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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. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Why did Nigel Farage's Ten Minute Rule Bill to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights fail? And what does it tell us about the state of politics now?

Mark D'Arcy: After two reports from a special Speakers' Conference, what more can be done to protect MPs and candidates from abuse?

Ruth Fox: Plus, the secret life of Westminster Hall, the MPs' alternative debating Chamber.

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, there have been a couple of very significant election [00:01:00] results of one sort or another in the past week. Naturally, they were going on while we were recording last week's pod, but there you go. That's show business. The Caerphilly by-election, which was an awful result for Labour and a very good result for Plaid Cymru.

And it has to be said for Reform as well. Plus, of course, the election of Lucy Powell quite convincingly as Labour's new deputy leader behind Angela Rayner, who's obviously now departed from that office and somewhat ahead of the official Labour leadership candidate.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I thought that was a bit closer than I expected, actually.

I thought Bridget Phillipson did a bit better than some of the media speculation had suggested she would..

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it does suggest there's an ability to mobilize a bit of internal campaigning by the leadership inside the Labour Party, but they still lost. And it's quite an interesting position now that Lucy Powell finds herself in because she's both the deputy leader of the governing party and outside the government. So she's got no collective responsibility, at least at a formal [00:02:00] level to toe the ministerial line in the way that all the other ministers have to do. And indeed that Bridget Phillipson would've had to do had she been elected as deputy leader. So she's got an interestingly independent position, and I suppose we've gotta wait and see what she now does with it.

Ruth Fox: Well, of course an interesting test will be the budget process, presumably because, you know, in the weeks ahead as we seem to have an awful lot of speculation about what the budget may or may not contain. But certainly the mood music seems to be, it is gonna be very tough. Really difficult decisions are gonna have to be made. And the possibility that election commitments, manifesto commitments are gonna be broken from perspective of Labour back benchers, as we've seen in quite a number of policy areas where difficult decisions have been made. There's, you know, been a sort of a breakdown, if you like, between the Prime Minister's office number 10 and the back benches and what they're prepared to wear. So does she become an interesting negotiator or power broker in that process?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it's certainly a role that she could pick up and one [00:03:00] area to watch I think will be what the government attempts to do in the budget, if anything, about social security. Remember that the last attempt to cut the burgeoning social security budget ran into trouble when Labour MPs could simply not be persuaded to vote for it. And if there's an attempt, and there may well be to try and bring personal independence payments and other benefits down a bit, in some way, she could emerge as a very important, honest broker figure between the government and its troops. Now it's come to something when the government needs that, but it has.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The other question is if they do break their manifesto commitment on income tax, for example, for particular taxpayers, whether or not that is going to be something that you just wear, you accept it as a political price, you've got to pay. The government's already unpopular. You just wear it in the hope that you get more headroom in your financial plans for the future. You can make some changes that you hope will, by the time of the next election, come to fruition and you can regain some of that popularity. Or [00:04:00] conversely, by breaking a manifesto commitment, does this fatally damage your relationship with the electorate that they were so clear about despite people like us and far more eminent economic minds than ours was saying this was

Mark D'Arcy: Every single financial think tank in the universe said that taxes were gonna have to go up in quite a big way. And they were saying, oh, no, no, no, it'll be fine. Trust us.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So breaking that promise and not having run an election campaign where they were really open and engaged with the electorate about the real challenges and what that might mean.

Does that fatally damage your relationship with the electorate? And there's sort of an interesting debate about this 'cause some people are clearly saying, no, you know, it is far better to get the finances, the economics under control. And some of, uh, you know, I mean, I saw some commentary from the pollster, Luke Tryl, More in Common, saying, actually this could be it for the mainstream political parties if you score your way through all your promises and break such a key one.

But actually just the public opinion is at such a low ebb in [00:05:00] terms of perceptions of the two main political parties that this could be far more damaging than some are suggesting.

Mark D'Arcy: I think a very interesting question now is whether Keir Starmer is about to enter, or indeed has already entered what I think of as the Clegg zone, whether or not he's going to end up being completely discredited by the breaking of a promise. If you think back to 2010, and that election, which produced the Conservative Lib Dem coalition government, Nick Clegg crossed the country, university town after university town, signing a pact in blood, never to raise student tuition fees. What did he do?

As soon as coalition negotiation started, he agreed to raise student tuition fees. Now, there were all sorts of little hedges and face saving devices within the policy, but the problem was that he broke a direct promise in the eyes of an awful lot of voters, and he was simply never forgiven for it.

However much he tried to change the subject or move on in any way, it always came back to the fact that he had promised one thing and done something completely [00:06:00] different. I wonder if that's about to happen to Keir Starmer, I mean, there's another view that maybe he's already fritted away so much confidence since July 2024 that there's not much more to lose, but he's certainly in a very difficult place and it could become even more difficult.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I mean, the obvious thing in his favour is that there's no obvious candidate as an alternative Prime Minister at the present time, no doubt several in the cabinet who fancy their chances, and Andy Burnham obviously did prior to the party conference season.

But that seems to have been put paid to. The other aspect, I think, Mark, that comes out of the events of the last few days is how the government, other political parties, handle Reform. And out of the Caerphilly by-election Reform, obviously didn't win it, Plaid Cymru won it, but to go to the kind of numbers that they accumulated in that by-election was a very, very impressive performance.

And one of the challenges in the House of Commons is the kinds of issues that Nigel Farage and his colleagues are raising. How does the Labour Party in government, how do some of the older opposition parties respond to [00:07:00] that? And I thought there was an interesting demonstration of this, this week in the House itself when Nigel Farage brought a Ten Minute Rule Bill forward on Wednesday to essentially legislate to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a signature Reform policy, something that the Conservative party has in essence recently signed up to following a report by the Shadow Attorney General Lord Fox, and some interesting developments I thought, in terms of the response of the Labour back benches to this.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, yes, indeed. I mean, the original idea, at least as the press reports, is that Labour MPs were told that they should abstain on any vote on Nigel Farage's Ten Minute Rule Bill, essentially sit on their hands and not directly oppose it. And there was apparently a lot of pushback by Labour MPs who felt that they actually wanted to vote against this and were quite annoyed not to. And the line softened. They were told they could vote against it if they wanted.

