any indicator that we look at suggests a declining faith in Parliament in the 20 years before the referendum, whether that’s turnout or just polls of trust in Parliament, to the list of problems that you laid out. We [00:18:00] could add things like the expenses scandal, which clearly does huge harm to the reputation of MPs. And the 2010 Conservative manifesto is a very serious document, which is called an invitation to join the government of Britain. And actually the whole theme of that manifesto is about the need for democratic renewal. But what’s really striking about it is that almost everything it proposes involves taking powers away from Parliament and giving them to someone else. Often through kind of locally elected bodies like elected police commissioners. It promises to cut the number of Members of Parliament. It promises to cut the cost of Parliament. So actually there’s already a sense here that the way in which you renew democracy is that you push Parliament out of the way. One of the first things that government then does in office is to pass a referendum lock, which is to legislate to say that Parliament cannot pass new powers to the European Union without the consent of the people. And it’s such a telling moment, I think, because conventionally the people give their consent to legislation through Parliament. Now [00:19:00] Parliament is having to ask the public in a referendum whether it’s allowed to do this. So we’ve already got a kind of intellectual world in which Parliament has itself kind of accepted that it does not have legitimacy on decisions relating to Europe. And then on the second part about buccaneering, I think that it is really important that we’re all, to some extent, formed politically in the time in which we first kind of emerge and become politically conscious, and a lot of leading Eurosceptics were very forged in the 1990s. That’s the kind of political world that shapes a lot of the thinking of the key players in the story. And the 90s is the decade in which it looks like geopolitics has been suspended.

Mark D’Arcy: The rules-based international order.

Robert Saunders: Exactly. That we’ve got a kind of free trading system, a Washington consensus that’s underpinned by the United States in which actually tariffs are a thing of the past, trade blocs are a thing of the past, geography has to some extent been abolished, and that you just need kind of nimble actors that can operate in this new kind of world. Now, the world in which we live today [00:20:00] looks radically, fundamentally different to that. We have a President in the United States whose strongest political conviction is his faith in tariffs. We’ve had tariff wars between China and the United States. In lots of ways it looks again a little bit more like the world in the 1970s. Brexit, in retrospect it turns out, happens on the kind of hinge between those two worlds in which it’s still plausible to make an argument about a buccaneering small island but in which actually the geopolitics were about to become very unreceptive to that.

Mark D’Arcy: And so where does that leave us? Because we’ve now got a situation where Parliament isn’t perceived as a legitimate actor and we’ve still got unresolved – I don’t think you call them details – unresolved aspects of Brexit that have to be cleared up. In the relationship with the European Union, we’ve got an EU reset programme coming down the tracks from this government at some point theoretically. So we are kind of still in limbo trying to deal with the consequences of a decision we took without really taking it in [00:21:00] 2016.

Robert Saunders: Yes, Brexit was always for good or ill going to be a long-term process. The cliche was always, it was a process, not an event. And that was absolutely right. And that’s not about Remainers frustrating things in some ways. One of the strongest arguments for doing Brexit actually was the extent to which membership of the European Union had extended itself into almost every area of national and public life. And that this was going to affect not just the terms of trade, but things like airline safety, international security, how you police your borders. That was always going to continue for a very long time. I think it’s interesting that whenever the debate about rejoining comes up, there’s a kind of allergic reaction, I think, among Members of Parliament and people who are active in those debates about the idea that we might do this again.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I mean, it does seem to be the subject that dare not speak its name now. I think the entire political class just winces at the thought of even going there again.

Robert Saunders: Absolutely. And I think in lots of ways, for good reasons, it was personally deeply unpleasant for almost everybody involved. [00:22:00] And I’m always conscious as a historian, there’s a danger that we can kind of suck the emotion out of events. That you go back to the text, you construct the arguments, you put everything in order, and what you lose actually is that sense of utter confusion and utter misery that was gripping a lot of MPs, particularly in the summer of 2019. And whether you are a Leaver or a Remainer, it was a really dark period for our political institutions. It was a period when it did seem like Parliament might actually collapse. So I don’t think it’s surprising that Members of Parliament, ministers, people who were part of that debate are not keen to reopen that particular box.

