We finally get a glimpse of Labour's plans to reform parliament

Or do we?

Photo by inspira studio on Unsplash

There's a terrible little game we play with Labour. We shouldn't have to play this game, but unfortunately we do. The game is called: Strategy or Ignorance?

In some areas, we have a fairly good idea of the direction of travel under a Labour government - net zero, labour markets, Rwanda, that sort of thing. In others - further education, say, or prisons - we really don't. So instead we have to play a game: Is the party just keeping its cards close to its chest ahead of the election? Or does it simply not know? Is it strategy? Or is it ignorance? 

I played the game earlier this week, when shadow Commons leader Lucy Powell gave a speech to the Institute for Government. It offered us our best insight yet into Labour's thoughts on how to reform parliament. 

No-one gives the remotest shit about this, of course, but it's the reason for everything we see around us. It is the engine room of political outcomes. If you mess up the legislative process, you get bad law. If you get bad law, you get bad real world results. We discuss these matters in posh academic terms, but the end result is the vivid down-to-earth policy wasteland we see before us now: dilapidated public services, half-kept roads, overpacked prisons, a corroded health service, and classrooms that threaten to collapse on the heads of the children who inhabit them. People's lives are ground up in the mechanisms of what they set in motion. They die of cancer which might otherwise have been caught in time, they lack the rail infrastructure that allow them to pursue a viable career, they're mugged by someone who was not rehabilitated in prison or effectively managed by probation services upon their release. 

Underneath all the tawdry theatrics and clever-clever punch-and-judy bullshit in Westminster are the lives of the people who've been failed by our amateur political culture. So parliamentary reform isn't abstract at all. It's about whether government works. It's about whether we can show that liberal democracy helps people, and therefore make a compelling case for why they shouldn't follow the snake oil populists instead.

Powell started talking. It's safe to say that this was not a masterclass in specificity. It was like we were lost in a watercolour painting of a maze: vague, full of generalised verbiage, and decidedly lacking in concrete promises. So we had to start playing the game: Is she being purposefully guarded? Does Labour have a plan for what it would do differently, but is unwilling to reveal it? Or is the horrible truth that it has no plan - just vibes, good old vibes, the primary currency of Westminster life. 

By the end, it was difficult to maintain much optimism. Powell isn't on top of the brief. Maybe she will be later. She shows signs that she's getting a handle on it. But she isn't right now. 

But first: the good stuff. Because there was good stuff in there. And honestly just hearing someone express good ideas without a coherent plan for how to achieve them is far more rewarding than hearing someone express terrible ideas without a coherent plan for how to achieve them, which has been our experience over the past few years. So, you know: marginal gains. Take what you can.

Powell is clearly aware that the Parliamentary Business and Legislation (PBL) Committee is failing on a catastrophic level. This committee sits in the Cabinet Office. Its membership is basically a who's who of all the most quietly influential figures in government: the leader of the Commons, the chief whip, the chief secretary to the Treasury, the attorney general. It assesses individual bills to make sure they're watertight before they head to the Commons or the Lords. Or at least it used to. In reality, this function has ceased to exist in the clown car collective of modern Conservative government. Ministers now stuff whole new powers into legislation months later, towards the end of a bill's time in parliament, or they scrap half of a bill after it has started to go through the Commons. This is not the kind of thing that happens if you know what you're doing. It's the kind of thing that happens if you're a howling fucking baboon. 

"We've seen a fall in legislative standards with poorly drafted and constantly changing bills," Powell said in her speech. "The wheels seem to have come off entirely from the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee, which used to provide a tough gateway, now letting through all sorts of nonsense." Good stuff.

She was also correct to spot the danger of statutory instruments. These are little executive power grabs - ministerial powers which allow the secretary of state to act like their own mini-parliament, introducing laws which receive next-to-no scrutiny in the Commons or the Lords. They were originally intended for technical uncontroversial bits of law. They are now used very widely indeed. Indeed their misuse is so profound we often see something called 'skeleton bills' - legislation so empty, and stuffed full of so many ministerial powers, that it's like the bones of something without the meat. In any sane world, where we actually cared about the values we claim to stand for as a country, this would be one of the primary topics of mainstream debate. But this isn't a sane world, we don't care about our values, and it therefore isn't.

Powell is correct on this matter as well, saying statutory instruments "shouldnt be used just to avoid scrutiny" and that "proper good… Labour policy, that's been developed appropriately, should be scrutinised and should have proper passage through both Houses". Again, good stuff.

