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

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark d'Arcy. Coming up this week,

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: Indefensible? How the government told Parliament about its Strategic Defence Review

[00:00:32] Mark D'Arcy: The House of Lords versus the Tech Lords - a long running battle over AI and copyright goes into its fourth round this week.

[00:00:39] Ruth Fox: And 96% of MPs say they have personally experienced threatening behaviour since they began working as an MP.

[00:00:46] The Speaker's Conference asks what is to be done?

[00:00:57] Mark D'Arcy: What indeed, but we'll get onto that in just a moment. First of all, Ruth, let's talk about the somewhat chaotic launch of the government's big Strategic Defence Review. Ministers appeared to be live on all channels and indeed all radio programmes as well. Ministers were everywhere. Newspapers had been fully briefed, and then eventually the House of Commons got a chance to have a look at the contents of the Government's big rethink of the UK's defence priorities.

[00:01:22] And Mr. Speaker was not amused.

[00:01:24] Ruth Fox: He wasn't, he was pretty angry. So angry in fact that he called two Urgent Questions. One from the Shadow Leader of the House, Jesse Norman, on why were ministerial statements not being made to the House of Commons, and then another on future of the nuclear deterrent from the Chair of the Defence Committee in advance of the statement that was just about to be made by the Defence Secretary John Healey on ...

[00:01:46] Mark D'Arcy: Which one assumes would've covered that very point. But, uh, but it's, it is one of the few things the Speaker has to make life difficult for governments when they insist on, on doing this. And all Governments do insist, I'm afraid, on making their big announcements in ways that maximise their public impact. And they don't think that making those big announcements just in the House of Commons and then doing a publicity blitz after the event has anything like the same impact with public opinion, which is what they're trying to influence, especially when Governments are in a hard place as, yeah, as this one currently is.

[00:02:16] Ruth Fox: I think that there's some argument to that in terms of the communications and wanting to get out and through the newspaper. But the problem was clearly journalists over the weekend had had sight of it. There were stories trailed in the Sunday papers, which particularly annoyed the Speaker, and then it became clear that journalists had been effectively offered a sort of a lock in reading room to read the report, but some had already previously had it. There was then some suggestions that defence industry personnel, senior officials from defence contractors had had sight of it before MPs. That particularly annoyed the Speaker because he was concerned about things around market sensitivity and so on. And there is a principle at stake, and I think this is why it's possibly different for this announcement than it might be for some other announcements in that what we are talking about is not just any old policy, we're talking about A, the defence of the nation and B billions and billions and billions of pounds.

[00:03:13] Mark D'Arcy: So it's right out there with a Budget, for example. Yeah.

[00:03:15] Ruth Fox: And the Government cannot have that money unless Parliament approves it. So there's a constitutional principle here at stake that Parliament must assent to the spending plans that will follow to enable the Strategic Review to have any credibility at all.

[00:03:32] So he's right, I think, to be annoyed and defending that constitutional principle. But the problem as I put out on social media that morning in relation to Jesse Norman's request for an urgent statement - I mean, frankly, a bit of brass neck from the Conservatives to be complaining about this because they did it all the time. And of course that's the long running thread of the problem the Conservative Party has got at the moment, that there's brass neck over a whole lot of things given their conduct and, and behaviour over the past 14 years in, in relation to Parliament. But if the opposition was remotely serious about this, rather than engaging in political theatre for things like Urgent Questions, if it was remotely serious, it would put an opposition motion down on an opposition day and try to enshrine essentially, what is the commitment in the Government's own Ministerial Code that when Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance to Parliament. And this is the point I keep making on this issue. This is the Government's Code, the speaker made that point in the Chamber. This is the Government's own Code, and he basically said they should be ashamed of themselves for not adhering to it.

[00:04:37] Mark D'Arcy: Well, there was a rather unfortunate moment for Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House, when she said, I'm satisfied that we have lived up to our commitments. And the Speaker said, well, I'm not.

[00:04:46] And, and it was a messy start to what is a very, very serious and important announcement about the future direction of Britain's defence and facing up to a renewed threat and all, all the rest of it. Yeah. And so the muddle around it took away from the drama of the launch that they were trying to achieve?

[00:05:02] Yeah.

[00:05:03] Ruth Fox: It created a sort of real muddying the waters in, in Parliament. I mean, they ended up in a real mess. I mean, the Shadow Defence Secretary apparently hadn't seen it. The rule is that you don't get the document published until the Minister has made the Statement. And whilst all this was going on, these sort of Urgent Questions, of course, that was pushing on the time when the Ministerial Statement would be made, pushing later into the day when the Strategic Defence Review would actually be published for the rest of us to see.

[00:05:27] And in the end, I mean, the Speaker essentially put the Defence Secretary on the spot, John Healey, and said, will you publish it now at the end of this question, before you start your statement. That was gonna be probably about two hours away. And he, John Healey really had no option but to agree. And I do think Lindsay, to be fair to Lindsay, he was at his rather sarcastic best throughout the, the Session at one point he said, um, I was offered a briefing this morning himself. But I'd read it all in The Times. So the only thing I didn't actually have was a copy of the Defence Review itself.

[00:05:58] Mark D'Arcy: I do think that there is a problem here for Mr. Speaker because he does this at regular intervals whenever there is a big announcement that isn't made in the House of Commons. And that's pretty much all big announcements that are not actually made in the House of Commons anymore.

[00:06:10] And he does this tirade at ministers and they all sort of tug the forelock and say, yes, Mr. Speaker, nod seriously. And then go on doing exactly what they've always been doing. And at some point, this undermines his authority, undermines the authority of the Chair that you can keep on rebuking Ministers and ministers carry on regardless.

[00:06:27] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that's his problem. And that's why, you know, if MPs think this is a, a serious problem, if they are genuinely concerned that statements should be made first to the House, then the answer is very clear: enshrine it in a resolution of the House. And if they do that, they can then attach penalties to it if they choose.

[00:06:45] Mm-hmm. Now, interestingly, the Speaker has apparently written to the chair of the Public Administration Committee, Simon Hoare, to ask that Committee to look at it. I've not heard anything further on that as to whether or not he's going to but I'm sure he, he must be tempted. He, he must be tempted. But on the other hand, I suspect the pressure would be from his own opposition from bench not to touch it.

