• Liam Byrne

• Business and Trade Committee

• International Agreements Committee: review of treaty scrutiny

• Whitehall's whispering mandarin - a tribute to Sir Roy Stone by Mark D'Arcy for the Critic Magazine.

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

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

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

Ruth Fox: You wait ages for a trade treaty, then three come along at once. Liam Byrne, chair of the Commons Business and Trade Committee, explains why Parliament still won't get much of a say on Britain's new deals with America, India, and the European Union.

Mark D'Arcy: Can you cut the cost of Parliament without harming democracy?

Ruth Fox: And farewell to the man who guided the Commons through two decades of crisis.

Mark D'Arcy: So Ruth, let's start by talking about those trade treaties. [00:01:00] It's been an unusual couple of weeks for Sir Keir Starmer because he's actually had quite a run of good news. Those successive new trade deals announced first with India, then with the United States. You remember those scenes in the Oval Office with Peter Mandelson, cackling away with Donald Trump, and then the biggest one of them all, the EU reset. Now, these agreements will have to be underpinned by formal treaties, but as we've often remarked on this podcast before, MPs and still less peers get very little traction on the terms of those deals. Because this is the Government exercising the royal prerogative, the executive's right to make international agreements with minimal oversight from Parliament itself.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, Mark, these are the residual powers which used to historically be exercised by the Monarch, but which are now exercised by ministers either directly or on the advice provided to the Monarch and which may be used without the consent of Parliament. And there's the rub, because a lot of these deals, I mean, you're talking about, as you say, a reset [00:02:00] with European Union, a deal with India, America dealing with tariffs, not just the kinds of deals that pertain to foreign policy, and the realm of foreign policy and international relations, but they cut deep into domestic economic policy.

And therefore, keeping Parliament at one remove is a problem.

Mark D'Arcy: And at the moment, the system for dealing with treaties for historical reasons, as you say, is actually pretty weak. The system we've got is that treaties are laid before the House for 21 days and it's up to parliamentarians to decide whether to object.

It rather echoes the procedure that I know you loathe for dealing with delegated legislation. Indeed, it's not a positive engagement with the legislation. It's a, do you want to veto this kind of question that's put before MPs. Peers actually don't even have that much.

Ruth Fox: No, essentially what we've got for international agreements, of which trade deals are a subset, is that the arrangement is basically modeled on what we [00:03:00] had a hundred years ago.

Back then, a foreign office minister in the Ramsay MacDonald government decided that actually Parliament ought to at least know which agreements were being negotiated by the Government and agreed and came up with this idea, this model, which became known as the Ponsonby rule, that he was Sir Arthur Ponsonby.

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