Ruth Fox: Well, on that note, Mark, I think we should take a short break and come back and resume in a few minutes. But listeners, while you have that break, remember to rate and review the podcast. It really helps us to grow our audience and ensure that more people can hear from Robert and Mark and myself. So hit follow on your podcast app and rate and review it. Thank you.

Mark D’Arcy: And we’re back. And Robert, the best part of 10 years has now [00:23:00] elapsed since the referendum vote. And maybe memories of all the drama or the soap opera...

Ruth Fox: WestEnders, Mark.

Mark D’Arcy: ...whatever you want to call it, have perhaps now begun to fade. Maybe it’s just that the pot isn’t simmering as hard. So where’s the reputation of Parliament now? Has Parliament indeed improved itself on the back of its experiences during the Brexit wars?

Robert Saunders: I think if one of the hopes of Brexit was that it would restore trust in parliamentary democracy, I think it would be very difficult to say that that’s been a success. Levels of faith in politics remain extraordinarily low. Hostility to and contempt for professional politicians I think is dangerously high. It’s not clear that scrutiny of legislation has improved or that Parliament has tackled some of the kind of technical challenges that emerged during Brexit. Two straws in the winds that might be worth thinking about here. One is that unquestionably the main opposition party in British politics in the sense that the party that everybody talks about all the time outside the government and expects to be the main challenger at [00:24:00] the next general election, Reform UK, has almost no parliamentary representation. It is for the first time an extra-parliamentary party, five MPs at the moment. And to some extent, Farage’s parties have always seen democracy as something that happens outside Parliament because the electoral system has done a very good job of locking them out. So a big part of our national politics now happens outside Parliament. Secondly, we might later this year be looking at an election for a new Prime Minister and that election too, if Keir Starmer chooses to contest it, will happen outside Parliament. Keir Starmer would automatically be on the ballot for a Labour leadership contest. And that means for the first time ever, Labour Party members would be deciding whether to remove or reinstate a Prime Minister. And I think that’s again another quite interesting straw actually, that shows us how the place of Parliament and British politics is declining.

Ruth Fox: And you think the very principle of members of a political party in effect being able to choose the leader and therefore the [00:25:00] Prime Minister is problematic. But a scenario in which the incumbent Prime Minister decides he’s going to run in a contest creates all sorts of potential difficulties. Is it that actually the principle of party members deciding is something that you’re concerned about?

Robert Saunders: It is. I mean, I’ve been making this argument for a long time. I think with all sorts of good intentions we’ve accidentally done something that is quite anti-democratic, in that we have given the choice over who becomes Prime Minister to a group of people who nobody has elected and nobody can hold to account. I’m not one of those people who says that party members are mad or bad or anything like that. I think party members by and large are public-spirited people who give up their money and their time to try to make politics better. But nobody has elected them to decide who the Prime Minister should be. We don’t let them vote on laws. We don’t let them vote on taxes. It seems very odd to me that we do let them vote on who the leadership in a parliamentary democracy should be. But I think there is a special problem coming down the line here in that, under Labour’s rules, it would be entirely possible for a Prime Minister who has [00:26:00] lost the confidence of Parliament, who in a sense cannot govern any more, to be restored to that position by the Labour Party membership. Or indeed a Prime Minister who clearly still maintains the confidence of Parliament but faces a challenger who can muster 81 MPs, that person could then be removed from the leadership by people outside Parliament. And I think that is a big problem.

Mark D’Arcy: It takes us into very interesting territory indeed. All sorts of issues there. And maybe we’ll return to it a bit later on in the pod. But at the same time, we’ve also got an evolving relationship with the EU going on where the government is trying to reset the relationships that were one of the big issues in the Brexit vote in the first place. And that’s all rather taking place below the radar.