[00:07:06] And this is the problem in Government, you don't do it in Opposition. You complain about it. And Mr. Speaker made this point a number of times to Lucy Powell when you were on the opposition benches, you were standing up and asking for Urgent Questions. You were complaining about this and now you're doing exactly the same thing.

[00:07:22] It's a problem for the Speaker in terms of his credibility, but it's also a problem for the reputation of the House and for Ministers and well for both front benches, because frankly they just look like hypocrites.

[00:07:31] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it all looks very silly and the fact that we've been discussing this fandango for quite a while also detracts from the fact that here's a major announcement that ought to be a major part of the business of Parliament in the years ahead.

[00:07:44] As the announcement unfolds, becomes policy, becomes contracts for new weapons systems, becomes recruitment drives to get extra soldiers, sailors, air personnel, the Government goes out and starts shopping for new drones or whatever it is, and Parliament really does need to keep an eye on that because although the Government has highlighted this announcement, they've been sort of angelic choirs telling us how important it is, there is also the point that the financing of it looks a bit iffy. We are at some point going to get to 3% of gross national product being spent on defence. NATO apparently now wants at least three point a half percent and the figure of 5% is suddenly being kicked around.

[00:08:22] I think the figure changes every time President Trump wakes up depending on what mood he happens to be in that morning. So there is a whole series of questions to be asked around this policy. And it is the business of Parliament to ask them and to monitor the answers, not just one ministerial statement as a single event.

[00:08:38] This is a process, not an event if you like. And Parliament's job is to see how well it is delivered and occasionally to put up a hand and say, hang on a minute, where are all those extra armed forces that you promised us?

[00:08:49] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I, I think one of the problems they got themselves into on the morning of the launch was that they had so many sort of different ministers from the MOD, they had the Prime Minister all doing press activities and events..

[00:09:00] Mark D'Arcy: All with varying degrees of effective briefing, it has to be said.

[00:09:02] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And the wording that was, um, being battered about, about the commitment to funding and when these targets would be reached and whether it would be at the end of this Parliament or what, you know, we are looking at 3% in the, the end of the next Parliament, so on, and then the detail of, of the exact wording of what they were saying was being picked over by the journalists.

[00:09:20] I do wonder, you know, on reflection, it would have been better if they'd had the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister at the Despatch Box making statements.

[00:09:31] Mark D'Arcy: And you have a definitive...

[00:09:32] Ruth Fox: A definitive statement at the Despatch Box, and then the Prime Ministers spokesperson can brief the press afterwards behind the scenes in the press gallery, which you'll be more familiar with than I am. And then you'd have had your clips for the news programmes. I think the days where you needed to get on the Today programme and it leads the day to influence the news. I think that's gone a bit. That's not as influential as it used to be, and they ought to look at using the bully pulpit of Parliament at the Despatch Box much more.

[00:09:58] Mark D'Arcy: It would be a good strategy because if the language is slightly different or gets slightly garbled and it will, you get different interpretations. Yeah. And then which one's, right? Yeah. And there you are. With the way this has been launched, it was doubtless conceived as, as a massive publicity blitz and it turned into a bit of a muddle. And here we are again.

[00:10:18] But I think one of the key players in the future of this now is going to be the Defence Select Committee. They're the point people for this. Now they're the ones who are going to have to look and see whether targets are being met on time and the kit is working as advertised and the numbers are being delivered as promised.

[00:10:35] Mm. And if those things don't happen, they're the ones who've gotta blow the whistle. There's probably also a role somewhere in there, I would imagine, for the Business and Industry committee to take a look because they'll have to be a defence industrial strategy accompanying all this to make sure this kit is made and the industry to make it is there.

[00:10:51] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well, apparently we're gonna have to step up building at a wartime pace, so yeah.

[00:10:56] Mark D'Arcy: You know, well they, they, they're talking about grinding out a new nuclear submarine every 18 months. Yeah. And that's quite a big commitment.

[00:11:01] Ruth Fox: 15 billion pound warhead programme. Yeah. Um, I mean it was interesting.

[00:11:04] It was all posited in the sense of jobs and growth. Mm. There was a lot of emphasis on that. Presumably then the Treasury Committee will also want to get its, its mittens on some aspects of the programme and, and scrutinise it. We haven't heard at the moment, Mark as we're talking, we haven't got the timetable for Select Committee appearances next week.

[00:11:20] So we don't know whether the Defence secretary will be before the Defence Committee, but if you would imagine, I'd imagine. Yeah. And if not next week, then the week after, I imagine.

[00:11:27] Mark D'Arcy: But it's not so much the initial.

[00:11:29] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's an ongoing, uh,

[00:11:30] Mark D'Arcy: ...exploration of this. It's the rolling programme to make sure that the Government lives up to its commitments and questions keep being raised.

[00:11:36] I mean, the problem with defence reviews is that you are invited to, as a member of a defence review, to draw up a great sort of sweeping assessment of the country's defence needs for 20 years hence, and then things change. Yeah. You, you saw what happened in Russia with the Ukrainian attack on their airfields. I found myself wondering. Could that happen here? Are we equipped to stop such an attack in this country? What measures would be needed? And those sudden new requirements, sudden new methods of attack and things like that are the kind of things that can make even, even the most comprehensive defence review obsolete very rapidly.

[00:12:09] And that again, is another role for Parliament. They've gotta ask those questions.

[00:12:12] Ruth Fox: Well, I mean, it's only a few years ago, isn't it, under Boris Johnson's Government where we had, it wasn't the Strategic Defence Review, it was an Integrated Defence Review, which involved all sorts of things about...

[00:12:20] Mark D'Arcy: I'm not quite sure what the difference between strategy and integration is in this context anyway.