Now, part of that is because a Ten Minute Rule Bill is a pretty low form [00:08:00] of legislative life. Essentially what happens is an MP gets the chance to make a 10 minute speech seeking permission to bring in a bill. And then a 10 minute speech opposing that bill can also be made. And indeed in this case was, but what then happens is that that bill just goes to the back of a long queue of other legislation waiting to be debated.

Theoretically, it might pop up on a random private member's bill Friday if you get far enough down the agenda. But in this case, there are no more Private Members' Bill Fridays scheduled. So this was always, at least at the moment, at least for the moment, so this was always going nowhere. I mean, even if one or two were scheduled, there are plenty of other things that would take precedence over Nigel Farage's bill.

So this was going nowhere. So it's purely at a symbolic level. But there are two things here. I mean, doubling back to the Caerphilly by-election for a moment. Some people say that what Caerphilly demonstrates is that there is an in heavy inverted commas, a progressive majority that can be mobilized behind a single candidate to stop Reform party candidates.

[00:09:00] So if enough progressive-minded voters combined behind a single candidate be they Plaid Cymru as it was in this case, or maybe a Lib Dem or a Labour candidate or a Green candidate or whoever, then the Faragistas can be stopped. Now for that to work, a lot of Labour MPs are thinking, you actually as a Labour government have to demonstrate the occasional flash of in inverted comma progressivism and do progressive things or alternatively fight non-progressive things.

And so they were wondering why on earth they were told not to oppose this Ten Minute Rule Bill, even if it was a purely symbolic gesture by Reform.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And the other aspect is, of course, Reform didn't turn out all their MPs either. Mm-hmm. I mean, the parliamentary group of, what are they now? Five, are never gonna get a bill through.

And because it's a Ten Minute Rule Bill, it had no chance. And I know quite a number of people on social media, on Reform side are, you know, criticizing the fact, oh, you know, terrible that this legislation didn't get through. I hate to manage their [00:10:00] expectations, but it was never gonna get onto the statute.

But it was a purely symbolic, I mean, Ten Minute Rule Bill are about putting policy aims into legislative language and giving the MP 10 minutes in prime time to make their case in the House of Commons Chamber. And Nigel Farage duly got that. Ed Davey opposed it and then

Mark D'Arcy: And enjoyed the prime time just as much.

Ruth Fox: And what was unusual is that MPs voted to actually not give him leave to bring in the bill, 'cause usually for 10 minute rule bills, they're not very controversial and they just go through, yeah, there's no vote. And they go to the sort of the end of the list of private members bills that will be considered if time allows.

But in this case, there was a vote, 154 MPs voted no, and 96 voted yes. And that was predominantly Reform MPs, the Conservatives, and a smattering of some of the MPs from Northern Ireland, from the unionist parties, but only three of Reform's five MPs were present. So I don't know where Sarah Pochin and Danny Kruger were, but they didn't appear to vote in that division if indeed the voting lists are accurate.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the voting [00:11:00] lists are usually pretty accurate, so you do slightly wonder where they got to and why they didn't think of bringing them in just as a show of of support. But it was also an opportunity picked up by the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, who made a speech opposing it. I can't think of the last time there has been a time when a Ten Minute Rule Bill has been opposed by an actual party leader in that way. But he took the opportunity to have a few digs at the case of the Reform MEP, who took money to spout the Russian party line in the European Parliament and elsewhere. So there was quite an effective speech from him and he was later pictured brandishing a half pint of beer, a very Lib Dem thing to do. You might think, go with the pipe, just to celebrate. I mean, maybe he didn't want to look as if he was gonna be drunk on duty later or something. But, you know, this is all taken to social media. Andy Wigmore, a big figure in the Reform party has been saying, oh, 150 odd MPs who voted against this are going to lose their seats at the next election.

And various other people have been bemoaning the defeat of this bill, but it was [00:12:00] never, as you say, going to be in actual law. I mean, you know, a 10 minute rule bills have once every thousand years made into law.

Ruth Fox: A bit more often than that, Mark very, very, very occasionally.

Mark D'Arcy: A guy called Andrew Dismore, I think got one through sometime during the previous Labour government before 2010, who's a Labour master of procedural shenanigans and was very clever in the way that he played this.

But he had the support of the government to do it. And you need that, and you certainly haven't got it on this occasion.

But is this overriding question. Should Labour the Labour whips, the Labour leadership have just taken a sterner line and allowed Labour MPs to vent their spleen a bit against Reform by voting against this bill.

Ruth Fox: Well, it'd be interesting to see what form MPs do in the future if they try and, you know, use some of these parliamentary mechanisms and opportunities to test out some of these dividing lines. Because, you know, the whole point about things like a Ten Minute Rule Bill debate is it's a mechanism to have a debate and to test the opinion of the House on a subject.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, indeed, and we were saying in the pod just last week, that Reform need to get a [00:13:00] bit smarter about using the parliamentary avenues that are open to them. And yeah, they're a very small party in the parliamentary ecosystem at the moment with just five MPs.

They're not gonna get a huge amount of the parliamentary limelight. But a guerilla action, particularly one aimed at perhaps carolling the support of Conservative MPs and maybe luring a few more defectors over the line is something that they could do. And if they were smart about it and used a few opportunities, maybe they would do that.