Ruth Fox: Well, not if you were listening to the House of Lords European Relations Committee this week, Mark.

Mark D’Arcy: As all of us do. As all of us do.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So that’s where I and my colleague, researcher Matthew England, regular appearance on this podcast, Matthew and I were giving evidence on the reset or the implications of the reset, which is dynamic alignment with EU rules in [00:27:00] certain areas.

Mark D’Arcy: Which we were talking about in a recent pod.

Ruth Fox: Yes, with Professor Catherine Barnard from Cambridge University. And that is one of my worries, and it came through quite strongly in the evidence session. Interestingly, in that session, we had the former head of the referendum campaign Matthew Elliott, Lord Elliott, and then Tim Barrow, Lord Barrow, who was one of our EU negotiators. So it was a very interesting committee to appear before, but below the radar, the government refuses, in its words, to give a running commentary on its negotiations. So we were expecting a European partnership bill in the King’s Speech to be laid before Parliament fairly soon after. That hasn’t happened. We assume possibly further delays because of the situation the government finds itself in now politically. But as and when a deal emerges how Parliament is going to scrutinise it and hold the government to account is going to be incredibly difficult because, despite the last 10 years and the experience, there hasn’t really been any significant reform of how Parliament scrutinises these matters. Whether it’s treaties, whether it’s legislation, [00:28:00] statutory instruments. And it’s incredibly frustrating. And I think MPs are just missing a trick.

Robert Saunders: Yes, I think we have the same broad culture in place that we had during the Brexit years, which is the executive by and large would prefer that Parliament wasn’t involved. The executive doesn’t really like MPs getting involved in policy-making. It feels that’s rather above their station. It’s much easier if you can keep these things contained inside Number 10. And that’s clearly still the mindset that we have now. But I think there’s maybe also a kind of wider institutional problem, which is one of the stronger arguments I think for leaving the EU, was that it was very difficult to have any kind of meaningful parliamentary scrutiny of European law. You were taking quite large sections of particularly economic policy-making and you were really lifting them beyond the scrutiny of Parliament. What we’re discovering now though, actually, is it’s not very clear that you get better scrutiny of those things outside the EU. And one of the absences in 2016 was a kind of counterargument from the Remain camp that said there is actually a democratic [00:29:00] case for staying in the European Community as well as a democratic case for leaving. And that democratic case is that in a complicated globalised world in which rules are broadly set across national boundaries, it is important to be inside the clubs that are making the rules. And your Parliament will not have full control over those things, but you will be in the room when they are being drawn up. You will in a sense be pooling your sovereignty with other countries, and you’ll take part in democratic decision-making in that way. That argument was actually made in the 1975 referendum. It was entirely absent in the 2016 campaign. And to some extent, we are experiencing now that problem of you may have got your kind of formal scrutiny powers back, but first, if your own executive don’t like it, they’re not going to matter very much, and secondly, if you’re not in the room where the rules are being made, you are just going to have to accept or reject them.

Mark D’Arcy: So if we get to the position where the government is once again waving-through EU legislation into British law without much scrutiny, if any at all, are we then [00:30:00] rubbing new salt into old wounds and reviving all the things that were such an issue during the Brexit campaign? Are we getting back to bold bad habits?

Robert Saunders: I think we’re certainly reopening an old problem. Whether it has the same kind of political power right now I’m a little bit sceptical of because of course most voters, most of us, don’t actually know what’s in these regulations. It’s not the stuff of everyday politics. One of the things that made the democratic issue so explosive in 2016 was that it had an obvious hook, that it became about immigration. And you know, there’s lots of writing that argues about was the main cause of the Leave vote sovereignty or was it immigration? And I’ve always thought that’s really a kind of false dichotomy because essentially the two became the same thing.

Mark D’Arcy: Sovereignty over immigration.