[00:12:24] Ruth Fox: Well, I, I think it involved things like development aid. It was a broader look rather than sort of a more critical focus on defence. But then we were looking at a tilt to Asia Pacific and, you know, this concentration on, on AUKUS this sort of alliance with America and Australia in terms of nuclear submarines and, and, and strategy and so on. And now out of this review, we seem to be having a tilt back to sort of Europe and, and NATO and sort of leaving seemingly the Asia Pacific issues to the Americans. Which may well make sense. But as you say, you know, that changing approach in just a few years,

[00:12:58] Mark D'Arcy: Well think back 25 years. 25 years ago, it would've been unimaginable that British forces would soon be deployed in Afghanistan to fight a war in a, a very distant and inaccessible corner of the world, but quite suddenly "badda bim" it happened.

[00:13:11] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that did strike me, both in the statements that John Healey made, but particularly Keir Starmer, was this emphasis on shifting to war readiness and combat readiness.

[00:13:24] Now, whether or not that was oversold a bit, I don't know, and what some people behind the scenes thought about it, but certainly that kind of tone and language struck me as different to what we've heard in previous reviews. I was left with a sort of impression of, it's a question of when not if.

[00:13:44] Mark D'Arcy: Certainly there is a much more threatening security environment than there used to be. And I suppose the logic is that if you spend a bit on deterrence now, you don't actually end up fighting a war, and that must be the hope.

[00:13:54] Ruth Fox: But that doesn't chime with the money, does it?

[00:13:56] Mark D'Arcy: But it doesn't, I mean, that's the problem. You know, you're saying we, we, we are rattling our sabres that we're going to be able to buy in about eight years time, and that seems a very odd way to go about things.

[00:14:06] I'm looking at the money commitments and thinking this is not going to have the Russians quaking in their boots. No, no. And I do wonder whether this is a bit of pitch rolling for tax rises in the not too distant future. The Government promised it wouldn't put up most major taxes. Mm, but it may now try to argue that the world has changed.

[00:14:25] The election of Trump has changed an awful lot. The whole security environment is much more threatening. Previous promises are now inoperative and we're going to have to find money for defence, and that's fine. There's a certain amount of public sympathy for that. There is polling out there that says that the public would support tax rises in order to pay for more defence, but the kicker on that is that they'd usually support tax rises that are paid by somebody else so yeah, as long as somebody else is paying, I'm quite happy to see tax rise. Right?

[00:14:53] Ruth Fox: Yeah, yeah,

[00:14:53] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

[00:14:54] Ruth Fox: Well, we will no doubt find that out in the Budget, which will be due in the Autumn. But between now and then, of course, next week, we've got the Comprehensive Spending Review.

[00:15:03] Mark D'Arcy: Oh, yes.

[00:15:03] Ruth Fox: So we will find out a little bit more about the Government's financial planning for the rest of this Parliament and how much money departments are going to get.

[00:15:10] Mark D'Arcy: And backtracking to our previous discussion, we may find out about quite a lot of it in this week's Sunday papers.

[00:15:15] Ruth Fox: True! Well, we're already finding out bits and dribs and drabs, aren't we? You know, winners and losers.

[00:15:21] Mark D'Arcy: I wonder if the Speaker is simply going to tape a denunciation and sort of leave it, leave, leave it on the chair playing it out from the chair. I think, again, this is too big. The implications are too painful. And I'm sure most Government media strategists would think this, for it simply to be sort of unveiled out of the clear blue sky in the Chamber of the House of Commons on Wednesday.

[00:15:40] So there will be pitch rolling. There will be announcements dribbled out over the weekend. There will be stuff appearing in briefing to journalists well before it's announced on the floor of the House of Commons. So all these complaints will come again for exactly the same reasons.

[00:15:53] Ruth Fox: Well just quickly Mark, before we take a break, just for listeners' benefit for things to look out for next week when the statement is made. Possibly Urgent Questions and so on. But, um, this of course is not like the Budget. So Rachel Reeves will stand up and make her Statement. It'll be responded to by one, assumes Mel Stride, as Shadow Chancellor, because for a Budget it would be the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, but not normally for a for a Statement.

[00:16:19] And unlike the Budget, there won't be multiple days of debate and votes at the end of it, which form the basis for a Finance Bill, which you have with the Budget. So it'll be much more a sort of traditional Statement, few speeches from Mel Stride and basically questions, questions, rather than speeches indeed.

[00:16:36] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And votes that follow later on would be in the form of Estimates votes. But bear in mind that the, the next set of Estimates votes, Parliament's about to do are actually about the current financial year. Not the next one. And this is all about stuff that will happen in the future, in the next financial year and beyond.

[00:16:49] So any votes in the Commons that result from Rachel Reeve's announcement are some way downstream. I suppose the other things to look out for are doubtless the Treasury Committee and possibly quite a lot of other Commons committees, will be having sessions with the relevant ministers and Rachel Reeves in particular to try and tease out more detail in Committee.

[00:17:08] They'll probably have a set of experts, then they'll have the Chancellor and uh, those will be quite big events from the Treasury Committee. Probably the following week, I'd guess.

[00:17:16] Yeah. Yeah. But as you say, the detail and the votes will come pretty much later in the, into next year . With that Mark, we take a break and then, um, I think we should perhaps come back and talk about ping pong in the House of Lords where the...

[00:17:30] Ah, the fine art of parliamentary ping pong. Yes.

[00:17:32] Ruth Fox: Where their Lordships have been tackling the Commons on the question of copyright and artificial intelligence, in the defence of the "creatives", and I have to say as, as creatives ourselves, Mark being podcasters now.

[00:17:44] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, we're, we're the creators.

[00:17:44] Ruth Fox: And we're all in favour of that. But, um, yes, there's a bit of controversy between the two Houses, so, uh, we'll be back in a minute to talk about that.

[00:17:53] Mark D'Arcy: We're back and, and Ruth, there's been quite an epic bout of parliamentary ping pong underway, the House of Lords and the House of Commons disagreeing over the final wording of a bill. Batting changes to the wording back and forth between them until finally at some distant point in the future, they will agree on a final set of words and the bill can go off to be signed by the sovereign. Because the key point here is that the Lords and the Commons have to agree on the exact wording of a piece of legislation. You can't have a, a House of Lords version and a House of Commons version. It has to be one bill. And they are in the final stages of agreeing on the wording of the Data Use and Access Bill and the vexed question of copyright and can big artificial intelligences without paying a penny scoop up the content created by people that's available on the web like us and train on it.