But I don't think they've got very many really experienced parliamentarians there. Lee Anderson, their chief whip is the most experienced Reform MP, and he's a relatively recent arrival in Parliament as well. Perhaps doesn't know all the procedural intricacies either. A bit of learning how to be an effective parliamentary guerilla fighter as a kind of badge of horror of the green benches is what they need to do now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, with that image, shall we take a break Mark and come back and talk about the Speakers' Conference report, which has been published about the [00:14:00] security of candidates and MPs in the future?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. It's a very, very interesting and important topic, this one.

Ruth Fox: But before we go to the break, Mark, can I just put in a quick word for any MPs or members of their staff who may be listening?

The society is running a brand new training session designed especially for parliamentary and constituency staff. It's called Mastering Parliamentary Papers and Parliament's website, and it's all about helping their staff find, interpret, and make the most of parliament's sort of documentation. So if there's any parliamentary staff out there who's struggling to understand the order paper or track down a ministerial piece of correspondence about a bill or find an amendment paper, this session is very nerdy, will show you how to do it quickly and confidently. I've written to all MPs Mark about the details. So, MPs check your inboxes to find out how to sign up, and if you can't find it, drop me an email at contact@hansardsociety.org.uk and if you're listening before the 7th of November, there's an early bird [00:15:00] discount, so don't hang about. So that's Mastering Parliamentary papers and Parliament's website. The training's online on the 20th of November helping MPs teams get the very best out of Parliament's resources. And if you don't work for an MP, but that training sounds right up your street, don't worry. We'll be running a version for people based outside Parliament in December and I'll be sharing details about that soon.

Mark D'Arcy: Not to be missed, but let's take that break.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back, and there's increasing concern in politics about the rising tide of abuse against MPs, which can range from social media abuse at a pretty nasty level, more than mere criticism of their politics or their policies, to actual outright physical violence. There have of course been horrible high profile cases involving the murders of MPs, Jo Cox, David Amess.

There have been court cases involving serious plots to inflict physical harm on Members of Parliament and they seem to crop [00:16:00] up more and more often now. A speakers' Conference has been looking at the issues. This is a sort of super select committee that has been taking evidence and has produced now a couple of reports on the issue looking at what might be done.

And one of the people who gave evidence to the Speakers' Conference is Sofia Collignon, who's a reader in comparative politics and director of the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London.

Ruth Fox: So we began by asking Sofia what kind of conduct we're talking about. What does abuse of MPs mean?

Sofia Collignon: So in the UK we use the term harassment, abuse, and intimidation as a general umbrella term, but that comprises, for example, physical assault, being punched on the face, being kicked, for example, being followed on the street.

But also, and I think that very relevant in the case of the UK, we hear a lot about psychological abuse as well. So politicians being followed on the street, threatened on social media or by letters or phone calls, being doxed. These type of [00:17:00] threats. So it is not only about physical abuse, it's also about psychological abuse and also abuse that can happen online.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Doxed being the practice of publishing, for example, people's working address, their home addresses, their personal phone number. Give them a call and tell 'em what you think. That's what dox means in this context.

Sofia Collignon: And also being swapped, for example. That's another interesting phenomena when people call security services so they can go to a particular politician's address.

So they go there and they basically collapse the area, so people start wondering about what's going on there. And that's another way of intimidating politicians.

Ruth Fox: The Speakers' Conference report sort of recommendations. There's quite a lot of them, but should we start with the social media side of things?

There's an awful lot of talk about X and Twitter, a bit about Facebook and so on, but there hasn't that been that much discussion about other aspects of social media. Like we see politicians now increasingly on TikTok. I keep being told Mark that that's where everybody gets their political news these days.

Mark D'Arcy: I believe it's very popular with young people.

Ruth Fox: With [00:18:00] young people. But there wasn't much about that in the report. Indeed, in the wider discussions. And my sense was that the report's recommendations were a bit, underwhelming, we've gotta implement the Online Safety Acts recommendations. They talk about an election code of practice for Ofcom and so on, but there wasn't much directed, actually, possibly stronger measures against the tech companies themselves.

Sofia Collignon: It's true, and I think that the report is very good at recognizing that there are limitations on how social media can engage and what they can really do or force them to do. However, at the same time, we need to recognize that social media are companies and they respond to the market logic, so they are not going to be acting out of goodwill or voluntarily.

They really will need to be forced to act. Now, it's true that it refers a lot about X, but there are other social media platforms that are increasingly being used, like for example, Instagram or TikTok, and they allow different ways of communicating with the public. [00:19:00] So for example, Facebook can be more closed groups. When you can control who is following you. X tends to be way more open. TikTok, for example, has a line of not being a political platform. However, I will argue that the more that people are getting to consume their news on TikTok, it also means that politicians are using TikTok to release this information.

So maybe they are not designed to be a platform for active discussions, but they are being used for that purpose.

Ruth Fox: Is there perhaps then a need to be thinking the Speakers' Conference could perhaps have recommended something along these lines that to strengthen it, that actually we need to be thinking more internationally. 'Cause this is not clearly a domestic British problem. It's much wider and the tech companies are operating at a multinational level. But until democracies are willing to tackle this and willing to tackle the tech companies on some of these issues and accept that they're not, as you say, they're not goodwill actors.

They're about making money and about power, but they are a threat to the values of our democracy and how our democracy [00:20:00] operates. So until we confront that problem, this problem's not gonna ease. Never mind go away.

Sofia Collignon: And also, I think that there is a fundamental question there, which is, do we want social media platforms to be the guardians of democracy?

And those are platforms that A, are not owned, as you clearly say, by British people. B, their guidelines are cross borders and see we are seeing that they depend a lot on the favorite algorithm at the time, which is completely not transparent. So we don't really know how the algorithm is working and how easily it can be tweaked, which is, for example, something some politicians complain about that.

