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PMP E105 ===

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. Coming up in this episode.

Ruth Fox: Is the way Parliament works at the root of the country's problems? One old Westminster hand, peer Lord Goodman, certainly thinks so.

Mark D'Arcy: Deck chairs on the Titanic or a decisive new phase in Keir Starmer's government? What impact will the latest Downing Street changes have?

Ruth Fox: And is chat GPT now writing Commons speeches? Are we witnessing the rise of the cyber MP?

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, let's talk about that Downing [00:01:00] Street reshuffle, the creation of what begins to look like an embryonic Prime Minister's department right at the top of the government machine. It will have ramifications for Parliament, not least because its Chief Secretary, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, now chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, a new post, is Darren Jones, who is a Member of Parliament, who will be a presence in the Commons.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, apparently he's got status as a, as a Minister, Minister of State. So as you say, he's gonna be a presence in the Commons. He can be in and out of the tea rooms talking to colleagues. Um, he can be questioned by MPs.

Mark D'Arcy: He will be bound by the Ministerial Code.

Ruth Fox: Bound by the Ministerial Code. Well, can he be questioned by MPs?

This is gonna be the question I think for Parliament. There is no Prime Minister's department. Prime Minister's Questions is once a week of course, but it's the Prime Minister who answers so..

Mark D'Arcy: It wouldn't be a very good innovation if they stopped having the PM answering some of them.

Ruth Fox: That's an interesting point.

Will he deputise for Keir Starmer at PMQs, or will that be Angela Rayner or not. We'll come onto [00:02:00] that and the Angela Rayner situation. But, uh, as a, as a Minister of State responsible for delivery, we are told for, for delivery of the government promises would, for example, he be taking part in questions at Cabinet Office, monthly questions alongside people like Pat McFadden.

There's an awful lot that's unclear about how this new role is going to work. Or is it actually, he is in effect a backroom boy now. He won't be on the front bench answering questions doing the work of a, of a minister. He'll be, perhaps in the media more, perhaps as a sort of spokesperson and, which is a role he's taken on quite a bit over the course of the last year.

Mark D'Arcy: But if he's a minister, he's gotta be available for questioning by Parliament, especially as a Minister in the Commons and, and not just at the Despatch Box in the Chamber. Potentially, he could be an almost semi-permanent hostile witness at several dozen different select committees.

Yeah.

It's not hard to imagine a number of select committees that have got their eye on that.

Oh yeah.

Ruth Fox: Of course. This is the difference. We've talked in the past about the role of the National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell [00:03:00] or Pole, I'm not quite sure how it's pronounced these days, but he's of course in Keir Starmer's Downing Street as an advisor on foreign policy and national security.

But he's not accountable to Parliament because he's effectively a civil servant, cum Special Advisor, and the Government are keeping him away from scrutiny by Commons committees. But as you say, because Darren Jones is an MP, that's gonna be much tougher.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. And you, as you say, an interesting question is, would he be taking Prime Minister's Question time?

Well, there is a deputy Prime Minister, there's Angela Rayner, who I dunno at the moment, might quite welcome having somebody else standing up and deputising for the Prime Minister, but in the long term, probably wouldn't if she still stays. And we are recording this before we know what Angela's fate may or may not be.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Listeners, by the time you get to listen to this, she might not be Deputy Prime Minister, who knows?

Mark D'Arcy: But that leads us to the question of a bit of kind of crowding at the top because we have a Prime Minister, we have a titular Deputy Prime Minister currently, as we record Angela Rayner, we have a defacto Deputy Prime [00:04:00] Minister in the shape of Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

We now have a Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in the shape of Darren Jones. And of course there's a Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. So there, there's suddenly quite a number of people milling around Downing Street with various roles that put them at the top table. And I think the question that has yet to be resolved on this, and even the players in this particular power game, may not know the answer yet, is how that plays out.

Who's going to emerge on top? Who has the ear of Sir Keir Starmer and who doesn't?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well this is one of the criticisms of how Keir Starmer has organised his operation for some time. Both in opposition and and now in government, is that clear lines of responsibility. In the end, the titles don't matter so much. What matters is what are they in charge of?

Are they the responsible person for that? And do other people know that they're the responsible person for that? And I think one of the concerns is that there are multiple people at the top of government who may have different titles, but share, [00:05:00] or seem to share responsibilities and therefore you end up in these turf wars.

Mm. So delivery for the government's program is that Pat McFadden in the Cabinet office as we've been previously led to believe, is it the Chief of Staff or is it now Darren Jones? Or is Darren Jones gonna take responsibility for delivering on, you know, the top five or six most difficult problems that perhaps are gonna be sort of extracted almost from government departments like the Home Office and Justice and Education and so on?

Take those problems out, place them in Downing Street and have a SWAT team on them to try and progress chase and, and try and get implementation and delivery on a, a much quicker timetable than the, the government departments have managed operating in normal circumstances. So we will have to see, I mean, I dunno, do you think having somebody in Downing Street in this, whatever the role pans out to be, is it an advantage, them being in Parliament as an MP? Or is this just a hugely burdensome responsibility for somebody who's already [00:06:00] got an awful lot of other responsibilities as an MP?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there are a couple of things that, that Darren Jones does bring to the table. One, as you say, he's in Parliament.

He can go into the Commons tea room and be directly in touch with the concerns of the parliamentary troops in the tea room.

Ruth Fox: Well, that brings in another question then, mark. How does this roll dovetail with the Parliamentary Private Secretaries? Well, indeed, because he has got two of them

Mark D'Arcy: and that's what they're supposed to be doing.

Ruth Fox: And that's supposed to be what they're doing and, and I think before the Summer recess when we had the developments of on the welfare vote and the big rebellion on that, one of our critiques was that the Prime Minister's. Parliamentary Private Secretary operation. So the, the back bench MPs who are his eyes and ears in the Commons are perhaps not the right people.

They haven't got the political antenna, the political heft, the political weight. Mm. Um, to be undertaking that role.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there's a question there, isn't there? Because you can be bringing the best intelligence in the world into the center of your operation, but if it's not being listened to, what do you do then?

So we, we don't quite know what's going [00:07:00] on under the hood of the prime ministerial machine, but what is clear is that it has had some major misfires already. And time is beginning to run out. You know, it's now more than a year into Sir Keir Starmer's premiership. You'd be looking at an election in about three years time.

And, uh, things aren't going awfully well at the moment, and there's less and less time in which to set them. Right. So there's that. Now, Darren Jones' role is an interesting one here because he seems to have an economic policy, delivery mission, and he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which meant he had a cross government role.

He was in all the big financial negotiations about government spending with all the departments. So he'll have a very, very strong knowledge of what's going on right across government. And he brings that now to the Downing Street table. And there's also this point about connection with parliamentary opinion, which is that he's not at the bottom of the Downing Street operation.

He's at the top, or at least fairly close to the top. So perhaps he's, the idea is that he will funnel in the concerns of the troops much more [00:08:00] effectively. That's, uh, yet to be tested. But maybe that's part of the theory of this appointment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, he's certainly got a wide angle lens on sort of the policy positions in all those government departments, as you say because that's the role of the Chief Secretary. They have to pore over the, the budgets of each individual department. It wasn't clear that out of a comprehensive spending review process that was supposed to look at every line of expenditure, that, um, there was much in the way of savings made or things being stopped as well as new errors of, of spending.