[00:18:41] People like us, you may think you are immune to this, but if you've written a Facebook post, some big artificial intelligence may be reading it and incorporating it into its vast body of knowledge.

[00:18:51] Ruth Fox: Yeah, as you say, this is the last point of contention in this bill. So this is the only remaining thing that they've now got to settle, but it has become a bit of an epic episode. And essentially the question is, how will copyright holders know whether the tech companies are using their content that they have produced, their sort of intellectual property in what are called training models for these large language models that are used to train these artificial intelligence, uh, I dunno what you call 'em, bodies, tech software, software.

[00:19:23] And how do we ensure that they pay for the content that they use. And on the one hand you've got the tech companies basically wanting as little regulation and frankly as little payment as possible. And on the other hand, you've got the creative sector and of course musicians like Elton John and others have spoken out in defence of, of the industry. But it's not just music, it's. It's art, it's the written word. It's literature.

[00:19:46] Mark D'Arcy: It's the cogent analysis that emerges on a regular basis from the Hansard Society.

[00:19:50] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, we, we've had a, an episode ourselves where we have a, an academic journal called Parliamentary Affairs, which has been going since 1947, which contains a huge amount of information, history, procedural knowledge, academic research about Parliament. And we discovered that along with many, many other organisations, through an article in the Atlantic Magazine in America, that Meta, uh, Mark Zuckerberg Facebook, uh, holding company had been basically scraping websites and taking content. And using a search tool on the Atlantic Magazine you could find out whether they'd used any of yours. And I happened to put Parliamentary Affairs in with no assumption that they should come out and say yes, they had and it turned out they had.

[00:20:32] Mark D'Arcy: I think the bottom line is it reads almost everything. Yeah. Pretty much everything that's available goes into the more of these machines, is sort of chewed on and used to refine the software.

[00:20:42] And the kicker from that, I suppose, is it can come out and start writing its own essays on parliamentary procedure if it wanted to.

[00:20:47] Ruth Fox: Well, of course there've been incidents where it's been used in the courts by some lawyers recently where they've helped write essentially their script for the, for the court as to what it was that they were going to say in defence of a client.

[00:20:58] And they were citing cases that did not exist. They, they would be made up and of course they're now facing, I think, legal action at the, uh, I'm not sure whether it's the Bar or the Solicitor's Regulation Authority, whatever. But, but they are facing action because they've used essentially chat GPT and it's spit out false information.

[00:21:15] You do hear anecdotally all these wonderful stories about academics marking papers from their students, and uh, an academic told me quite recently that they had found a reference to a paper by them and that the slight problem with it was that they hadn't actually written any such paper, and the whole thing had been invented by one of these large language models, but a student had set it to write their essay for them.

[00:21:35] Well, the last recruitment round we did for an operations post at the Society, we had to halt the marking exercise and restart it because we discovered that so many of the responses were using Chat GPT, sort of AI models and you would, once you started looking at them and we blind review, so we don't know anything about the candidates. We don't have CVs. We have responses to questions that are skills based, and we were looking through those and thinking these are pretty duplicative. And we were then able to, to test it, and we had to restart the process. And the company whose software we use are on the case, and they've increased the checking and monitoring for AI triggering alerts if they think that, uh, some of the, the answers to questions from applicants are AI induced, but it's a real problem.

[00:22:24] Mark D'Arcy: And the basic issue that underlies this is whether or not the people who are producing this content should get some kind of payment for the use to which their content is being put. It may not be very much, and Nick Clegg formally of course of this parish, was out and about saying that he found it was flatly impossible to do this and that essentially the big tech companies would a. withdraw their radiance from us and not do work in Britain if such payments were imposed on them. And B, there was no real way to enforce it anyway, so those arguments are flying about at the moment. And I think one of the problems for the House of Lords, and certainly a problem for me, is I flatly don't understand this stuff. It's like when people start talking about cryptocurrencies, I hear a loud buzzing in my head and I lose the will to live.

[00:23:07] So you, you are asking a group of legislators who mostly do not have the expertise to start ruling on these questions now.

[00:23:16] Ruth Fox: Although I think, to be fair, you could argue that some in the House of Lords have more experience of that than the House of Commons. Mm-hmm. So if, if you're gonna have a fight anywhere about this with some informed commentators and experts, the, the Lords is probably as good as any...

[00:23:29] Mark D'Arcy: The Lords is probably as good as any, I'm just suggesting it's not all that many Lords.

[00:23:32] And, and here of course, we must, uh, mention the name of Baroness Kidron, uh, better known as a, as a filmmaker. Mm-hmm. But also defender of the creatives as, as a creative she's been leading the fight with the House of Commons over this issue. The government, I think, very concerned about deterring investment by the big, uh, tech companies, doesn't want to enforce what's being asked for here by people like Elton John and at the same time is probably also worried that were they to try and do so the tech companies would then lean on Donald Trump and bang would go the trade deal that Britain has sort of half got with America.

[00:24:06] Ruth Fox: And that's been an underlying sort of theme of the discussion in the House of Lords, is to what extent is the Government being lobbied much more heavily and being much more open to the tech companies than the art or the creative industries, and to what extent is really this about doing it, almost a behind the scenes underhand deal with the Americans.

[00:24:23] Aware that, for example, I think when he came to Munich, the vice president, JD Vance, I mean that was one of the themes of his speech at the Munich Security Conference, that not having regulation of essentially American tech companies with a global footprint, not having them regulated in a way that would be detrimental to what America sees as its interests.

[00:24:43] And therefore we are in that sort of territory of, is democracy in this country, is what is in the public interest going to be not actually interfered with, but subsumed under the interest of wider global economic regulatory questions about the future of this sector.

[00:25:00] Mark D'Arcy: And one should never forget, of course, that sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration were the tech bros, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the, the, the tech lords themselves.

[00:25:09] Ruth Fox: But they're all falling out with him though, Mark.