Another way of silencing them now is when the platform leadership do not agree necessarily with what they are saying or with their persona and want to criticize them. The easiest way of doing it is by pushing what they are saying to the bottom of the newsfeed. So even if they want to engage with people, they are effectively being silenced.

So yeah, they do respond to market logics and I think that an alternative could be to attack the market, for example. So [00:21:00] one idea will be taxes, for example, for protecting democracy. The democracy tax, or something around those lines. But yeah, relying on the idea that they are going to be doing it for good will or voluntarily.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the snags with that though, is that a lot of these big companies, mostly American owned, if you recall the picture of all the big tech wars sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, they're gonna have so much influence of the US President that any attempt to curb their activities in Britain could result in international consequences for this country.

You know, the wonderful trade deal that you think you've got suddenly evaporates because someone's whispered in Donald Trump's ear that someone's trying to curb the activities of X or Facebook or whoever it is.

Sofia Collignon: I think that's a fantastic, it's, it's a really good point and it really highlights how this problem will have domestic but also international consequences.

There are creative ways around, for example, countries like Germany that have been much more strongly regulating on social media interactions. There is also a lot of work to [00:22:00] be done on digital training, also on liabilities. For example, when particularly publish information that is not necessarily true or verifiable.

And I think there is a responsibility among leaders to also fact check what they are publishing. But if they are not fact checking and engaging on the spread of misinformation, which can be very harmful for certain people, like, I mean, we have the case of in France now of Mrs. Macron.

Mark D'Arcy: She's suing, I think at the moment in America to prove that she's not in fact a man.

Which is, is just plain bizarre. But there we go.

Sofia Collignon: I think that social media have been used in the world of, is in the public interest in the UK to excuse some of the behavior. But the way that public interest and freedom of information and freedom of speech is defined in the law in the US is completely different from how it is defined in the UK for example. In the UK we do have the caveat of you are free to say whatever you want to say until you are harming someone. And so clearly the law [00:23:00] establishes where the lines are and I think it's something that we tend to extrapolate what we know about the US case and bring it to the UK.

But actually we do have other kind of legal provisions there.

Ruth Fox: I mean, the abuse, it affects all MPs. I mean, male MPs get some of this as well, but it particularly affects female MPs and candidates. In the run up to the general election as we saw last year. You've done a lot of research on this and you've also done comparative research.

I mean, how does our situation here compare with the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you know, some of the Europe, big European democracy, Scandinavia, France, Germany.

Sofia Collignon: So what we are seeing is that, the case of the UK is not particularly bad compared to comparable democracies, as you've mentioned, this is a problem that is manifesting worldwide.

Ruth Fox: So everybody's bad.

Sofia Collignon: Everybody's suffering from it. And also every country's trying to do what they can to make it better. Yeah, so that's the other thing. We don't have a [00:24:00] perfect solution at the moment, and it is a very multifactorial problem that will require a lot of coordination if we want to solve it.

Right. So domestic coordination between, for example, the police, parties and other institutions, but also international cooperation. For example, in the case of social media, but also other countries meddling with elections or assigning responsibility. What we find is that in the case of, for example, Denmark and Sweden, the patterns are basically the same.

What really makes the case of the UK special is the electoral system that we use. So in the UK we have a first past the post electoral system. A lot of European countries use a proportional representation, which means that the link between where the politician lives and the public or the citizens is different. So in the case of the UK it is relatively easy to identify in which geographical area the politician is more likely to be operating. That of course, adds to the level of threat. [00:25:00]

Ruth Fox: Does that mean that in the UK we are seeing higher levels of in-person harassment? Because the person who wants to attack or to harass an MP can sort of more accurately target them.

Whereas MPs on list systems, proportional list systems have got much bigger geographical areas. Usually for a constituency or a region operating at a regional level is much harder. Is that the problem?

Sofia Collignon: Well, physical attacks are fortunately, very rare, in the UK, so we don't see very high levels of physical violence.

But what we see and has been increasing a lot is people following politicians in the street, for example, or screaming to them, which amounts to psychological abuse. So maybe they are not physically being punched, however, that has a psychological effect on them as well.

Ruth Fox: MPs at the school gates, I think of particularly female MPs.

With their children.

Sofia Collignon: Yeah, with their childrens. But when we talk about MPs, the constituency geographical area is larger, but think about [00:26:00] local elections. In local elections, by definition, what we have is the councillor needing to be embedded in the community to represent them. So one of the things that they say that is really harmful is that they most likely know their perpetrator, even if it's psychological abuse or abuse that happens online.

For them, it's way easier to identify who is being the perpetrator and it's people that they go to church together. Or they have to do their shopping and they find them in the same store, they find them on the street. That can be really harmful for them.

Mark D'Arcy: Your own work has demonstrated that this is a particularly serious issue for women candidates, for women office holders, MPs, councils, whatever, and that they are disproportionately the targets for that kind of activity.

Sofia Collignon: Yes. So we find that more than half of women are being subject of any form of abuse, harassment, or intimidation. And that this is even worse if you're a woman from an ethnic minority or from a religious minority as well. And the [00:27:00] reason is that actually perpetrators take everything that can be special or interesting identity wise about you. So they take your identity and they convert this identity into a weapon so they weaponize your uniqueness, let's say. Um, that's something as well that we are seeing with LGBTQ plus candidates. They are also being targeted. So if we start accumulating all of these particular personal characteristics, that means that the likelihood of being abused just multiplies.

But I want to put that caveat there as well, because one of the things that we are talking a lot right now is about how being a woman makes you a target or being a member of an ethnic minority. However, women and ethnic minorities also have something really special, which is that it's their own identity that give them another community.

And those communities, for example, women's groups and parties or particular churches and your own local community, can also work as a [00:28:00] protection network. That where you can safely talk about your own experiences and understand that your experience might not be specific about you. But it's about the other experiencing hate towards your community.