But he certainly knows what it is that the departments are doing and, and why, but that role also means that you ruffle feathers. Mm-hmm. Precisely because sometimes you do have to say no or you have to, you know, question in quite a challenging way why departments are doing what they're doing. So he will have made some political enemies amongst his ministerial colleagues.

Mark D'Arcy: Hmm. But it, it does be token, a strong new focus in Downing Street on economic policy. And of course, the Prime Ministers also appointed a personal economic advisor, which may or may not help things. I'm long [00:09:00] enough in the tooth to remember Sir Alan Walter's, Margaret Thatcher's personal economic advisor, putting her at dagger's drawn with her then Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

And that was one of the things that in the end, precipitated Margaret Thatcher's fall. It was one of the early pebbles in the avalanche. That suggests too, that the Prime Minister wants to take a a bit more of an influential role on economic policy rather than subcontract it entirely to the Chancellor.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, he's certainly not paid, said to have not paid much attention to economic matters since he took over as Prime Minister and therefore having an extra pair of eyes and ears will be good. I mean, I think the difference certainly with the Thatcher years would be where Sir Alan Walters was in opposition to and known to be, take, take a different view to the policies of the then Chancellor Nigel Lawson. That was why the, the relationship in a sense fell apart. So Margaret Thatcher was deliberately employing somebody to give her advice that was diametrically opposed to what her Chancellor was proposing. And I think it was through Sir Alan Walters that she discovered that we'd been shadowing the deutschmark and she hadn't been told about it.

Hadn't been told about it, and [00:10:00] you know, all hell broke loose. My impression is that the economic advisor that, uh, Sir Keir Starmer has taken on, also a parliamentarian, I think she's in the House of Lords, Minouche Shafik recently back from Columbia University, where she had a pretty torrid time dealing with the Gaza question and the relationship between Jewish and Palestinian students on the, the Columbia University campus in New York, but she's also previously been at the Bank of England.

She was, I think, permanent secretary at the Department for International Development. She spent time at the head of the LSE, the London School of Economics. So she's got a wide and varied background. Mm-hmm. But it's not, I would say, somebody who's necessarily got very strong economic instincts that are diametrically opposed to the direction of travel of Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeve's approach to government.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, she, she's certainly not an open critic, and it is possible for a Prime Minister to have an economic advisor and not fall out with their Chancellor. I mean, Tony Blair did [00:11:00] famously fall out with Gordon Brown at a very subterranean level, but it wasn't necessarily the kind of open feuding that led to Margaret Thatcher's downfall.

He had a guy called Derek Scott giving him independent economic advice, and you do need a little bit of a counterweight. It's just part of the process, but it's the fault line in governments. If it goes wrong, if Chancellor and Prime Minister fall out as, for example, David Cameron and George Osborne never did then, if they fall out, there is great trouble ahead.

Ruth Fox: Well, we will see what happens. Another issue that we're waiting on is, as we've just sort of alluded to this question about Angela Rayner's future. Mm-hmm. Uh, as Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister, because of the kerfuffle around her accommodation arrangements and the buying of a, of a home in Brighton and how she spends it.

Mark D'Arcy: Hove, actually.

Ruth Fox: Oh Hove, sorry.

Mark D'Arcy: As they say in Hove, "Hove, actually".

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I gather this is an important distinction.

Mark D'Arcy: In Hove.

Ruth Fox: Anyway, let's just say Hove is a quite a long way from her constituency. Yes. This question is with the, uh, the Prime Minister's [00:12:00] advisor, Laurie Magnus, who will report on whether or not he thinks she has broken the Ministerial Code or not.

Mark D'Arcy: And the thought is that that report may be sooner rather than later.

Ruth Fox: Yes, indeed. You may be hearing it listeners, by the time this actually hits your podcast feed. Yeah. And we, we don't know what's gonna happen yet.

Presumably if she's to depart government that will create a very big hole at the top and presumably bring forward the reshuffle that Keir Starmer was alleged to be making this week but hasn't, and was said to be delayed. And possibly it will be a more significant reshuffle than he planned, because the rumour over the Summer recess was this, this would be a reshuffle of the junior ranks, not the Cabinet, but he may have no option. So we'll have to see. I mean, it's presumably not just a, a, a potential Cabinet reshuffle, but also potentially an issue in terms of the role that Angela Rayner occupies as deputy leader of the Labour Party.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. Well, both of those may be up for grabs. I, I don't see how you can say I have sinned and therefore can no longer be Deputy Prime Minister, but I can still be deputy leader of the Labour Party. [00:13:00] So if there is to be a resignation, I would guess it comes as a package deal. You, you, you lose both the deputy premiership and the deputy leadership of the party.

Maybe they can find a way to split that difference. I'm not so sure.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Another person who's been making the, uh, the headlines, but not in Parliament is Nigel Farage. What do you make of a leader of a political party going to another country to basically complain about his own country's rules on free speech when, let's say that country's rules on free speech are not exactly pristine either.

I mean, he's basically gone to Congress, given evidence, and the sort of messaging back is that he thinks that the American administration should take action and almost deploy sanctions against the UK for its rules on free speech restrictions.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, his case was slightly bolstered by the arrest of that Father Ted script writer, for some tweets by five officers crowding onto a plane somewhere, which is just an extraordinary case. But all the same, I do wonder whether this might be [00:14:00] Nigel Farage's first major political blunder. I don't think it's a good look to go abroad to criticise your own country. And least of all go abroad to the Parliament of another country and criticise it there when you're a Member of the Parliament of this country and you're not in that Parliament.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, the US government is checking the social media profiles of people going to the United States, particularly those of course, who want a visa and to stay there. So the idea that it's perfectly fine to Labour what's happening here, whilst doing that in the United States, when that's their position, just seems to me to be bizarre.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose that there are a number of people now who might otherwise be considering a visit to the United States who don't think they're gonna go to the expense if they're gonna be turned back at the border. Yeah. Or worse still sent for a stay in sunny El Salvador without any due process or chance of appeal.

So I think that people who do the kind of thing that Nigel Farage has just done are possibly getting into very dangerous territory. I'm pretty sure that he won't be able to say a word in Parliament without people [00:15:00] heckling him on this point for quite a while to come now, and as I say, I think it may be the first real political blunder he's made in quite a while.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And he was tackled on this question of, well, why aren't you in Parliament when it's been in recess for all these weeks and now all of a sudden it's back and you're, you're abroad again, I'm paraphrasing considerably, but he essentially said, well, you know, what's the point of me sort of sitting there on the, the back benches? Can't, can't really do anything.

And I do think this is something that Reform is gonna have to think about. They're still ahead in the polls. The conversation politically has moved on to a degree of seriousness about the prospects of a Reform led government. And them being in front of the two main political parties hitherto Labour and the Conservatives.