Robert Saunders: Exactly. The slogan take back control was so brilliant because it made a democratic argument, but it attached it to material things. Take back control of your borders, take back control of your laws, take back control of your money. And so immigration gave [00:31:00] arguments about sovereignty a really powerful hook, which at the moment it doesn’t have, I don’t think you’re going to get the same kind of explosive situation over, I don’t know, customs forms or something of that kind. But that isn’t to say that there won’t at some point become a major question, which might again be about the border with Northern Ireland or something of that kind, that does actually suddenly reanimate interest in this issue and we won’t have got any further with resolving it.

Mark D’Arcy: And that brings us very neatly to the question that I had to sort of follow up on the Brexit arguments, which is are all the same forces at play over immigration? We’ve had the dreadful Henry Nowak case. We’ve had the horrible events in Northern Ireland. Are we now seeing those same forces, distrust of Parliament, a feeling that the elite’s slipping a policy, that the majority wouldn’t accept if they were asked, past people ever so quietly? Are those things going on on immigration now rather than on Brexit?

Robert Saunders: I think there is one very important difference, which is that after 2016 you can actually [00:32:00] point to the referendum as evidence that Parliament is out of sync with the people. You can say we have a Parliament full of people who voted to Remain and an instruction from the people to Leave. And that could be held over Parliament all the way through that period. And we haven’t got a moment like that. There isn’t a kind of an alternative decision-making mechanism that stands outside Parliament.

Mark D’Arcy: You can imagine people calling for a referendum to stop mass immigration, on something as simple as that.

Robert Saunders: Yes. And if you did that, then you would have exactly the same dynamic again. In the absence of that, you’re clearly right that we do have the same kind of populist argument being made. I think you began this podcast by quoting Nigel Farage on the morning of the referendum result when he says this is a victory for real people. And that idea of real people has become absolutely central to our political rhetoric. And I think it is broadly accepted kind of unconsciously actually by both the main political parties, a sense that there is a real people out there and those [00:33:00] people probably are working class, they probably live in the north of England, and that those are the people who in a sense represent the real democracy as opposed to metropolitan elites. We haven’t used the word populism I think so far in this discussion, but the nature of populism is that it says that the people have a kind of single mind, a single intelligence, they all want the same thing. And you pit the people against the enemies of the people. That’s very different from a classic kind of parliamentary or pluralist model of democracy in which you say the people are a kind of glorious cacophony of different kinds of ideas and interests, who have different religious opinions, who have different economic interests, who do different jobs, live in different places, and democracy is always an argument among the people. Populism argues that democracy is about the people imposing their will on the enemies of the people or on elites, and that way of thinking clearly still structures a lot of our political arguments.

Ruth Fox: One of the other things we haven’t talked about in this debate, and I think it’s more acute now than [00:34:00] it was at the time of the referendum, but it was heavily criticised then, is the role of another elite, which is the tech elites, the implications of things like social media on our debate. And of course we’re seeing discussions about that particularly pertinent in respect of what’s happened in Southampton, what’s happened in the terrible events in Northern Ireland, and what role essentially misinformation and whipping up of opinions on the Right, particularly not solely, but particularly on the Right through channels which are almost beyond political control. And we’re having this debate that’s happening in Parliament about how far the technology and how it operates can be put under democratic control. I just wonder what your perspective on that was. Because you’ve been quite strong in recent days on social media and yourself in saying that there needs to be more leadership and more people speaking out clearly against some of this.