So it is more, most likely reflecting misogyny, for example. But you can talk about that with your own network of women. So it's true that they are being targets, but at the same time it's true that they do find interesting ways of coping with the abuse.

Mark D'Arcy: And when you're disproportionately targeted though, and perhaps start taking precautions of fewer public appearances, a bit more careful about going out canvassing or going out to campaign in a busy market street, for example.

If you stop doing those things, you're then immediately disadvantaged.

Sofia Collignon: Yes. So my research shows that if we look at people that were harassed in 2019, in the 2019 general election, what we see is that women were more likely to suffer any form of abuse, but also as a [00:29:00] consequence, they were less likely to engage in social media campaign activities.

Now, we might think that this doesn't have any effect on electability, however, my research has shown that actually if they stop engaging on social media or going to rallies, for example, that directly affects their likelihood of being elected and their electoral success. So it's not only about women or ethnic minorities or particular candidates decide to step down and not to present themselves for election again, but it's also how it's harming their chances to be elected at the end.

Ruth Fox: So it has quite important potential consequences for the nature of representative democracy in this country going forward. Because the whole thing about the way our system works is that local link. It's about being visible and active in communities. It's about being accessible through things like constituency advice surgeries.

But we're actually seeing MPs increasingly because of the threat being advised that perhaps they shouldn't do some of those public meetings or [00:30:00] some of those advice surgeries in the local community.

Mark D'Arcy: Or go online.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, that they've actually gotta move online in order to protect themselves. And that has quite important implications for what the relationship is between the Member of Parliament or the candidate and the constituent in the future.

Sofia Collignon: Yes. So one very clear example of this is that in the UK we are used to seeing MPs or candidates publishing their home addresses as a way of signaling that they are local so that they can understand the local issues and also that they are going to be responsive to what the local community needs.

Currently, one of the recommendations is to remove the home addresses from the public domain, which means that candidates will have way less to signal that they are local and they understand this local issues, but also it's another avenue in which we are removing the politician from their communities.

And I think this is quite important. So one alternative is to use PO boxes instead of the [00:31:00] addresses, but also we are saying that when the level of risk is considered to be higher, some of the candidates and some of the MPs are removing their surgeries or the campaign events to something that is online creating a lot of inequalities on who can access.

Mark D'Arcy: Those surgeries or events, you're immediately disadvantaging people who aren't perhaps very good at getting online to attend a virtual MP surgery, for example.

Sofia Collignon: Exactly.

It has an effect on who is being heard as well, who makes it to office, so who is representing, who is persevering despite of all the risk, what are the kind of policies that are being debate and how they are being debated as well.

So we see a larger proportion of candidates, for example, in service and MPs as well in service, saying that they are deciding not to participate in certain debates or to moderate what they think about controversial issues in response to the abuse that they suffer. Now something interesting is that these abuse is not necessarily coming from their own constituents, it's from outside. So [00:32:00] it comes from the outside. So there is a lot of different implications for the public debate and also for who is being heard.

Ruth Fox: And it's not just MPs and candidates themselves is it's their families. 'cause we're, you know, one of the things that Speakers' Conference report picks up is that the way in which the families are affected by this, so children at school, spouses are affected by it sometimes in their place of employment or sometimes just, you know, going about their normal business in the supermarket and themselves being followed or receiving unpleasant correspondence through the letterbox or emails or phone calls and so on.

Mark, I've got an interesting question for you. One of the recommendations and Speakers' Conference on this is also about the role of the media in all this. So we've talked about social media, but the role of traditional media, some of your former colleagues, journalists, doorstepping politicians in the constituencies at home with their families.

It's not quite a form of harassment exactly, but if you are on the end of it, it feels like it. [00:33:00] And the Speakers' Conference basically saying they should stop doing that.

Mark D'Arcy: It depends on the circumstances. I think with this, sometimes if you've got a very serious question for a political representative and they won't answer it, maybe at that point it feels like a legitimate thing to do to go and knock on their door.

I think it becomes much more difficult when you have a sort of encampment of hundreds of journalists and photographers outside your house for ages because you're caught up in some political controversy or scandal. Maybe that becomes very uncomfortable for the family. I do wonder if you fence people off completely, you're just giving people an absolutely ironclad way of ducking questions that they really ought to answer.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. It's this sort of fixed question of what's the public interest? Yeah. Where's the line?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there's that. I would hate to be on the receiving end of a large crowd in camped outside by house, shouting questions, lenses being put against the windows to see if they catch a picture of me inside my house. Cowering away. It must be pretty unpleasant. But I sometimes wonder if the cure might be worse than the [00:34:00] disease. 'cause if you get a sort of political super class that's insulated from any form of question, it makes it so much easier to avoid asking what may be very necessary questions.

Ruth Fox: One of the other recommendations that I found fascinating because it's something we have talked about in the past, and I thought the link between it and this issue of harassment and particularly misrepresentation of facts and so on was really interesting.

This idea that the Speakers' Conference recommends that, to avoid oversimplification and misrepresentation of stories about politicians that you encourage politicians to participate more in long form interviews.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh, well, I'm all in favour of that. I thought you might be. I really am. I think one of the worst things about recent elections is the way, for example, famously Boris Johnson in 2019 simply ducked appearing in front of Andrew Neil, who would've asked difficult, intricate questions to him. And he essentially wimped out of doing that. And I thought it was shameful. It should be part of the democratic process that you submit yourself to long form interviews.

Now they're an [00:35:00] increasingly scarce part of the media ecosphere these days anyway, 'cause they tend to have quite small audiences. And broadcasters who lecture endlessly about their public service work seem to be doing less and less actual public service. Naming no particular institutions, which I used to work for, but all the same.

I really do think that A, the broadcasters need to do more of it, and B, the politicians need to engage just to get democratic discussion going.