So they've got a degree of credibility as a result of these polls and the prospects of a, of a future Reform government. If that's gonna be the case, there's only what? What have they got? Four, five MPs now? They've lost a couple along the way.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: They are going to have to go, if those poll results were to transpire into an outright Reform government, they're gonna have to go from, let's say they pick up a few more [00:16:00] in a, by-election. They might have 10 seats by the time of the next general election, let's say. They're gonna have to go from that to, to 350 plus seats in the next Parliament. And they are

Mark D'Arcy: With enough people to staff an actual government. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And they are gonna have to know how to operate in the House of Commons. So even if you feel that sitting on the back benches or sitting in the chamber or, or whatever. It feels like a bit of a waste of time. Actually, they do need to invest some time and effort into learning more about how the House works, the procedures, levers that they need to pull mm-hmm. To get things to, to happen. And even if they are not directly involved in the legislative scrutiny process on committees and so on, they need to see how it works.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Richard Tice, the deputy leader, is the one who seems to be doing most of the parliamentary heavy lifting on the Reform benches at the moment. And he's, he's quite present in the chamber. He asks a lot of questions, he makes a lot of speeches and interventions. But it can't be done by one person alone.

No. And if you are only starting off with, you know, a famous five MPs. To [00:17:00] some extent, they've all gotta do their share of the legwork. So a wave of future Reform MPs have someone to look to for an example.

Presumably they might pick up a few Conservative defectors, ex MPs, along the way, maybe even some Labour ex MPs and people who know how to operate the system to some degree.

But it is a point they need to take seriously. If they're gonna be the government, they've gotta know how to operate Parliament. Uh, at the moment, I don't think they've got enough.

Ruth Fox: No. Another, um, development on the party side in affecting Parliament is that, um, Zack Polanski won the Green Party leadership election.

And this is interesting because although the Green Party's grown in size, you know, in previous parliaments of course it was the lone, uh, ranger of Caroline Lucas. They've now got four MPs very active in the in the Commons, but their leadership election has taken the leadership out of Parliament and you've got Zack Polanski on the outside who's now gonna be the big influential voice in terms of, of green politics.

Mark D'Arcy: I dunno, maybe in some senses it's an advantage. [00:18:00] For an insurgent political party looking to make a much bigger breakthrough in its commons representation. Not to have a leader in the Commons who can be out there doing out, out of Commons campaigning stuff much more often and not tied down to all the duties that you have in the House of Commons. But it's also potentially a weakness 'cause it's a fault line. Because the people he beat, it was a ticket of Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsey sitting Green MPs, who are still there in the Commons, who are his team there capable of getting headlines hopefully for them at any rate from the commons.

And you do wonder how someone who is planning to run to the left of Labour is going to influence their prospects of holding Conservative facing parliamentary seats.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that question of how do they maintain the communications and line up their policies and their answers to an approach to things, particularly when the MPs are gonna be asked for sort of instant reactions to things. And are they all gonna be singing from the same hymn sheet.

Mark D'Arcy: That's [00:19:00] exactly the point. There's a very obvious potential fault line there for other parties to exploit. I mean, Zack Polanski's a member of the Greater London Assembly, so he may have some duties there that time down a bit incidentally, but at the same time, he's gotta be out in the country saying stuff, being punchy, taking controversial lines, and he'd better be sure, I think that his MPs agree with him because otherwise there might be trouble.

I mean, one particular task, he's got his election's already been welcomed in a tweet by Zara Saltana, is how they relate to Jeremy Corbin's, nascent new party also to the left of Labour, potentially fishing for voters in much the same waters as the greens. Zara Saltan has been saying, I hope we can have a good working relationship or words to that effect.

Ruth Fox: Have they actually got their party off the ground yet? Well, I've seen the launch tweets, but I mean, I I, they seem to be still arguing over names.

Mark D'Arcy: It, it has got an out outright title yet, and it all seems to be going a bit slow. I mean, once upon [00:20:00] a time you had a launch and there'd be a party and a logo and it all seems to be going much more gradually than that. But maybe they just do things differently in this party.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, maybe they, I think they were gonna hold a conference, weren't they? Maybe the planners for the attendees at that conference to give voice to their thoughts on what the parties names should be.

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe they'll be a breakout group with crayons that do a logo or something. I, I, I, I dunno. But they are doubtless a serious threat to Labour on, its left. But if they and the Greens are competing directly with one another across the country, I think that threat is probably diluted a bit. As far as Labour's concerned, I dunno if they need to have anything as explicit as an outright electoral pact.

They could do essentially what Labour and the Liberal Democrats did in the last election, which is make an effort not to tread each other's toes too much. And that would be all that was needed. And it could all be very sort of backroom and unstated. [00:21:00] And maybe that's all right. Maybe there isn't a great overlap in seats. The the Jeremy Corbyn party could win and the seats that the Greens could win. Maybe they each feel, they reach the parts that others the other side cannot reach. But that's something to keep an eye on as well though.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. It's never boring is it Mark? We're a year on from the election and all these sort of party machinations and, and, and developments are, and they've all got implications for Parliament in some form.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, the, the party system as we have known it for centuries really, essentially, the Commons has always had two big parties and a few minor players off, except in a very few short historical eras. And now quite suddenly, the system is fragmenting in all sorts of different directions.

I mean, the Conservatives have a threat to the right of them. Labour have a threat to the left of them.

The Liberal Democrats in the middle have the biggest parliamentary contingent they've ever returned since the days of Asquith. So there's a very, very different parliamentary landscape [00:22:00] out there now, which is simply not reflected in the way the Commons operates.

No. And the Commons, I think is going to have to adapt. And we've talked about this on this pod before. Yeah. To a much more multi-polar system than it's been used to.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, with that, let's take a break and uh, come back and talk about another development that is affecting how MPs operate in the Commons.

And that's the rise of the Cyber MP. See you in a minute. See you soon.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, I can unite the strands of what we are talking about a bit here because of a remark that an MP made on social media a while ago that he could understand what it would be like to live in a world dominated by emotionless, artificial intelligence with no human empathy. Because he'd just been in a meeting with Darren Jones who was then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Rather, a cruel comment, I think. Darren Jones is, is a pretty able politician and a pretty able operator and will be hearing a great deal more of him.

But [00:23:00] AI is suddenly percolating into the work of the Commons. People are starting to count the use of AI sounding phrases in MP speeches, and it seems to them that this indicates that AI is writing a lot of Commons speeches.

Ruth Fox: Well, there was a really interesting article, Mark, over the recess by Zoe Crowther for Politics Home when she looked at how MPs were using AI and she did the research, I think on on Hansard, about are MPs using particular phrases and so on that they've garnered from chat GPT in their speeches. And the thing that stood out was that the phrase "I rise to speak" has been used 601 times across the Commons and Lords so far this year compared to only 131 occasions in the first eight months of, of last year, and 227 times in 2023. So it's been on the rise.

I mean, it's not really a phrase that's ever, well, I can't say it's, it's not been used in the House of Commons before, but it's not a phrase commonly used.

Mark D'Arcy: It strikes me as a bit of an Americanism, actually.

Yeah. [00:24:00] It's the kind of thing I can remember characters saying in the West Wing and things like that. I rise to speak about this. And I suspect that that's maybe where chat GPTs got it from. Mm. Is that this, this pops up an awful lot more in maybe congressional speeches and speeches in other American political bodies, then it pops up in Britain. But now the idioms crossed the Atlantic, be afraid.