[00:25:11] Mark D'Arcy: Well, it's entertaining to watch, I mean, a very interesting moment in the US Congress this week where there is legislation at the moment that is going to prevent the individual states from making law on artificial intelligence for 10 years.

[00:25:25] And Marjorie Taylor Greene, big Trump acolyte in, um, the House of Representatives got up and said "oops, supported this bill, but I've suddenly seen this bit, which I hadn't previously noticed before, and now I'm against it, and I don't think this should happen because it's against, I've read it, our federal constitution." So a great deal of mockery of her for not having read the bill before supporting it.

[00:25:45] Ruth Fox: Although she wouldn't be the first.

[00:25:47] Mark D'Arcy: She wouldn't be the first, to put it mildly, I think in the US Congress or the UK Parliament.

[00:25:52] Ruth Fox: But, uh, can you believe in America that Trump's bill that they're negotiating at the moment is actually called the "Big Beautiful Bill", that is its actual title.

[00:26:01] I, I thought I thought it was a campaign slogan that sort of shorthand, like you get some of those titles in, in the UK on, on bills, but here the Clerk of Legislation wouldn't allow you to use a slogan as the title of a bill.

[00:26:11] Mark D'Arcy: It's, it's certainly a slogan rather than a proper legislative title. But we talk about the assisted dying bill and what we actually mean is the terminally ill adults, brackets, end of life, closed bracket bill. So it's not unusual for bills to have kind of handles, but for that handle and, and especially as flippant as that to be an actual title. But backtracking, I mean, I did want to make the point here that the, the big factor in our democracy now is the sheer power of the tech Lords and the, the crypto Lords, again, an American phenomenon. People who want to legislate to control this mysterious world of cryptocurrency, which I flatly don't understand often find themselves facing suspiciously, well-funded political opponents suddenly because there's an awful lot of money in crypto.

[00:26:53] Ruth Fox: Well, and Lord Pannick made the, the point, the Crossbench Peer, the lawyer made the point in the debate this week that this concern about, you know, protection of copyright and what's happening in the influence of America in this sector, that the head of the United States copyright office had been sacked last month, the day after she'd produced a report basically saying that, uh, AI companies should respect copyright rights.

[00:27:16] So, you know, there is that genuine fear. There's a lack of understanding. There's a fear about what is going on behind the scenes in terms of the influence of the tech sector and the influence of the American government. But there's also this constitutional question about whether Baroness Kidron, Members of the House of Lords standing up for the interests of copyright holders.

[00:27:35] Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm. They keep winning their point in the Lords. Yeah.

[00:27:37] Ruth Fox: And interestingly, the number of votes that have taken place that looks like the government is struggling a bit at times to get its troops out. I mean, on one of the votes, certainly there was, I think 18 Labour Peers voted with Baroness Kidron. Now that, a few of them drifted away this week, because particularly members of the House of Lords who've previously been members of the House of Commons saying, I think we've gone far enough now.

[00:27:59] Yeah. That we've really gotta respect the will of the elected house. But still, she won the vote again.

[00:28:04] Mark D'Arcy: She keeps kicking it back, keeps offering MPs another chance to think about this. But if they keep on offering the same answer eventually, this is the inbuilt inhibition of the House of Lords. It knows it can't push things too far with the Commons. Very rarely goes more than a couple of rounds. This one's now in its fourth round. So it may well be that they offer one more change of wording and then, then, then fold.

[00:28:24] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, she indicated last night, so we're recording on a Thursday. So on Wednesday evening she indicated that if she won her amendment on the day that would obviously then go back to the Commons and she would accept whatever came back from the Commons. So my working assumption at the moment is that this will now be it. There'll be a round, I think its scheduled for next Tuesday, where the Commons will have to consider the amendment that she won last night, then it'll be kicked back to the Lords and that, that'll be it.

[00:28:49] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I mean, the Lords will probably make a few protesting speeches and say that, uh, well, we told you so.

[00:28:54] Ruth Fox: Yeah, but my sense is it has harmed relations a bit in the Lords. It has been quite tetchy at times, accusations of bad faith. And yeah, in that sense that the Commons just wasn't listening.

[00:29:05] Mark D'Arcy: They also feel that if they're the House with expertise, maybe they should be listened to, perhaps a bit more than they are, but the Commons doesn't like it when the Lord gets uppity. So, yeah.

[00:29:12] Ruth Fox: I perhaps should be a bit more specific and say the, the Government wasn't listening as opposed to the Commons per se.

[00:29:16] Mark D'Arcy: I think that's fair enough actually.

[00:29:18] Yeah. I mean, although those almost interchangeable, given the size of the Government majority. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:22] So Ruth, with that, should we turn to another subject just quite quickly, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, I mentioned it earlier, the assisted dying legislation proposed by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater is going to be back in the House of Commons for its second day of Report Stage consideration next Friday, Friday the 13th. And there's been a lot of talk about how there hasn't been sufficient consideration of this bill. And you've actually written a piece I understand in the House Magazine, the parliamentary magazine rather debunking that idea and MPs have obviously been reading it because it came up in Business Questions in the Commons to, uh, questions of the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, just before we recorded today.

[00:30:03] Steve Race MP: Next week we have the second, uh, day of Report Stage debate for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, an issue which is really important to many of my residents in Exeter. Does the Leader of the House agree with me and with Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society that consideration of the Bill continues to be thorough and with significant time allocated to the process.

[00:30:22] Lucy Powell MP: Well, can I thank him for raising that issue? And we are going to be debating the assisted, uh, dying bill, uh, further a week on Friday and probably, uh, soon thereafter. We all have different views about the issue itself, but what I would, uh, agree with him on is that the process has been incredibly thorough, in part thanks to your support as well, Mr. Speaker for making sure that there's ample, uh, time for debate on the floor of the House. Uh, Second Reading had a full, uh, day of debate. There was over 90 hours of committee stage, uh, debates and so far there's already been one day on remaining stages likely to be a further two, and that would be more time than has actually, um, probably been given to most substantial pieces of government legislation.