Ruth Fox: Another actor that is part of this discussion but actually doesn't feature much in the Speakers' Conference report, I think it's a real weakness, is the role of political parties, and we all know that sometimes we've heard about politicians themselves attacking other politicians in terms that are frankly offensive and unhelpful.

And unless you're setting an example, it's a problem, Sofia, there's very little about political parties in these recommendations.

Sofia Collignon: So in both the reports, I think political parties are considered to be a strategic partner, for example, so people that can, or institutions [00:36:00] that can help implementing some of the recommendations but not necessarily object or subject to any reform and action. And it's true that in many cases what we see is that the perpetrators can be easily identified as belonging to a particular party. What the parties do with perpetrators can signal a lot, can signal commitment with the issue, but also commitment with how their own supporters should be behaving and how do they have to engage in the democratic process? And what we, I think that I would like to see much more is parties engaging in training not only to their candidates, but also to the people that support their campaigns, to make them understand what is acceptable and what is not and why is not acceptable.

Mark D'Arcy: Training certainly, but also maybe disciplining them, maybe occasionally disavowing someone. You know, you think back to it's almost ancient history now. There was a period in the early [00:37:00] sixties where a Labour cabinet minister Patrick Gordon Walker, who's going to be foreign secretary in Harold Wilson's government, lost his seat in the general tide of a general election.

And had to try and come back later. But he lost to someone who was fighting on the slogan, which I won't repeat exactly 'cause it's so bleeding offensive. If you want a black person for a neighbour vote Labour, the MP who won on that slogan was, Harold Wilson said, going to be a parliamentary pariah. But, uh, wasn't disowned at the time, at the parties actually have to come out hard against people who cross a line, I think.

And they've gotta be prepared to pay the cost of that, which may be that they write off a parliamentary seat.

Sofia Collignon: And adding to that point in 2017, it was the first time that the candidate survey that we run and have been running for a very long, like for a long time, asked the questions about, or the battery of questions on abuse, harassment, and intimidation to candidates.

And what we found in 2017 is that the Conservative Party was being targeted. So candidates from the Conservative Party were more likely to be subjects of abuse than [00:38:00] candidates from other parties. And when we look at the answers to the open-ended questions, what we find is that a lot of them mention Momentum as responsible for the abuse.

So Momentum emerged as a grassroots movement, and the party, of course, was not necessarily responsible at the time of what Momentum was doing, but they were able to organize in tactics and use tactics that were considered to be in the intermediary with some of the candidates, especially considering that the tragic death of Jo Cox just happened.

That just highlights the responsibility that parties have there, as you said, like this, providing the training to their supporters on how not to engage and what are the kind of things that are not acceptable in a democratic context.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a very important point though, that the parties can police their own, but they can't necessarily police organizations that aren't quite within their control.

And so you can have kind of ginger groups and extremist organizations getting involved in the process who don't have a candidate there who can't be disciplined by the parties [00:39:00] concerned, and that's where you have to look elsewhere. Now, the report does include the suggestion there ought to be a national police unit tasked with essentially protecting the democratic process and protecting candidates within it.

Sofia Collignon: And I think that that's a fantastic recommendation to make because currently what we are seeing is kind of a postcode lottery where depending on where the abuse happens and the training that the local police has effects how seriously the attack is taken, but also the capacity of the police to really find the perpetrator.

And I think that actually having one single unit that can monitor and has a responsibility to monitor or protect democracy, I think can be a way of even the ground for people to participate in politics.

Ruth Fox: They've also said that there should be much more effort in terms of improved citizenship education, which is something we obviously support, at the Hansard Society, they talk about national public awareness campaigns and they want sort of an effort led by the defending democracy task force [00:40:00] that was set up by the government to sort of challenge the abuse and promote and draw the line about what respectful political engagement looks like, political communication.

But this Speakers' Conference itself will come to an end with this final report. So what are your sort of hopes in terms of the long-term prospects of this making any difference? It's helped open the debate. There's been more conversation about it, but implementation is a another step.

Sofia Collignon: So it is a shame that there is very little cross-fertilization between what countries know that might be working and what we can't do in the UK, for example, Latin American countries like Bolivia and Mexico have implemented legislation to protect people in public life from any electoral violence or electoral related violence, and those policies have been quite successful. So some of them have been successful in terms of the tearing particular forms of violence, but some others as well of providing the politicians a level of security and yeah, a [00:41:00] framework in which they can protect themselves.

However, we don't really, because there's not that much research that is comparative in terms of what has been implemented and has worked in some places. We don't have a lot of information about how we can translate those findings or those policies into something that might work in the UK. So we are reinventing the wheel over and over again when actually there are countries that have been dealing with this issue for a much more longer time, and some of them quite successfully.

I think that there at this moment, we are in a moment where we arrive to have one single institution in charge of coordinating all the efforts. What we are seeing is that different stakeholders are doing different things, but we don't have any way of measuring things. So currently there is no evaluation.

So we don't know what works and what doesn't work. We don't really have one single person that, or one single institution that coordinates the effort and send one single message. We don't currently have someone that monitors the [00:42:00] implementation either. So I think that we are in a moment when we really need leadership that is recognized as leaving the multiple strands of the proposal instead of leaving it to this kind of desegregated way in which we have been working so far.

Ruth Fox: And who could that be? 'cause the defending democracy task force is a sort of internal government unit. Sounds like more of a mission for the Electoral Commission.

Sofia Collignon: Yeah, I will definitely say that. The electoral commission should have the

Mark D'Arcy: Fresh from all their other triumphs.

Sofia Collignon: Yeah. Well, and also not forget the resources.

That's the other thing. Yeah. Look, I mean it's not only about having the mandate to do something, but also it's giving them proper resources to do it. Yeah. So if they are going to be engaging with multiple stakeholders, they should have the resources to appoint personnel and also especially evaluation. I think that currently if we don't evaluate, we don't really know what will work or not, and we are in the risk of overregulating and restricting things without necessarily knowing if things work or [00:43:00] if any instrument will work or not work.