Robert Saunders: Yes. If you go back to the 1970s, one of the arguments for European integration at that time was that there were now these [00:35:00] powerful global forces that were, in a sense, beyond the reach of any individual nation state, and that if you wanted to reassert some kind of democratic control over those forces, then you had to do it collectively. Now, what they meant were things like big American car manufacturers who could switch production from one country to another, almost at the push of a button. Or they were already starting to talk about things like the movement of global finance. That was on a much smaller scale than later. We’re not having that same debate, I think, to anything like the same extent about the extraordinary power of the tech bros, the fact that so much of Britain’s political argument now happens on a site that is algorithmically programmed to favour certain kinds of politics. The fact that one of our political parties has received tens of millions of pounds from people who don’t live in this country, don’t pay their taxes in this country, but have certain economic power over it. So it’s interesting that we had a very powerful and effective politics during Brexit that was to some extent about [00:36:00] restoring national sovereignty and removing foreign influence over Britain, that being understood as the European Union. I think there is the scope to create a similar kind of political project that actually says, how do we challenge another form of international influence on our politics? But it’s not particularly potent at the moment.

Mark D’Arcy: So you can see the possibility there, the germ, if you like, of a political movement that wants us to declare independence from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example.

Robert Saunders: Yes. The question is, I suppose, whether you can do that on the nation state level. There’s some evidence that perhaps you can. Brazil, for example, challenged the power of X. But it’s generally been assumed, I think, that this is something you’re going to have to do on some kind of collective international level. So you have the paradox that probably you need to move closer to the European Union again, in order to tame this different kind of foreign influence.

Mark D’Arcy: They’re big enough to regulate these people, but we are not.

Robert Saunders: Right. Exactly.

Mark D’Arcy: And with that, Ruth, perhaps it’s the moment to take a break, and when we come back, we might like to talk about what’s been happening to Sir Keir Starmer, who as we’ve recorded [00:37:00] today, has been having a bit of a day.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Well, Mark, and we’re back. And I think we all thought today might be a quiet day at Westminster for this conversation reflecting on the last 10 years. But in fact, as we’re recording, John Healey has resigned as Defence Secretary. He’s called out the Prime Minister over the DIP, of which we’ve talked a number of times on this podcast, the Defence Investment Plan, and the fact that, in his words, the settlement is just not good enough and is nowhere near what’s needed for the defence of the country, for our armed forces. So he has gone. And Robert, when we last had you on this podcast, around Christmas time, the theme of our discussion was, is being Prime Minister an impossible job? And I think Keir Starmer’s got another problem on his hands.

Robert Saunders: Yes. Although, I mean, he’s lasted longer than most of his predecessors.

Ruth Fox: Recent predecessors. Yes.

Robert Saunders: Well, I think all the problems that we discussed in that episode are manifest in what’s happening at the moment, and we’ve perhaps got three problems clustered together. [00:38:00] On the one hand, politics is facing genuinely really big and difficult problems. And I think the DIP illustrates that, that there’s a widespread sense across politics that we need to spend more on our armed forces, and that the kind of long Cold War dividend has probably now been exhausted. But we’re operating at a time when there is no money, when the economy hasn’t grown for a long period of time, when the tax system looks like it’s reaching its outer limits. You set that alongside Ukraine, the crisis in Iran, all the other big questions that government’s wrestling with. This is a genuinely difficult time to govern. We’re sending into those very stormy waters an extraordinarily inexperienced crew. We talked in that previous episode about how political careers have got much shorter, about how politicians don’t acquire much experience of things like party management. They don’t sort of learn their trade through a series of small crises before coming into Number 10. Keir Starmer never held a ministerial office other than being Prime Minister. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that this crew is finding it difficult to navigate [00:39:00] these waters. And the boats they’re sailing in, in terms of the parties, are taking on water fast. So if politics is kind of a Bermuda Triangle at the moment, that sinks everybody who tries to make a journey through it, I think there are reasons for that.