[00:31:06] Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark, well, bit of a shocker to look at your mobile phone and wonder why it's, um, so lighting up. Yeah. And discover that you've been mentioned in the, in Business Questions in the Commons, the Chamber by Steve Race. We should say Steve Race MP was asking the question of Lucy Powell. And as you say, I've, I've written a piece with my colleague at the Hansard Society, Matthew England, about the bill and about this vexed question of has it really been rushed.

[00:31:29] We will put a link to the article in the show notes. But I should be clear, we divide this question about whether the Bill has been rushed into two separate stages, two distinct phases. The preparation of the bill before it was then laid before Parliament, which we argue was rushed. There's no doubt about it. A timetable of 60 odd days to develop your policy and prepare a bill is a very, very limited timeframe to deal with something this important. And that's why there are so many ministerial powers in the bill to settle some of the detail at a later date by ministers. But the actual amount of time that has been spent on it at each parliamentary stage once the bill was in Parliament, is greater than for most government bills.

[00:32:11] Mm.

[00:32:11] So you can't say that the parliamentary scrutiny per se, has been rushed or limited, or MPs have not had enough time. Of course, you might always want more time. You might always want to debate these things endlessly, particularly if you're an opponent of the bill, but by any measure against government legislation or against other Private Members Bills, it has had a lot of time by comparison, and we go through examples at each stage, Second Reading, Committee, Report, and we, we identify that and compare it to what's happened with government legislation in this and previous sessions.

[00:32:48] So it's a more nuanced piece than Mr. Race's question might have implied, but I hope people find it interesting and I hope, you know, just for the benefit of MPs to get a handle on, well, how does this compare? There are many reasons to vote against the bill on matters of principle, on matters of policy, but the question of - it has not had enough time in the House - seems to me isn't a particularly good argument, unless you are willing to concede that therefore almost every Government bill that has gone through has not had enough time to be considered.

[00:33:19] Mark D'Arcy: Well, that's exactly the point. This is not a point about this specific bill. It's more a point about the generally ineffectual way that Westminster scrutinises legislation. Yeah. Debates are over timetabled. MPs have probably have a couple of minutes to contribute at most if they're back benches rather than front bench spokespersons. And the whole thing is rammed through according to the Government's convenience rather than the need for proper scrutiny.

[00:33:43] And that's before you get to the question of pre-legislative policy development. Yeah. The, the things that should underpin the bill. Yeah. So don't so much blame Kim Leadbeater. She's working the process she's got, and she's actually been given an unusually generous amount of time for a Private Member's Bill.

[00:33:59] I mean, as we were saying, the next day of Report Stage, a two day Report Stage, very unusual for a Private member's Bill is coming up on Friday the 13th. There may be another day for the Third Reading debate later on. So there's an awful lot of Commons debating ahead for this. And when you see Private Members Bills often waived through in a matter of hours in the Commons, this is a much more extensive process than that, for all its faults.

[00:34:21] Ruth Fox: I mean only three government bills this session so far will have had two days on Report like the assisted dying bill. So there's plenty of government legislation that's gone through this session with, with much less scrutiny.

[00:34:31] MPs may not like the amendment process. I understand the frustration amongst opponents of the bill that their amendments are not getting accepted, but that's not unusual. I mean, it's a fiction. This idea that at Committee Stage it's some kind of Socratic dialogue where people on both sides of the bill engage in this sort of great intellectual debate and emerges from that, a common sense winner on matters of principle. On most bills it is exceptional for an amendment to be accepted unless it is from the Government.

[00:35:01] Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. It's, it is also exceptional for people to be paying all that much attention at Committee. Yeah. You quite often see people sitting there going through their correspondence during a Committee stage of a bill. It is, I'm afraid, a convenient fiction. I mean, you tend to go, the bill now goes for line by line scrutiny in a special bill committee, rather overdramatises the actual process of hammering something through that normally takes place.

[00:35:23] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and it's complicated. And the procedures, I think, well, we've argued for many, many years that they're in need of reform.

[00:35:29] As you said, it highlights the inadequacies of the process. And if you think that this bill has not been well handled, if you are an MP, then you are duty bound to say, if it's not good enough for this, it's not good enough for the Border Security Bill. It's not good enough for the Employment Bill, it's not good enough for the Product Regulation Bill. Because all of those, they may not be the life and death decisions that the assisted dying bill is about, but they do affect really important aspects of all our lives as citizens. And if they think the procedures are not up to it, then it is incumbent upon them to do something about it. So that brings me to the Modernisation Committee.

[00:36:05] Mark D'Arcy: Where I gather you are appearing next week.

[00:36:07] Ruth Fox: I am, yes. It's gonna be a busy week next week. So I'm appearing before the Modernisation Committee on Tuesday. Late Tuesday morning, I think about 11 30, 11 45. We'll put a link in the show notes to where it'll be, and I'm gonna be talking to them as part of their inquiry on accessibility.

[00:36:22] Mark D'Arcy: And I'll be sitting there with popcorn.

[00:36:25] Ruth Fox: So I'm gonna be talking about some, some new work we've been doing on sort of reviewing the language of the House of Commons. Of course a common theme of this podcast, looking at some of the customs and why we need a review of Standing Orders. Again, these are the kinds of things that that we talk a lot about, and we'll have a new report out shortly. I've shared the draft with the clerks and the committee members, an early draft, and we'll see what happens next week, but looking forward to that. But I do hope that, um, you know, next stage of the Modernisation Committee's work will then be on, uh, legislative scrutiny.

[00:36:54] Mark D'Arcy: And maybe we can have an after the match discussion in next week's pod as well.

[00:36:57] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well in fact, we should probably let listeners know Mark that um, because the second day of Report Stage will be next Friday, we will in fact be delaying our normal podcast recording. We normally record on a Thursday and it hits podcast feeds on Friday. We'll be doing Friday recording and it'll hit your podcast feed on Saturday the 14th.

[00:37:15] So we'll have our analysis of what happened at Report Stage.

[00:37:18] Mark D'Arcy: And with that, Ruth, shall we take a break?

[00:37:19] Ruth Fox: Okay. See you in a minute and come back and talk about Speakers Conference. I think

[00:37:23] Mark D'Arcy: Indeed.