Ruth Fox: But there may also be, of course, a degree of socialization in this, precisely because there are so many new MPs. If they've seen some of their colleagues using it, they may themselves use it. So it may not entirely be AI, it might be natural imitation.

Natural imitation. But there's an interesting sort of broader debate about how, whether AI should be used by MPs more generally. So also during recess we saw that the Labour MP, Mark Seward launched an AI version of

himself, a sort of chatbot MP I think, to answer questions from his constituents. He had to adjust it along the way, I think a few weeks after launch to put some more safeguards [00:25:00] in because it was, it was saying some rather unwise things about policy positions that he may or may not have held.

There's that sort of element, but it's an interesting area of innovation.

But the question is, how useful is it really, and how scalable is it? We know that apparently Parliament has been piloting a scheme for MPs to use Microsoft's own AI System called Copilot for tasks. Basic sort of administrative of operational office tasks such as summarising reports and correspondence, that's been also used in the civil service and Government have been running pilots on this. Now, Parliament is, and you can see how that might work.

Mark D'Arcy: But you can see a, a kind of dystopian future here where MPs get AI to write parliamentary questions that are then answered by the departmental chatbot. And no human being, no human intervention at any point.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, if you read some of the questions and answers at the minute, you might think that's already happening at scale.

Yes. I mean, this is the problem, isn't it? If you're gonna leave it all to chat GPT, then [00:26:00] what's the point of having the MP? You might just, well, just as well churn out...

Mark D'Arcy: Save a lot of money.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I think the inevitable answer is that it can be used.

You can see how it can be used, for example, to summarise or to edit or to proofread documents, but in the end, you need that human intervention.

To fill out the policy detail, fill out your views. I mean, for example, you can't see how chat GPT is gonna answer a constituents piece of correspondence on the assisted dying bill and what your views are on that. I mean, when it comes to complex moral questions on which there's no party line they can extract from a manifesto, what do you do?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I'm having serious generational problems with all this. I mean, I'm sitting here holding my hand sharp and goose quill pen and dipping it into my inkwell and scribbling notes as we go. And I really do struggle with the world of Chat GPT and AI interventions and this idea that in, in a sense, you, you get to a point where the human being is [00:27:00] barely involved at any stage of the process anymore because everyone's got their own little bots operating away on all sides of the political spectrum.

Ruth Fox: Well, we've experimented here a bit. I mean, just out of interest really. 'cause we're not quite as, uh, died in the wool as you are Mark, we are trying to engage with these, these new innovations. For example, I have put in the transcript of podcast episodes and asked it to draft podcast show notes just to see what it pumps out.

And let's just say sometimes it's not. Listening to the same podcast episode I've been listening to. We also, for a bit of a, a laugh, we fed in some information from our annual report about our finances and said can you pump out a report that we could deliver to our Annual General Meeting about our financial situation.

Mark D'Arcy: Gosh, the long Summer, evenings must just fly by at the Hansard Society offices!

Ruth Fox: This is how we live! Let's just say, I dunno who's, which charity it was looking at for its finances, but it wasn't ours. But that just demonstrates the limits at this point. Yeah. Of it can be [00:28:00] quite good if you put into it a paragraph. Well, I dunno, I've done a lengthy paragraph and a few extra sentences and it's just too long and it's, it's not pithy enough. You ask it to edit it, redraft it for clarity and, and so on and to be more succinct and it does quite a good job of that. Mm. You can think, oh yeah, that's quite, that's quite neat. And you can play around with it. But you ask it to do something from scratch, that involved any research, and I would have real worries about it. It's reliability and its accuracy.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, you do wonder, I, I once talked to an academic who discovered that a, a student had been using AI to draft their essays when the essay that was submitted include a reference to a paper by this, this self same academic that he hadn't actually written. Yes. And that had just been purely invented by the system. And, and that's actually quite an advanced mistake to make.

Yeah.

But there are clearly dangers.

MPs have always used technology where they can to try and lighten the workload [00:29:00] essentially. So, you know, even 40, 50 years ago you could write to an MP and get a stock answer on the question of the route of the proposed local bypass or the closure of the A&E or whatever the local constituency issue was.

Just top and tailed with "Dear Mr. Jones, this is what I think... yours sincerely, your Honourable Member.". And that was perfectly normal and reasonable. But if you were to start just engaging with your constituents through an AI and trusting the AI to do the thinking for you that way, madness lies. Yeah. I dunno if anybody's actually going that far, I should say.

Ruth Fox: No, I, i, I rather doubt it, but I mean, certainly there is an issue clearly about, as you say, constituency workloads and the, the sheer size of mm-hmm. You can't really call it a, a post bag anymore 'cause it's mainly an inbox.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a, it's a post mori.

Ruth Fox: But there's, you know, a huge amount of, of volume of correspondence coming in. And of course, no matter how generic the incoming email or letter may be, the constituent, they don't [00:30:00] want a template generic response. They want a per, they want a personalized answer. Yeah. They may not necessarily get it, but they wouldn't want it.

Yeah. And I think certainly what you hear is that they want it quickly. They want, they expect it to be fairly, a fairly rapid response. Whereas 20, 30 years ago, the expectation would be even with a better postal service than we have now, that they probably wouldn't get a response for a couple of weeks. Expectations about speed and, and responsiveness have changed as well as the volume.

And remember, we are all, when we engage with our MPs, we're all using technology. Yes. And one of the reasons they've got this huge workload problem is that it's basically click-ocracy. Everybody taps on the, send this letter in, this campaign mailing in from this latest campaign group to my MP. There's no aversion to them using technology to, to send it in. So you've gotta think about, you know, from an MP's perspective, are there ways to use AI to manage their workload more effectively?

Mark D'Arcy: Long gone are the days when Enoch Powell could sit [00:31:00] in the House of Commons library handwriting a response to every constituent's letter. Yeah. Presumably there weren't much more than 10 of them at the time.

Ruth Fox: But I do wonder still whether there is a cachet that attaches to receiving a letter through the post. Partly 'cause it's so unusual these days. I dunno about you, but I get very few letters through the post. A nice cream letter with the House of Commons portcullis embossed on it, you know, nice cream heavy note paper inside compared to the email in your inbox.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And a signature done with a fountain pen. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the days. Yeah,

Ruth Fox: I just, I just wonder if there's a certain cachet. Certainly when I was working for an MP, you used to get quite good response from those kinds of letters as opposed to mass campaign responses sent, just sent by email.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, Ruth shall we take another break and when we come back, we're gonna be talking to Paul Goodman, former Conservative MP, now Conservative peer, political editor of Conservative Home back in the day about his thoughts on why economic [00:32:00] growth may require parliamentary reform in Britain.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, let's do that, mark.

But just while we do two listeners, um, a couple of ways you can help the pod while you're waiting for us to come back, you can review us on your favorite podcast app. We've had some wonderful reviews over the summer, so thank you for that. But please do, uh, if you haven't already done it, please do so 'cause it really helps other people find us, um, tackle the podcast algorithms that neither Mark nor I understand, but we're told it, it helps.