Ruth Fox: But also not learning from other countries if we don't have that resource to, to look as you say and research and evaluate it.

Mark D'Arcy: I wonder what I hope there is that things will be better come the next elections. Sophia, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth, me on the pod today.

Sofia Collignon: Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very happy that we're here.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And, and Ruth, we've got a listener question that's come through and it's on quite an interesting area of Parliament, a relatively new feature of the operations of the House of Commons. I say relatively new, couple of decades old now, but uh, it is still perhaps not completely familiar to a lot of people outside the world of Westminster.

And this is debates in the Commons parallel debating Chamber, Westminster Hall.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So we've had a question from. Tim Kingston Hepner, who says he's been watching a, a Westminster Hall debate on the IB in state schools, which I assume is the International Baccalaureate debate, Mark. Tim's wondering about, uh, these debates, how long have they been around?

How much of [00:44:00] the powers and privileges of the House do they enjoy? Do they have a quorum? Are they a form of committee? Do they tend to be attended by a crowd of like-minded MPs or do they draw in multiple views on an issue? And then he says, are they a feature of Westminster Parliaments, which have been exported elsewhere?

And finally he says, because there are never enough questions, he's putting that to the test. Does the Lords have an equivalent? And he adds, great, great podcast. Keep it up. A very real and rare diamond in so much political podcasting rough.

Mark D'Arcy: Well thanks very much indeed for that. First of all, um, let's see, is it something that Westminster might export?

I think Westminster actually imported this from, I think the Australian Parliament.

Ruth Fox: They did so, the origins of this are in the late 1990s, started the Blair government when they had the modernization committee, the first modernization committee. Of course we've got another one now. But that modernization committee looked at the parliamentary calendar, I think.

And there was a proposal for a second debating [00:45:00] chamber. Which had emerged out of the Australian experience a few years before they called it the main committee. And it was this idea that you create this sort of additional debating space so that basically you've got more capacity for MPs to ask questions or to hold debates.

And the modernization committee decided to have a look at that, trialed it for a period before it became a permanent feature, and the first actual Westminster Hall debate held in the grand committee room off Westminster Hall was on the 30th of November, 1999, so almost 26 years ago. So not that new really.

Mark D'Arcy: What were they debating?

Ruth Fox: Well proof that, you know, these things are long running, Palestinian refugees, nothing changes.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. The Westminster Hall debates that we have now are actually quite a smorgasbord of debates coming from different directions for different reasons. They started off being essentially a series of almost adjournment debates where someone could raise an issue or a group of MPs could raise an issue [00:46:00] and get an answer from a minister about it and never votes taken in Westminster Hall. If a vote were to be attempted, it would become a deferred division and would be voted on on a Wednesday later on. But they almost never do attempt to force votes in Westminster Hall.

But nowadays you get debates on subjects nominated by the petitions committee when they've got a particular parliamentary petition. Those are normally on a Monday afternoon. You get debates nominated by the liaison committee, the committee of the select committee chairs when they want to get a particular select committee report or some select committee related issue debated in Westminster Hall.

And again, get some kind of answer from a minister. And you have debates allocated by the back bench business committee. So there are several channels that feed into the debates in Westminster Hall now, and they've become quite an important part of the parliamentary ecosphere.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean essentially you can't hold divisions in Westminster Hall 'cause there's no lobbies.

So essentially it's non-controversial business is, is dealt with that there [00:47:00] and, and

Non-controversial in the sense that it's not voted on as opposed to non-controversial in the sense that it's not, uh, controversial.

Mark D'Arcy: It's the parliamentary sense of the term if you want.

Ruth Fox: And they, they're held on sort of motions that this house has considered X whatever the subject may be. So in Tim's case, the International Baccalaureate and State Education System, and the interesting thing about this is MP sit in a horseshoe. So it's a very different chamber style to what you get in the main chamber, and that was, you know, the idea was that we would encourage constructive discussion.

Certainly in this session, I've noticed some of the debates have been incredibly popular. Very, very well attended by both MPs on the public. There is a bit of a public gallery we roped off at the back of the room.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not that big a public gallery, but you can get people in there. And the key thing to remember about this is the petitions committee debates on a Monday afternoon.

They are often after Prime Minister's question time the most watched online parliamentary event of a given week.

Not least because a lot of the time you've got these kind of hashtag driven [00:48:00] campaigns on social media about a particular issue, and then people who've tweeted in favour or sent in emails about it are alerted.

There is going to be a debate on this on this day, and people tune in and watch.

And sometimes they come into the, as you say, very small parliamentary gallery and sit there as well. I think one of the things about a possible future redesign of the parliamentary buildings is that there's already people thinking that maybe you need a slightly bigger public gallery for Westminster Hall, because so many people want to get in and see these events. So if you actually can.

Ruth Fox: Question for restoration and renewal.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the many.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And, one of the features of the way the parliamentary day in Westminster Hall, uh, in that grand committee room is designed is that there's a bit of flexibility because the debates might be 30 minutes long, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, or three hours.

They try to, well, sorry, try to, they do avoid sitting when, for example, primetime activity, like ministerial questions, statements, prime minister's questions is going on. So the schedule is such that MPs can go back into the main chamber. [00:49:00] And, certainly, you know, if, for example, you're in the middle of a debate in Westminster Hall and in the main chamber of vote is called

Mark D'Arcy: you have to suspend proceedings.

Ruth Fox: They suspend proceedings and they have injury time at the end of the debate to add the extra minutes. But they are popular. They weren't at the beginning, with all MPs. Some of the old lags in the the 1990s Parliament, Eric Forth, for example, described it as ghastly Westminster Hall and Gwyneth Dunwoody had spoken apparently to the Australian clerk in charge of the main committee and had not been convinced by his arguments about whether it would detract or enhance from parliamentary business.