[00:37:26] Ruth Fox: And we are back. And, uh, Mark the Speakers Conference, which we've spoken about a little bit on the podcast before, this inquiry under the Speaker's auspices, that is looking into the security of candidates at general elections and then MPs as well, has published interim recommendations, an interim report this week, and some of the findings are quite shocking.

[00:37:46] 96% of MPs personally experienced incidents of threatening behaviour. 31% of MPs said they did not feel safe while campaigning during the general election and so on. So the Conference has made some initial recommendations and proposals. It says electoral law is not fit for purpose. I mean, you know, not exactly telling us something we, we perhaps didn't already know.

[00:38:09] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I think this is it. The, the, what this report has essentially done is produce some fairly alarming statistics to back up things that most MPs or people who have been parliamentary candidates will have experienced and will know to be true. So they're bottoming the kind of folk wisdom around parliamentary campaigning now, which is that it has become a lot more unpleasant and dangerous.

[00:38:30] And whereas once upon a time, the most dangerous thing you're likely to meet was an angry dog these days, angry voters and occasionally very threatening voters. And of course the incredibly nasty dimension of social media abuse. Yeah. Which can amount to incitement as well.

[00:38:44] Ruth Fox: And that comes through in the report as sort of the number one source of MP's concerns, that a lot of the abuse is coming through social media. That's the origins of it.

[00:38:52] And a theme of the report is an emphasis also on parliamentary staff. It's all very well talking about MPs. But their staff as well are on the sharp end of it. They're obviously, sometimes the people you know, they've got to respond to the social media. They're the ones picking up the phone. They're the ones opening the abusive correspondence and threatening letters. They're the ones that are at constituency meetings with MPs when they get harangued in the constituency. So there's very clear sense in the report that the MPs and the wider parliamentary community and the Electoral Commission and the police and so on, all these key players have to take into account the needs of, of parliamentary staff as well.

[00:39:28] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it is this awful perception of a constant ongoing threat that anyone, particularly anyone who stuck their head over the parapet on some really controversial issue now has to face. I, I know of MPs, for example, who've taken a controversial position on an issue where a lot of people feel very strongly, who've then had to be escorted on public transport by a member of their staff taking the train up to Westminster from the constituency, always make sure that someone's with them, so they've got a bit of backup if someone comes and starts haranguing them on the train. So when you get to that kind of position, you kind of feel that public dialogue has become a bit more poisonous than is healthy.

[00:40:04] Ruth Fox: Yeah. There's been an element of this for quite some years. Mm-hmm. Um, I mean, the social media element has transformed it and has made it more immediate.

[00:40:13] And the volume of it has increased considerably. But I mean, I remember when I was working for an MP 20 odd years ago, um, he'd been a Foreign Office Minister during the Iraq war, and then it, then it's aftermath and things got very, very, very difficult. We had all sorts of abusive communications, correspondence in, into the office.

[00:40:32] We had a, a wreath delivered one day to the office anonymously. Oh wow. And all a bit dubious about whether there's anything buried in this wreath that was a risk. I mean, I used to have the number for the local special branch because of the risk of threats to our office. Not helped by the fact that the Probation Service moved into the, into the ground floor of our office block building.

[00:40:51] Mark D'Arcy: In some ways quite convenient, I suppose, but,

[00:40:53] Ruth Fox: Well, yeah. I mean, they, it meant that the police were not far away and on hand. But yeah, we had one incident where a, a guy who it turned out was coming to probation, was apparently wielding a gun on his way to our office, and I got a call from the police telling me to barricade ourselves into the office with filing cabinets and so on, which was all really difficult.

[00:41:11] It turned out it was a, it was a toy gun. It wasn't real. So the threat was, but you know, we, we had quite a number of those kinds of unpleasant incidents, firebombing of things, uh, through letter boxes and so on. But that was very much around the post Iraq situation. I think for the current MPs and recent intakes, it's been, I hesitate to say the toxicity of the Brexit debate, and it's just sort of piled up and, and social media has put it on steroids.

[00:41:40] But what comes through in the report is the fact that there needs to be much more coordination around this. Stuff. And one of the things that I hadn't really thought about was the fact that once Parliament dissolves and you cease to be an MP, the parliamentary security blanket fades away. They don't take away the security measures in your house or your panic buttons or your alarms or whatever, but that coordinating link isn't there anymore.

[00:42:04] Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:05] Ruth Fox: And you're back to parties, you're back to, you know, the local council election officers, running the elections, back to party agents in charge of the campaigns, and you've got 650 different operations all across the country, not all of whom are facing the same level of threat. Because this is focused on particular candidates very often.

[00:42:23] Mark D'Arcy: And the report talks about a duty of care for the parties towards their candidates, that in effect, they should act as a kind of clearing house for security concerns that their candidates have incurred. And this can be a tyro politician in a completely unwinnable seat facing unacceptable abuse as well as someone who's expecting to be an MP at the end of it all. And it can happen to pretty much anyone. It needn't be a rational cause. Yeah. Which I suppose is the other point about this.

[00:42:52] Ruth Fox: So, some of the things that sort of, the measures that they're proposing, I mean, they want to sort of a review to ensure no home addresses are published on the election materials.

[00:42:59] And when you register as a candidate, they want candidates identities to be properly verified. Polling stations to be protected. Not sure what will happen with that. And talks about the fact that we need much more sort of injection of, I suppose, what you call cultural change in attitudes of things like the Home Office, the Electoral Commission, and the Police I mean to all of this.

[00:43:19] Mark D'Arcy: The thing that I found least plausible about this was the suggestion that all the parties should get together and work out a code of conduct for good electioneering, which is a very worthy idea. But there's always a lowest common denominator thing here that once someone breaks the rules, it becomes very hard for everybody else to keep observing them.

[00:43:38] If someone is prepared to be really unethical and really raucous and really vicious in a campaign, it can drag the whole thing down. It's quite hard to take the high road when you're constantly being pulled onto the low road.

[00:43:49] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean the, the specific recommendation is that the parties, and the Electoral Commission should work with the Speaker to develop a code of conduct for campaigning. Part of me thinks, well these people are the legislators of the future for us making laws that we are all gonna be bound by, one would hope that they might behave in a particular way, but we know that some of them don't. And the way in which parties for partisan electoral advantage, well, sometimes, as you say, take the low route is unfortunate.