And yeah, if, you know, pass on the details of the podcast to any friends or family members or coworkers that you think might find the podcast of interest. And we'll see you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: See you soon.

And we are back and, and Ruth, there's an awful lot of talk sloshing around the country about various ways in which we could be governed better.

How could government be reformed? How could the system deliver better results for the citizen? But one thing that isn't talked about quite so much, is where Parliament might fit into [00:33:00] the process of making government more effective. There are all sorts of think tank ideas out there, not least from ourselves at the Hansard Society, but it's not been part of the mainstream political debate for quite a while.

But one old hand who thinks it ought to be is Lord Goodman, former Conservative MP, fellow of the Policy Exchange think tank. Now a member of the Lord's Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, who does think that something ought to change? He said in a recent article that MPs lead a dog's life and making Parliament better was actually crucial to making the economy better as well.

Ruth and I met him to explore exactly what he meant by that.

Lord Goodman: There's a lot of interest at the moment in making government better, in making legislation better, making government better, whether that's civil service procurement, how Number 10 works, the relationship to number 10 and the Cabinet Office and making the departments better.

So there are all sorts of arguments and ideas about splitting up the Treasury or dividing the Home Office or if you are on the right, returning the Law Lords to the [00:34:00] House of Lords from the Supreme Court. I think Parliament is the missing element and Parliament is sometimes treated in all this as though it's a horse. It's just a horse to take you where you want to get to, to these various improved ends. And the the best means of getting there is just to sort of flog the horse _and_ make the horse work harder. But actually, I think the horse collectively, to pursue this rather convoluted metaphor, isn't really working, in particular what you might call the front end of the horse, namely the Commons.

So enormous interest in Lord's reform, you know, do you appoint more people to appoint view and do you elect it?

To my mind, it's this dangerous thing to say as a peer. Quite a lot of the problem is down in the Commons because Commons should do, I think three things. One is debate, another is scrutinise legislation, and the third 'cause of the way our system works is provide ministers, and for one reason or another, it's not doing these things as well as it might.

So you are speaking, of course, not just [00:35:00] as a peer, but with the authority of a former MP who's actually sat in that chamber and been in Commons debates.

I just want to reflect a bit on how the Commons has changed for better and for worse. So when I first stepped through the door as a young researcher in 1978, longer ago, the US care to remember Labour was the party of well Labour.

There's a smattering of these university Dons, but miners, electricians, engineers, manual workers, and so on, it's party of Labour. Tories are the party of capital. So they are landowners, high-earning lawyers, city finances, and so on. That I think has changed. And part of the reason for that is, and you have to award the prize or wooden spoon to the Liberal Democrats and Liberal Democrats really invented and pioneered and popularized the idea of the Member of Parliament as the constituency champion.

You know, a Member of Parliament would stand up for you in your seat and no issue would be too trivial for the member of Parliament to deal with, whether it's a broken paving stone or an overhanging tree branch or your [00:36:00] own personal problems. I think by and large voters quite like the idea of their MP as the local champion, but though that's great for your locality, I think that's collectively a problem for the country and good constituency. Champions are not necessarily diligent scrutinies of legislation or energetic ministers. The argument here is that the new breed of Super Councilor MP are purely locally focused and aren't gonna be spending time going through the details of the Widgets and Grommets Act and making sure it works properly.

That's not their prime priority. I think if it were their prime priority Parliament wouldn't have changed in the way it has some of which. Is to reflect working in the modern age so far more as down in Westminster Hall. There's this sort of plethora of all party groups with the kind of wild west out there, and there's this enormous lobby bureaucracy that will campaign push you to do a Westminster Hall debate. You do the debate, the minister answers, everyone's happy, but it's not improving the quality of legislation or the quality of government.

So what would you do to improve the quality [00:37:00] of legislation and government? 'Because we've got an argument at the Hansard Society and have had for quite a number of years now. Mm-hmm. That, yes, it's precisely this. Well, MPs certainly in, in recent, previous Parliaments have abdicated their responsibility to some extent for legislation. And the one of the problems is the way that we legislate today is no longer really fit for purpose in terms of the times we live. It's too slow in terms of primary legislation.

Parliament slows things down. Government wants to go quickly, but Parliament slows things down, 'cause scrutiny requires time and oxygen to to be done well. And on the other hand, the bit that does go quickly, the regulations are completely un scrutinized to a very large extent, particularly by the Commons, not by the Lords. And that's creating both a scrutiny problem, but also a democratic deficit because the Lords is picking up too much of the legislative burden part. Part of the difficulty is as I understand it, the solution to the problem is not in the hands of the government. I mean, the government can deal with its own problems, it [00:38:00] can divide departments can produce legislation, but the parliament itself has got to be happy with the changes that you propose.

So you know, you've gotta put that right out on the table at the start. And I think there's got to be a sort of trade off between the government. Government's gotta have a program, it should, in the ideal world that doesn't exist, do fewer bills better, I'm in favor of a kind of trade off whereby you'd have fewer and better bills, but the scrutiny would be a bit more exacting. So think there's a certain amount to be said for more pre legislative scrutiny and, and all that. And I think if I was being a bit critical about thought on the right at the moment, I think thought on the right moment is just keep flogging the horse and kind of forcing your legislation through in order to get the results you want.And if you do that, you end up with very bad. Legislation by coincidence since I arrived in the Lords, I was chucked on delegated legislation and that you're on the delegated powers regulatory report. Powers Delegated [00:39:00] Powers. And that really kind of opened my eyes to what people in the Lords think about what has been happening to legislation whereby governments of both parties produce a bill. It's what government calls a framework legislation, we call skeleton legislation. Yeah. Whereby basically we will write the headlines as ministers for the cops to consider and fill in all the details afterwards or, or even more pernicious. This will give us the power to implement our policy when we figured out what our policy is later quite, but I suspect one of the drivers is ministers and civil servants kind of know that the commons doesn't really do scrutiny thoroughly anymore.

So for that reason, it, it can get away with doing this and no one's gonna complain. So part of the answer must be government doing fewer bills better, but also. The Commons has really got to take a bit more control of what goes through it itself. That's the trade off.

This is the perennial question. So yeah. When parties are in opposition, they complain about this. When they're in government, they welcome the powers and what they've Labourd in [00:40:00] opposition. They're quite happy to do once they've got their hands on the ministerial reigns of this legislative horse we have. So how do we persuade? Ministers to undertake reforms that would effectively constrain their ability to legislate.

Incredibly difficult, and this is the elephant in the room all the time with parliamentary reform because although you say it's for parliament to decide, it's actually the government that's gotta lay the motions in the House of Commons to do it. I'm afraid the only solution I can offer is that restructurings of the economy and the political scene tend to happen when there's a crisis. Yep. Like, you know, in my memory is 1976, great economic crisis and then the government has to change its economic policy all 2010. I suspect. I haven't thought about lots of it. Now that there will be a crisis to do with the upper house, possibly that will have a knock on effect on the lower. So for example, you know, if we get in future some sort of government of the right. That's more like a sort of reforming conservative. Conservative, gonna reforming government and we have [00:41:00] a chamber with no hereditary in it. On what basis do you appoint? How many peers would a reform government be entitled to? 50, a hundred. Nobody really knows as a knock on consequences. Yeah, it might produce a crisis, but you are surely right that ministers won't do this themselves.