Honestly, she's right on all sorts of things. She wants MPs to take on a stronger role scrutinising legislation. She accepts that the House of Lords is good at scrutiny and that "the Commons could learn a thing or two from it" - very welcome words after Labour's previous half-thought-through suggestion it would abolish the Chamber. And most importantly, she understands the fundamental value of seriousness in government. "Labour is prepared to do the hard yards," she said. "This is serious work for a serious party of government that is serious about governing better".

But the thing is: we really do need to hold them to that. Claiming the mantle of seriousness means you have to demonstrate it. And yet at certain crucial moments, Powell appeared hopelessly under-informed. 

She was asked at one point about the Wright committee proposal for a House Business Committee. This was a committee established by Gordon Brown for parliamentary reform which suggested that the Commons should control its own timetable rather than being told what it could do by the government. This is the bare minimum of what could be expected for a sovereign legislature - that it decides how long it is going to take to look at legislation. It is a precondition for a Commons Chamber with any self-respect whatsoever. 

Powell evidently had never even heard of it. "Blimey," she said. "This is the niche crowd. It gets to the index of the index." It really isn't niche. In her policy domain, this is a very common discussion. The fact she’s never heard of it suggests she hasn’t spoken to any parliamentary reformers. When the idea was later explained to her she replied: "Not massively keen on that but anyway, we'll see." If Labour is a serious party for serious times then you would expect the shadow Commons leader to have heard of pretty rudimentary ideas in their policy area and, if they're going to reject them out of hand, they should be able to articulate why. 

The greater problem is that Powell offered no solutions, except to say that Labour will do it better, presumably because they're just fundamentally better people. What is her solution to the grotesque misuse of statutory instruments? It's not hard to find one. The Hansard Society has a system ready to go off the shelf. It's been painstakingly constructed by people with real expertise who have given it major thought. Instead, Powell said: "It's not about having hard and fast rules about that. But we'd be asking tough questions about why… ministers and departments think that's the right approach and it won't get through us if they can't justify that better."

Similarly, there are lots of good ideas out there for how we assist MPs to actually scrutinise legislation, rather than just vote whichever way they're told to by the whips. But again, Powell opted for something more wistful and vague. "A lot of this is about the culture and the standards," she said.

This gets to the heart of Westminster's problem. There is a knee-jerk superficial response to deep-seated problems which casts them as issues of personality rather than structural defects. It's all about people. Get rid of the bad ones, chuck in the good ones, and it'll be fine. It's the assumption behind so much of Westminster life. It is the reason that we have a 'good old boys' system, operating on an expectation of decent personal behaviour. And that ultimately is what Powell seems to be suggesting on statutory instruments. We don't need to change the system. Just trust me. I'll be really tough.

But the thing is: politicians are not to be trusted. What matters is the systems they put in place to restrain themselves, not their assurances they give about how they'll behave without them. Out of power, Powell recognises the problem with statutory instruments. But in power, she will find them very useful indeed. Of course she will. Who wouldn't? You can legislate really quickly and easily with a bare-bone minimum of opposition. And soon enough, those warm words about accountability that she gave at an Institute for Government lecture years ago won't matter so much.

I don't want to be too despairing about this. Powell's instincts are good. Labour has strong policies in other areas, even now they've been watered down. It is likely to be much more savvy on civil service reform - which is desperately needed - because of the civil service background of many people around the leadership. And the Powell point on personality isn't irrelevant. Having decent people with decent values pursuing decent policies is a vast improvement from where we are now. 

But nevertheless, this is still a disturbing outcome. We should not have to play a game where we try to figure out if shadow ministers know what they're talking about. And we should not find that, having played the game, the answer is no. 

The next Labour government will not just define its own future and that of the country. It will be a litmus test for whether rational progressive politics can deliver for people in a way that populism cannot. The consequences of its failure are very severe indeed. They really must do better.

Odds and sods

The Gold is very good, if you’re at a loss for things to watch. It’s a BBC drama from last year that I’ve only just stumbled on. Two episodes in and it feels like a stone cold crime classic - lavishly made, impeccably paced, full of thrilling little observations about class, and with a cast playing gloriously against type. The kind of thing you could stick next to an HBO drama and not feel embarrassed about.

Oh and we’ve a new season of Origin Story out. We start this one with a two-parter on George Orwell, who is a much stranger and more complex man than we ever give him credit for: a font of despair, who despised the modern world, and was wrong about a great many things. Mercifully, he was also one of the greatest British writers of all time, so that does rather make up for it. The first episode is available here - do give it a listen if you haven’t already, we’re tremendously proud of it.