Mark D’Arcy: But this is a body blow to Sir Keir Starmer. He’s already facing the expectation that if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election he’ll come straight down to Westminster and almost immediately there’ll be some kind of leadership challenge and he could well be replaced. Because his MPs are sort of smarting from the horrors of the May elections and are basically extremely worried about their survival. And now John Healey opens a new front on this issue of defence spending. And he’s a very interesting figure in a lot of ways. He’s one of the more experienced ministers in this government. He was, I think, housing minister under Gordon Brown, who was just below Cabinet level when they Labour last lost office, and was one of the people that was being lined up as a potential alternative to Sir Keir Starmer had he been consumed by earlier scandals like the beergate scandal, had he been drinking [00:40:00] beer when he shouldn’t have been during the pandemic. And he’s also seen as someone who’s very much a straight-up party loyalist, who’s party loyalism has been overridden by the desperate need to get more defence spending. So Keir Starmer has all sorts of difficulties in front of him, not least finding a viable replacement.

Robert Saunders: Yes, it is a body blow, but then we could say it’s the latest in an extraordinary series of body blows. And actually I think an interesting feature of British politics over the last, well nearly 20 years actually, has been a phenomenon that we might think of as kind of zombie premierships. There comes a point in a premiership in which a Prime Minister is essentially politically dead, but they remain in office in a sort of undead form. Because actually it’s not straightforward getting rid of a Prime Minister. We might take Gordon Brown, for example, who is sort of politically dead, from the election that wasn’t, onwards, but actually has another, what, two and a half years in power. Theresa May was politically dead as soon as the polls closed in 2017, and yet she lasts for [00:41:00] another two years. This trust obviously is the exception that proves the rule in the sense that she was kind of in and out very quickly. But Rishi Sunak, likewise, his premiership continues for quite a long period of time after it’s clear that he’s lost authority. That’s not a prediction that Keir Starmer is going to survive. But I think a curious feature of our politics has been a recurring phenomenon in which Prime Ministers experience blows that essentially shatter their authority and their capacity to govern their parties, but remain in office after that.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. I’ve been watching social media as the news of John Healey’s resignation unfolded. Lots of praise from all sorts of Conservative MPs who are absolutely delighted to see the former Defence Secretary essentially making their case that this government isn’t spending enough on the defence of the realm. There’s a recent weighing-in by Al Carns, the junior defence minister tipped as a dark horse candidate for the leadership himself because of his very glamorous background in Special Forces, who praised John Healey’s work to the skies, but then said that there are serious people doing serious things in the armed forces and they need a [00:42:00] defence ministry that continues to provide support for them, which is essentially his explanation for not resigning in John Healey’s wake, that the show has to go on and the Ministry of Defence has to maintain its support for our service personnel abroad.

Robert Saunders: Yes, you could say that there’s a sense that nothing in his ministerial career so befitted him as the manner of his leaving it. That people who resign on points of principle are always extraordinarily popular, particularly with the Opposition. They suddenly get elevated into kind of political titans.

Mark D’Arcy: John Healey’s also put out a statement that he doesn’t see himself running against Sir Keir Starmer for the leadership. And I found myself immediately thinking about that classic episode of Yes Minister, in which Jim Hacker is asked if he’s planning a tilt at the leadership and he replies, my wife and I are hoping to spend more time with the family. You are running!

Ruth Fox: But John Healey’s letter of resignation, he refers in it to the Prime Minister being unable and the Treasury being unwilling to essentially put together the funding package that’s needed [00:43:00] for the defence of the country. Now that is about as damning a statement about the government as you could make, if you think that at the very least the one thing a government must do is defence of the nation above all else, but in terms of the Labour politics of this, I mean, the first question Mark you raise, who might replace him? I mean, who’s willing to take on the role of Defence Secretary in the circumstances, particularly when we’re only a week away from the Makerfield by-election and who knows then what unfolds after that and how quickly. But the reality is that most people on the Labour back benches don’t want to make the kind of decisions that John Healey is telling them need to be made. And that’s fundamentally the political problem no matter who the leader is. The statement says essentially the settlement will be 0.08% of an increase in defence spending. I mean that really doesn’t touch the sides, does it?