Remember when I put got put on delegated powers? Patrick McLaughlin, Lord McLaughlin, who chaired it, said, ministers have this road to Damascus experience. Right? When, when, when they stop being ministers and go on committees like delegated powers, they have this experience and change their approach. Of course, it's also true, the road to Damascus does run both ways.

Well, Gerald Kaufman always used to talk about people doing a four minute mile up the road to Damascus and uh Yep. Bad a bit. It's very interesting, isn't it, that you get this situation where people go into the House of Lords after perhaps quite a long and exalted commons career, and suddenly start talking about reforming the structures that they had previously been quite happy to operate.

It's usually when the other side's in charge, as Ruth was saying, but it's [00:42:00] a different matter to come up with a really good coherent design for this, because what you're really talking about is all singing, all dancing reform of the structures of parliament, which is something governments have historically just shied away from.

Too much trouble. Nobody outside S Sw one cares about it.

That's right.

And two. Ideas I floated, both of which are immensely problematic. Were one, taking the restrictions off outside earnings to some degree. Uh, this is particularly a conservative preoccupation that of course MPs are in, I think the top 3% of earners. Yeah, you're very well off if you're an MP compared to average member of the public. But for a lot of the Tories, the comparison isn't with your average member of the public. It's with the man and woman you university with. Right? And they're earning X times as much, and they don't have the restrictions on their outside earnings.

And the of course, businesses a risky thing, but the risk of losing your seat now because the turbulence as high than it was, you are putting your family in the front line. Two MPs have been killed. I [00:43:00] mean, I'm painting a bit of a somber picture, but it is rougher and readier than it was. I think you've only got to talk to women MPs who've arrived recently to discover that they're in the front line of this anxious and angry public mood. That's got a lot to do with immigration. You put your finger on it. There is an issue here that most of the general public would think that a middle class bloke or woman of modest taste could probably just about muddle by on 93 grand a year quite, and it's a very difficult ask to say, A, pay them more, or B, let the moonlight, which would be how a lot of people would see it. Well, and the alternative is you go with a float, you say, right, okay. People want constituency champions. Let them have them, but let them do legislative scrutiny properly. And you take your ministers out of the commons to some degree. This is happening anyway. If I look across the Lords at the government front bench, Timson is doing prisons.

Jackie Smith is back doing education. Yeah. Patrick Valance is doing [00:44:00] health Hendy who did transport for London is doing transport. Some of these people not actually. Particularly political. Some are, some aren't, but rather like Richard Soak, putting David Cameron in the Lords or Gordon Brown's goats is already All the talents.

Yeah, all the talents. There's a bit of a tendency now to put ministers in the Lords who are not just add-ons to the commons ministers, but actually contributing something in their own Right. Problem with that is you have at least arguably a democratic deficit.

I think that's one of the things, isn't it? If you, if you start taking large numbers of ministers essentially out of the House of Commons, the House of Commons becomes a much less happening place. It does, and and the, the second issue is that you're sometimes asking people who haven't evolved in a political environment to start functioning as politicians in a way that they're just not used to. And there is a bit of a track record of people who've been bought in as technocrats, rather crashing and burning in government. So I think there are people who are. Really good at business, [00:45:00] who are really good at politics, but they tend to be people who are primarily politicians first. So, you know, classic example would be Michael Heseltine.

Mm-hmm. An example of a business person who didn't make it was, I'm going really back in time, was I think John Davis under Ted Heath. Right. We were just discussing him earlier. We discussed this earlier. Yeah. Right. Like, I can't, 'cause I was only 13 at the time. I even can't remember the ins, ins and outs of it, but I'm a bit resistant to this idea that you just bring in business people and they'll govern efficiently.

Because as I understand it, business is about the bottom night. It's about making a profit. Politics is about trading off lots of different things and bringing lots of different people with you who you may think are less able than you are. And you know. Top people don't always necessarily have the patience Yeah.

To deal with people who they think are less gifted than they are.

Well, just going back to the, to the John Davis, uh, analogy for our listeners. So we, we were looking [00:46:00] this up before you came Paul, because Mark mentioned him and, um, he'd `been Secretary of State for trade industry 1970 to 72. Yes. So predates me under Ted Heath, But he'd been boss of the CBI. Yeah. Uh, Confederation and British Industry, and one of his problems clearly was around communications, which I think is a, is a problem for business people. 'cause they're not used to having to communicate on a daily basis in such a public way. They're communications of internal and private in business, whereas once they become ministers, they are on a national public stage.

Yes. And both in the, in the Lords and outside, every word is scrutinized. Well, he came a bit of a cropper because he said, uh, in one speech, we believe the essential need of the country is to gear its policies to the great majority of people who are not lame ducks.

I mean, and this was in. You know, the more reverential era of the 1970s compared to today. I mean now you, I dunno how long he lasted. He lasted couple years, two years. As a cabinet minister, you'd last two [00:47:00] hours. Yeah, right. You know, `by the time X had finished with you. Yeah. You can bring business people in from outside. You can bring lots of people from different backgrounds in, from outside. But they have to adapt to the constraints like ducks to water.

And it's a lot more attractive, presumably for business people to be brought into a party that's in government. I'm thinking back to Archie Norman who came in in, I think in, yeah. 2001 under William Hague and, uh, lasted a single term, was just, it struck me beginning to get quite good at politics when he decided to leave and go out and make Google more money outside.

He was fo Aster. Aster. That's right. And so he was, you know, he was a pretty senior business person with a lot of expertise and he revamped conservative central office. Yes. I think he'd have been much happier revamping a government department now and doing actual policy work. So it's far easier when you're in power.Yes, that's right. And that's, um, one of the famous examples that's battered around about whether coming in from business helps or [00:48:00] doesn't help. But I think in the situation we are talking, talk about really thinking about government mm-hmm. And people coming in from outside. So I've proposed two. Possible avenues to go down, but they're both difficult. Nothing in this is easy. The alternative, of course, is you. Just leave everything as it is. But I don't think that's working very well. No.

Is there a way of getting the existing crop of members of Parliament to do more legislative work, to focus more on the business of lawmaking, which is initially what they were supposed to be doing in Parliament than they do at the moment?Suppose you'd have to start off by, there's got to be sort of a couple of key committees or groups who get a debate going.

Mm-hmm. And then the MPs have gotta pile in. But I think there are a lot of disincentives to doing this. Disincentive number one is just the sheer pressure of holding your seat. The pressure to hold your seat now are greater than ever because more seats are marginal.

There are no safe seats. There are, there are no, there are no [00:49:00] safe seats anymore. So there's that, and then there's the sheer hamster wheel stuff. Mm-hmm. Not having time to think. And it's an example of the hamster wheel stuff. I mean like how many WhatsApp groups are, are you on?

Oh, about half a dozen probably.