So there were some important figures in that Parliament who were opposed to it.

Mark D'Arcy: But it is a way of getting a kind of wider spectrum of issues considered in Westminster now. And sometimes you don't need substantive motions and attempts to change the law. Sometimes what you need is an answer from a government minister saying, yes, the government's gonna do something about this, or, no, the government is not going to act, and this is why.

And it is all part [00:50:00] of accountability for a government that's constantly acting over a huge range of issues. I think it's a way of hauling ministers in and finding out what they're up to and getting their explanations for what they're doing. And in that sense, it's actually extremely valuable. And of course those petitions committee debates are also a connection to the wider public and making sure that concerns that can attract a suitable number of signatures do get addressed by MPs at some level, even if it's not the action maybe that some of the petitioners wanted.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And Tim asked a question about the quorum and, very low. It's three, I think. So it's basically the chair, the minister, and whomever is bringing the debate.

Mark D'Arcy: Someone would basically have to get stuck on the underground or something for it not to be quorate.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But going to your point about holding ministers to account, one of the interesting ways in which Westminster Hall was used early on, but did not survive, was to have what was called cross-cutting ministerial question time. In the grand committee room.

Mark D'Arcy: And that was quite an innovation, [00:51:00] really. The idea was that way you had something that cross the various silos of different government departments. Suppose you were having, having some issue around drug abuse, you could have someone from a home office minister dealing with a law enforcement dimension and someone say from the Department of Health or, or the Department of Justice dealing with the implications in prison or the implications for hospitals.

And so you could have a group of ministers connected with a subject pulled in together to try and deal with it in a rounder way. Then it's possible if you just raised one aspect of it at a departmental question time.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then the first session, I think for this was held in 2003, but by 2005 it fell by the wayside.

I'm not entirely clear why. Whether it's just ministers didn't want to do it, or it proved not very popular. Perhaps any of the retired clerks who listen to this podcast might let us know. But that fell by the wayside and hasn't been continued. But of course by then, in future years, we've had, as you said, you know, the petitions committee was set up and that's become a forum for it.

Select committee statements are now quite a regular feature, [00:52:00] so other business has taken priority.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, you can imagine it's probably quite a difficult thing to schedule to get a clutch of ministers from different departments all into the same room at the same time when they've got such a wide range of activities that they might be up to.

But it did strike me as a useful innovation. I think it's a pity that it's gone. Maybe it was also because MPs at the time didn't really quite know how to make it work.

Maybe there weren't enough subjects where that cross-cutting dimension was important.

Ruth Fox: Well, yeah. They just sort of weren't used to doing it.

I mean, I think initially they operated Westminster Hall debates around router for ministerial availability because of precisely that question. If you ended up with a minister having to make themselves available Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, that was gonna be problematic. So there was some kind of router that was in operation.

But yes, for whatever reason, crosscutting, ministerial questions did not happen. But, perhaps it's something MPs today could have a look at in the future.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. One for the new version, the new model modernization committee that's out there, beavering away as we speak on updating the procedures of the House.

Updating of course in [00:53:00] heavy inverted commas here because plenty of traditionalists even now who don't like the sound of some of the things that have been mooted.

Ruth Fox: I think Tim asked whether there's an equivalent in the House of Lords and not really. I mean, there is the grand committee room in the Lords and known as the Moses Room.

Mark D'Arcy: Because it has a mural, one of those awful Victorian Lady Bird bookstore murals of Moses bearing the tablets of the law. So it's known as the Moses room.

Ruth Fox: But it's not really a second debating chamber. I mean, it sort of operates as a super committee.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it does. Committee stages of bills are sometimes taken in the Moses room, statutory instruments, that kind of thing. So it's not a parallel debating chamber in quite the same way. You don't get peers being able to bring questions for debate and discussion there in the same way.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So Tim, I hope that answers your question. It's a really important part I think of the House of Commons operation and you know, as you say, Mark, sometimes those debates are just as popular, if not more popular than what goes on in the chamber.

And actually, I think is a challenge for the [00:54:00] back bench business committee when it's thinking about the location of where debates should go, that MPs have applied for, should it go into Westminster Hall or should it go in the main chamber? Sometimes quite difficult to judge.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, sometimes MPs are offered the choice.

You know, you can have a debate in the full chamber, you know, in six months time. Or you can have Westminster Hall next Tuesday, what do you want? Yeah. You know, and the urgency usually trumps anything else there, unless they really do want prime time in the chamber. And I suppose the other thing to say about this is this is one of the modernizing innovations that really has stuck.

And that people have now learned to use. Sometimes, as you say, as with the cross-cutting questions, maybe that doesn't stick and people don't quite learn how to get a handle on it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think if you asked the current cohort of MPs, if they'd want to abolish it, I'm pretty sure the answer would be No.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm pretty sure too.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, Mark, I think that's all we've got time for this week, so if you've got any questions, do send them to us at hansardsociety.org.uk, our website. Go to the podcast link and you'll find the link where you can submit your questions or send them to us on [00:55:00] social media at HansardSociety and we'll do our best to answer them.

Mark D'Arcy: And just before we say goodbye, it's worth saying that next week, both Houses of Parliament are only sitting for three days. It's a short half term break. So we've got a special episode to offer you looking at the dawn of the two party system. We talked to the historian George Owers about his new book, the rage of party, and the tumultuous events that happened around the beginning of the 18th century Queen Anne's reign when all sorts of mad peers, deranged rakes, culminating clergyman, rival claimants to the throne, were carving a swave through British politics in the most dramatic way imaginable, but also starting to build the foundations for the democracy that we enjoy today.

Ruth Fox: It's a great tale. See you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: 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 or find us on social media at Hansard Society.

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