Mark D’Arcy: And John Healey rather resentfully remarks in his letter that he only got the actual final DIP deal on Monday afternoon. So I think that was probably much resented that he [00:44:00] wasn’t more involved in developing it to start with. But all the same, he’s essentially asking Labour MPs to acquiesce to cuts in the welfare budget, possibly in the NHS and other things that they care a lot more about, in order to fund the defence build-up now. And that’s a pretty hard sell with a Labour Party that revolted against the idea of welfare cuts not all that long ago.

Robert Saunders: And I think that line in the resignation letter about being unable to decide is the one that’s particularly damaging because the case that Starmer’s defenders have been making, I think, for keeping him as Prime Minister is broadly, what do you think is actually going to change as a result of a new leader? Because the structural conditions all going to be the same. The economy is still going to be a disaster. We’re still going to have all of the problems in the Middle East. We’re not going to change our fiscal rules. We can’t break our manifesto commitments. So do you really want to just go through the psychodrama that the Conservatives inflicted on the country over and over again, of changing leader when there’s no obvious payout at the end of it? And the response to that has tended to be: okay, the [00:45:00] broad conditions might not change, but there are two attributes of leadership that could change. One is the capacity to communicate. One is a sense of you might have a leader who has an understanding of politics as a kind of pulpit, someone who can speak for and to the country. And that’s always been kind of the Andy Burnham and the Wes Streeting case. But secondly, that you need a Prime Minister who can make decisions. And I’m not in Number 10 so I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but a recurring criticism of Keir Starmer is that he doesn’t actually like making decisions on these big questions. So I think that line is going to be really harmful to him.

Mark D’Arcy: I’m old enough to remember a speech by Nigel Lawson. I think he was attacking John Major over the council tax or something years ago when he was still in the House of Commons. And he quoted a French politician who remarked that to govern is to choose. And he added the rather deadly rider, that to appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern. And I think that’s now the essential case against Sir Keir Starmer, that he’s basically too focussed on process and too unwilling to decide things in [00:46:00] the teeth of any institutional resistance from members of his Cabinet. I’m looking at you Rachel Reeves.

Robert Saunders: And there is obviously something institutional about the authority of a Prime Minister. It’s about how many votes can you command in the House of Commons, but there’s also something intangible, which is about a sense that you have authority and a sense that you are in fact kind of performing government. So, again, to go back to John Major, one of the most damning lines against him was the idea that he was in office but not in power, he inhabited the post but couldn’t actually any longer govern either his party or the country. And another very damning line was Tony Blair’s, who as Leader of the Opposition said to him: the difference between us is that I lead my party, he follows his. And I think John Major comments in his memoirs that that line really hit home because he sort of knew it was true.

Mark D’Arcy: And so here we have Keir Starmer now desperately wounded by this. As you say, he might cling on in a sort of zombie role, as you put it, for a while, even for years. Or we could have an almost instant leadership [00:47:00] contest the moment Andy Burnham puts his feet over the threshold of Parliament, and that’s making the assumption he actually wins this forthcoming by-election, of course.

Ruth Fox: And also, will we not perhaps have a coronation as opposed to a contest? I mean is that not a possibility after Makerfield?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, it seems to me entirely possible that basically a second front has been opened here by John Healey. Now it’s not just Andy Burnham’s critique anymore. You’ve got John Healey’s critique and they’re critiquing on two different issues. And Andy Burnham might not want to take on board John Healey’s critique, Andy Burnham might not want to commit himself to a vast extension of defence spending at the expense of social programmes.

Robert Saunders: And we talked earlier about the problem with Labour’s leadership rules, that in principle it firstly asks the Prime Minister to stop governing the country for a period of time and to go around Labour Party membership fighting a leadership contest, and secondly it creates this really difficult situation in which a group of people outside Parliament get to decide whether or not he stays in office. When your leadership rules are that bad, the temptation for parties is to [00:48:00] try to circumvent them, to try not to use your own leadership processes simply to force Keir Starmer to resign, and to engineer some kind of coronation. So I suspect if Andy Burnham does win the Makerfield by-election, we might see things like more resignations, more ways of trying to put pressure, in the same way that ultimately what brings down Boris Johnson is not the Conservative Party’s processes, it’s just a series of resignations that collapse his ability to govern.