Right? I mean, much of my life is spent looking at, or I trying to avoid it to be honest, or trying to avoid WhatsApp groups. Yeah, an enormous amount of politicians' time is spent dealing with stuff in WhatsApp groups, some of which is necessary, but all of which it's taking time from something else. So the disincentives to just stand back from the action and think, what could we do to improve legislative scrutiny? The, the problems that obstacles doing that are considerable. Well also, not least of course, the criticism that's come from the government and the whips, I mean, the implications of the recent welfare vote where Labour MPs lost the whip and the message was put out that it was not their role to be seeking to publicly Labour the government and, and seek to amend legislation that they should be doing it [00:50:00] through private discussions with ministers.

And then once it hits the commons, it's kind of shut up time, which is really not the trace, trace the history of this taking the whip away. Mm-hmm. I'm trying to remember where this really got gay. It happened under John Major. Oh yes. They, the whip wonders after the, the, the Great three Rebellion, Teresa Goman and people like that more and more. You know, I think the executive does regard MPs as their simply to help get the stuff through. And I remember, you know, when I was editing Con home, we did a count of Conservative MPs and we worked out more what on the payroll and on the back benches. If by the payroll you counted vice chairman and deputy chairman of the party.

And of course, uh, was it Gordon Brown's invention, the trade ambassadors, trade ambassadors, forestry invoices, forestry, all that Zs, well let's all these quas on a governmental post Precisely. And the deal is, we will give you this if you vote the line. So actually there were remarkably few people left who were benches.

So actually parliamentary body was dividing [00:51:00] between, you know, the perpetual. Front bench, the people who on it and, and the rebels. The perpetual rebels. The perpetual, the perpetual rebels. Yeah.

All these questions of, of parliamentary discipline and parliamentary organization just suggest that parliament has progressively become less and less effective at its basic function of holding government to account and going through the detail of proposed laws and.No one really has come up with a convincing way of making it better at those core functions.

Well, some of us have, but they just don't adapt and don't adopt them. Present company accepted. I was gonna say. Yeah. We try. We, we try. I mean, the Constitution unit ourselves, that the Head of Society Institute for Government, we've all got ideas and proposals, but it's how you convince essentially the powers that be, which ultimately in the commons and the ministers to adopt them.

I'm back to thinking that. The only circumstances in which one gets a major recalibration is a crisis. Crisis. So you have to wait for the crisis. Right. Never crisis. Go away. Good old fashioned Marist might not be far away. Yeah. How do [00:52:00] you see that unfolding then?

Let suppose there is a crisis. Are people just wandering round in circles, wibbling to themselves? Or does someone suddenly pull from their inner pocket a blueprint with the imprimatur of, uh, the Hansard Society and the Constitution Unit and all these other people? This is what we've gotta do to do things back. You can't, you can't see what the crisis looks like. And it happens, but I suspect it, it's got something to do with the relationship in the commons and, and the Lords. 'cause the first thing. Everyone talks about, it's not commons reform, it's Lord's reform. Mm-hmm. And we are in the, in the process of Lord's Reform, if you'd like to call it, kicking out the Aries reform. 'cause it does open whatever you think of it, a whole series of other questions. Mm-hmm. About what the Lords would look like.

So. I'm not really giving you much of an answer, but I suspect what happens in the one chamber will eventually have a knock on effect on the other. I must say though to, to me, they're not getting to grips with the [00:53:00] central issue, which is the performance of the Commons.

Obviously I'm biased as a conservative peer, but I don't think the minds of Team Steiner are really very much on on the Lord's. I suspect they look at it as a political boom for the Labour party to say, we are kicking out the hereditary, but there are consequences whether you think it's a good or a bad thing, and the consequences other than the bishops. You have a largely appointed chamber, which raises the question of whether that's good enough.

What new parties that arrive on the scene are entitled to, what are reform entitled to? If the Gaza Independents win, how many have they got now? Four or five? Yeah. If they win 12, are hey entitled to peers? All this does have a sort of knock on, and the composition of the Lords is then something that is a constant irritant because the numbers keep going up as the political system changes its balance. I mean, if, as you say, if reform come in, will reform want to appoint several hundred peers as a government?

Well, the government as I'm saying, [00:54:00] has now got, its sort of next stage of a plan for the Lords, is that there'll be a committee that will sit down and work out how to reduce. The numbers and criterion number one is age criterion. Number two, I understand, is something called making a meaningful contribution.

Aha. Who is to decide who doesn't, doesn't make a meaningful contribution? What is a meaningful contribution? So I'm not sure you're gonna get agreement on this committee. I wonder if really down the street are that bothered about it.

They've got enough on their plate. Mm.

I do wonder if there's just a total disdain for this kind of issue at the heart of government. They're getting on with their program, they're fighting their internal battles, and the last thing they want to do is get immersed in Twiddly. Constitutionalism.

Yeah. But for as long as I can remember, Lord's Reform and parliamentary reform, they've always, as you well know, always been more about the politics of the day than the platonic ideal of what to do.

And they've nearly always been preoccupied with the composition of what the Chamber should look like rather [00:55:00] than what it should actually do. And I remember all this from days when I was an MP. We were voting under Labour. For, you know, Labour's proposals for an elected chamber. I have to put my hand and say, I always voted against any proposal to elect the Lords.

Um, I've done I think you many foolish things in my time, but not that because I once, I think once you start that you get into immensely difficult relationship between the two. Yeah, yeah. The question I think is, is it likely that there is gonna be a second bill on Lord reform in this parliament? History would suggest no.

And as you say, this ability to, to agree a, a consensus around what issues, like participation levels in the laws and whose participation levels are sufficient and who's not, and whether or not they should therefore stay is just, is just really very, very complicated. I imagine that there'll be something in the manifesto and the more trouble the government's in, the more radical it will be.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but. I fear the trade off of you [00:56:00] being radical and being thought through. It's not gonna be a good trade off. No, no. But going back to this question of, of we're gonna have to wait for a crisis. Yeah. The other factor that I think comes into play is that precisely the, the volatility of the electorate that I think a lot of Labour MPs know that their chances are they're only here for one term and they want to make a difference.

Yes. And my sense is quite a lot of them are incredibly frustrated with how the system is working and the bureaucracy of the state and government responsiveness. I mean, the Labour MP Josh Simons was. A relatively new MP, used to be director I think of of, is it Labour together? This sort of the internal Labour think tank. Mm-hmm. He was writing in the FT this week about mm-hmm. The sclerotic nature of the state and the frustration that lots of Labour MPs have with it, getting things done. And I think if they can turn their eyes to the fact that part of this does lie in parliament, in actually democratic control of things [00:57:00] like the regulators and some of these bodies that are creeping into legislation and, and powers sort of being distilled away from parliament to external bodies.

If they can sort of focus more on that, there's a possibility that within this parliament you might get a bit more of a grip. But whether or not there'll be a consensus around how you then reform the house of comms to make it more effective. I'm vaguely aware that there's this kind of Labour pro-growth group. Yeah. That kind of like wants to get on with it. But in order to get on with it, you do have to think quite carefully about what the kind of role of an MP is and actually part of the answer to all this is in the hands of the parties themselves with candidate selection, there's immense pressure on the machine to choose people who will be good constituency, campaigners, 'cause that's what the voters want in the short term.