[00:44:17] But I'm not sure that codes of conduct like this will necessarily eradicate it. I mean, the Joe Cox Civility Commission, for example, has had a code of conduct type model that it's tried to encourage candidates at the last election to sign up to. Many did, but I'm not sure that that is actually the biggest threat.

[00:44:34] Mark D'Arcy: It certainly, it doesn't help when campaigns are conducting in very violent and abusive language. Yeah. And you see pictures of candidates with their head in a sort of gun sight,, cross hair type thing. That is the sort of language that became very unfashionable in America after there was a, a murder attempt on a Congresswoman there.

[00:44:51] Gabby Giffords. Gabby Giffords. Yeah. And uh, it emerged that she'd been seen as, as an electoral target. And I'm sure quite innocently they did the cross hairs metaphor, but it became something else. And it does suggest something rather nastier than merely losing an election. Yeah. I suppose my other concern is there is a necessary degree of security that MPs or would be MPs now have to have. But the difficulty is it can restrict contact with the general public. I mean, if you take the two most horrible cases, the murder of Joe Cox outside her constituency surgery, the murder of Sir David Amess in his constituency surgery, it's very, very difficult for Members of Parliament to interact with their voters who bring concerns to them.

[00:45:35] If everybody's having to go through some kind of security blanket first, I hope we don't get to the point where access becomes really restricted and it things become difficult for constituents in terms of actually reaching, physically, getting into the presence of their MP. But it's clear that. Just having total unfettered access with MPs, wandering about with no protection at all, opens them up to danger.

[00:45:56] Ruth Fox: I think that's definitely happening because if you compare it to, as I say, 20 years ago, we used to have open door surgeries, so you know, it was first come, first served. You didn't book, there was no screening. You just came and sat in the waiting room and we basically were there for several hours and we saw everybody who was there.

[00:46:12] The only check that was done was, are you a constituent? Are you actually resident within the constituency? Now, MPs are, I think more often than not using booking systems, you've gotta actually book in. They get more information upfront. Quite a lot of them are holding online surgeries, which may not be a bad thing. I mean, there's advantages to that, but it's also a way of separating and screening access. And of course, this question of access to our MPs and that ability to have that personal contact has been such a feature of our political system in ways that not all parliamentary systems around the world have, and it's always been seen as a sort of a benefit and a positive feature. And as you say, if we're moving, gonna have to move away from that because of the security of MPs, what are the potential implications for that?

[00:46:57] Mark D'Arcy: Well, this report by the Speaker's Conference is an interim report. Mm-hmm. It indicates a direction of travel, areas of concern, and so they're now going to have to move on, I think, to much more detailed measures.

[00:47:07] They're talking to members of His Majesty's press next week, I believe, as well.

[00:47:11] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so I gather and um, they've indicated the next three areas of focus are gonna be looking at public attitudes towards MPs and the level of abuse and intimidation and debate. They're gonna be looking at the influence of the press and broadcast media in that context, hence why your former colleagues are gonna be there.

[00:47:27] They're looking at how threats are being handled in the criminal justice system and looking at the role of social media. One thing that did strike me though, reading the report, was actually the Speaker's Conference, has done a survey of MPs and MPs staff. Now bearing in mind that we are being told that this is such a big issue and an important issue, I was very struck that only a third of MPs responded to it, and only 7.7% of MPs staff responded.

[00:47:52] Now, there may be lots of reasons why, and we know, you know, MPs are inundated with emails and communications - and surveys - and surveys, and we know from academic research that getting MPs to take part in survey research is increasingly difficult to get.

[00:48:07] Mark D'Arcy: But you'd have thought on this subject...

[00:48:08] Ruth Fox: But yeah, on this subject and under the auspices of the Speaker, I would have expected slightly better. So, um, interesting to see what comes of that in the future.

[00:48:15] Mark D'Arcy: Do these things actually get debated in Parliament? I, I can't recall a Speaker's Conference report on any previous issue being debated directly in Parliament.

[00:48:23] But you'd have thought this is something MPs might want to weigh in on.

[00:48:26] Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, one assumes that at the end of the process when they produce their final report, it'll be like any other Select Committee report. They can try and get a debate in the House. But again, you're into that

[00:48:35] Mark D'Arcy: Mr. Speaker turns up at the Backbench Business Committee to lobby for a debate.

[00:48:39] Ruth Fox: Um, you're into that sort of same question again, aren't you? If it isn't going to be a Backbench Business debate, then it's, it's Government making time for it in the House precisely because it's in the interest and it deals with an issue that concerns all MPs. There's wide party representation on this body and because it's under the auspices of the Speaker, I'd be surprised if it wasn't debated, but we'll have to see.

[00:49:00] And we're not quite sure of the timetables in terms of when their final report will be, that it seems that they've got still quite a lot of work to go.

[00:49:06] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I think Ruth that just about, uh, brings this podcast to an end. Just, uh, time though for a couple of quick reminders. First of all, just to remind you, again, as we mentioned earlier, the next edition of this podcast will be coming out on Saturday the 14th, a day later, so that we can take in the results of the second day of Report Stage of the assisted dying bill.

[00:49:24] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and just my regular appeal to listeners. If you're enjoying the podcast, please do, uh, review it, rate it on, uh, whatever podcast app you're using, it really helps other listeners find us on these, uh, well, those pesky algorithms, uh, we were talking about earlier. And secondly, we have still got our listeners survey ongoing, so if you haven't already completed it - quite a lot of you have - have hundreds of people have already completed it, so please do because it'll really help us. learn about what you like about the podcast, what you dislike, and will also help us in terms of trying to market it for those, uh, pesky advertisers that we need to keep supporting the podcast to, to pay the bills. So please do, uh, complete the listener survey. You'll find it in the show notes and on our website.

[00:50:07] Mark D'Arcy: But for now, goodbye.

[00:50:08] Ruth Fox: See you next week.

[00:50:11] Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/PM or find us on social media at Hansard Society.

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