Mark D’Arcy: So our history repeats itself once again. I suppose that leaves all sorts of questions open now. Who is going to replace John Healey, is an immediate thought. I mean, who would want to step into those shoes? Especially if they’re going to have to accept a Defence Investment Programme that isn’t what John Healey says is necessary for the defence of the realm. That’s going to be a pretty hard sell for a start, a big test for Keir Starmer if he can find someone to step into the shoes.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and I think the question of whether the Defence Investment Plan will now be published in these circumstances, it must be in question. I mean, I don’t know whether you saw it Mark this week, the Speaker had an absolute [00:49:00] go at the government minister, I think it was Luke Pollard, answering a question in the House this week because the Speaker had got wind of a suggestion that the Defence Investment Plan will be published as we are recording today on Thursday, tomorrow, Friday. And he basically said that would just be unacceptable, a complete mistreatment of Parliament, treating MPs as second-class citizens. And he wasn’t having it. And interestingly, in the House, the defence minister did not say: no, Mr. Speaker, you’ve got it wrong, I don’t know where you’ve heard that, we are not publishing on Friday. But subsequently John Healey did make a statement or answered a question from the media and made clear that no, it wouldn’t be published on Friday. So we have to assume it’s not coming out in these circumstances this week. But as I understand it, the timetable, they are under considerable pressure to get it out before the NATO summit because NATO allies are getting increasingly queasy about what our position is and whether we are going to commit to the requisite level of spending that’s needed.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose you’ve got to say it’d be a fun gig to be the new Secretary of State for Defence going in to bat in the House of Commons for the [00:50:00] defence investment statement. So I think that’s a cup that I think a lot of people would like to pass from them.

Robert Saunders: It all reminds me a little bit of that great political movie, The NeverEnding Story. There is a sense that sort of the Nothing is just consuming British politics at the moment. And you have this terrible problem that a really important decision needs to be made, arguably one of the most important decisions of the parliament, and yet everybody knows that the leadership of the party is simply in a holding pattern, that it is waiting for the Makerfield by-election. It’s waiting to discover whether there will be a change of leadership or not. And in that sense, you both have to make a big decision now and cannot make a big decision now.

Mark D’Arcy: Ouch. And I suppose the other point to make is that the position of Rachel Reeves as Chancellor now must be in increasing question over this as well, because a new leader coming in may have to find that money and Rachel Reeves is very unwilling to find it. Apparently.

Robert Saunders: Yes. Although they may also be very nervous of doing anything that’s going to spook financial markets. And so in the sense there may be an argument for keeping the current Chancellor.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, well they’re caught in quite a number of binds.

Ruth Fox: Well, on that score Mark, I [00:51:00] think we should leave it there and tell listeners, as we’re talking about the Makerfield by-election and what may happen, we’re going to be actually recording a day later than usual next week. We’re going to be recording on the Friday, not our usual Thursday, in order that we can cover the result. And we hope there will be a result, not endless recounts, not a tie or endless recounts.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s not California.

Ruth Fox: So I’m assuming that there will be a result in the early hours of the morning. And then, assuming if Andy Burnham wins, we’ll no doubt have news of his restoration plan to return to Westminster. If he doesn’t, if Reform win, then what happens to Keir Starmer’s position? What happens to the Labour government? It could all be very chaotic, but we’ll be back next Friday to talk about it.

Mark D’Arcy: The most consequential by-election pretty much ever. I suppose. So, until next week, listeners, goodbye from all of us and thanks very much indeed to Robert.

Robert Saunders: Thank you.

Ruth Fox: See you soon. Thanks. Bye 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.