It's where the imperatives of the system drive you. So it it's, it's all about the party machine delivering a warm body, wearing the correctly colored rosette at the [00:58:00] next election, rather than finding future ministers, people who are going to be able to think white hot, great policy thoughts, and then deliver them in government.

It's in the hands of the parties to sort this out. If they take the view, the electoral pressures to have people primarily constituency campaigners are so great, you can't really do anything about it. That's the way it will end up. But if that happens, you'll get relatively fewer people who are good manes. And I'm always surprised that there's as much top rate talent. In the parties as there is, and generally, I think it's probably true throughout recent history that they've been kept going at the top by in the Thatcher years as a core of about 10 or

15 people, probably about the same. Now,

one of the things that always surprises me I, is that parties of government don't seem to make the connection between being able to really deliver and winning the next election.

And you can see this in Books in America, like, um, abundance, where the Democrats are now talking about, well, what we've gotta be able to do is [00:59:00] deliver good things for people when we are in government at state or city level. And we are failing to do that similarly, surely governments have to think a lot more about how they actually get the goodies.

They're promising people to those people. And they don't seem to do it. I mean, I, I dunno if the latest shuffling of the, uh, chairs in Downing Street is gonna make much difference to that example. Well, question I'd ask you about that is what's the most effective means of delivering stuff and who've been the most effective politicians of the last sort of 10 or 25 years? And whether you like them or not, people like Gordon Brown or George Osborne, highly effective politicians. Why? 'cause they got a few simple, clear ideas about what it was that guided them. In Gordon Brown's case, it's brown, more state intervention. In George's case, he wanted a sort of smaller, smaller state.

But there was a plan. There was a plan, right? Yeah. Once you have a plan guided by ideas and beliefs, then I think it becomes easier to deliver something rather than less easy, [01:00:00] rather than just thinking, we've gotta deliver good stuff. 'cause that risk goes to how do you do it?

Perhaps one of the problems of the current government is that it doesn't seem to have all that much of a plan. I'm sorry, that's a very low ball question. To put a conservative fear, I've gotta say it's the lowest one. The, the question I'd ask is, uh, if that's true, I think it's, it's true. I'm not gonna dispute it. I'm still puzzled about why nobody really seemed to spot this before the election happened. Maybe voters and the media classes were just so angry with the conservatives that he didn't want to think about it.

But it seems quite astonishing to me that they've arrived this great sort of role of drums and Blair of trumpets and there really doesn't seem to be a plant, for example, for public service reform. So what are the principles that unite the education reform and the health reform? They seem to be going off. If I understand it rightly in sort of completely different directions, it says something about how the media cover the elections. [01:01:00] It says something about the kind of questions we as the public, as the electorate ask elections. But it also says something about how the higher echelons of the political parties operate.

Because surely if you're sitting in shadow cabinet in the run up to the general election, and you can see this, the polls, you know, there's a barring disaster. There's a very, very good chance you're entering government and you haven't got a plan. But I, I think a lot of this is the WhatsApp culture. Yeah. You know, we are so busy fighting for the president. The day day. We're so busy dealing with X. We're so busy sorting out the problem in our WhatsApp groups. We're so busy with the constituency problem. We are not thinking, hang on a second here. We've got a quite restrictive financial framework. Mm-hmm.

We've got MPs who lean to the left. How are these things gonna work together when we come to do welfare reform? And I think part of it seems to be a question of. Kind of like time management and strategic management. Does that seem No, absolutely. I mean, one of [01:02:00] the problems I always have with MPs is they accept invitations to every meeting under the sun. And you sort of sit there and think, why are they going to that telling you that they're exhausted and they're going to all these evening receptions and having their photographs taken with the placards for social media messaging. If you wanna get an MP along to an event in the evening, you, you know, you need to include a social media opportunity These days. There is this sort of desire for just step back and say, why am I doing this?

It's an interesting question about the hours because part of the argument for the present hours is all those long hours, the old hours were kind of, they family unfriendly. But what's the point of these family friendly hours?If actually you are here, your family is somewhere else, whose family are you being friendly? Whose family? But you are. You are out in the evening, all these receptions. So it's kind of like. You're not getting your downtime. Yeah. Anyway, it takes me back to that conversation mark that we had with Simon Hart, [01:03:00] the former conservative Chief Whip and who produced his memoirs and he was sold us.

He picking up this issue about what is it that gets people into politics? How do you get the right people in as MPs to be those future ministers and, and legislative scrutiny is, but how do you get them to feel that at the end of their period in office, they've had a fulfilling experience. We can talk about money, we can talk about time.

You know, all of these issues come into play. Mm-hmm. But one of the things that is interesting, I came out of that conversation as I recall, Mark, was that he talked about the fact that we need candidates who are resilient. But actually quite a lot of the MPs that come through, they have quite high expectations about what they're gonna be able to achieve.

Mm-hmm. And actually events or you know, what whatever's happening in government can coMPletely SC it. And they find that at the end of the day, what they've been trying to achieve, maybe it's a bill or it's a, a change in in policy doesn't happen. And not [01:04:00] as a result of anything they've done, but as a result of background context and, and circumstances.

And how do you get them to be more resilient And that one of the reasons they get so many problems with, with MPs who sort of, um, in their evening, uh, hours go off and do silly things as, as he, he talks about in his memoirs, is disappointment and a sense of which this, this political career is not particularly fulfilling on being on this, this hamster wheel of meetings and events and social media.

I think two, two things. The first is you can't control time and tide. I mean, your party may suddenly go out of government or you may suddenly be moved because someone dies or resigns or whatever. All that. But think the role model here for success, although he was lucky in terms of when his party was in office and not your role model really is Nick Gibb, who went into politics as kinda ambitious, conservative and got this sort of caught up in education reform.

He just made education reform. His life's business and has taken it [01:05:00] immensely seriously and really, really dedicated to the subject. That's what you have to look for, I think, in potential candidates as well as good local representatives. It's people who really want to do stuff and will. Taking your point about resilience, who will keep going?

Well, there's plenty of foo for thought there, Paul Goodman. I'm not sure any of us have come to a solution that is actually likely to be adopted, even though as Ruth was saying, we've got plenty of policy ideas here at the Hanson Society. But thanks very much indeed for joining us on. Thank you Parliament Matters.

Well, that was great, Paul. Thanks very much. And, uh, listeners, hope you enjoyed that. We'll be picking up those themes in, uh, future episodes of the podcast. No doubt. Just to let you know. We will be back next week, a day later than normal in your podcast feed. Um, we'll be launching the next episode on Saturday, not Friday as normal.

And that's because it's second reading of the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords. So we will be back to tackle and pick apart what [01:06:00] happens in the House of Lords so it could be a very long evening. There are over nearly 200 speakers listed to take part in that debate and will be joined all being well by our procedural, our new procedural guru, sir David Beamish.

Yes, it could go on late into the night. There may or may not be a vote. It's even within the bounds of procedural possibility, at least that the bill could be thrown out by their Lordships. And we'll be there to report on whatever happens, and it should be with you next Saturday.

See you then.

Bye bye.

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

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