Tag Archives: Nicky Morgan

A woman’s place is in the House: reclaiming civility, tolerance and respect in political life

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Dame Laura Cox, author of a 2018 report into the bullying and harassment of House of Commons staff, argues that the behaviour of too many parliamentarians is misogynistic and a cause of capable women MPs leaving parliament, or having to accept behaviour that would not be permitted in any other workplace. She says that this is in part an institutional problem, and calls for a more open, tolerant, respectful and conciliatory politics.

We are living currently in a very angry world. Our parliament, the central institution of our representative democracy, should be setting an example of tolerance and civility, but instead, civility and willingness to compromise seem to have faded. Political discourse generally has been impoverished by antagonism and extremism. Those more constructive qualities of reflection, cooperation, collaboration and consensus seem to have fallen by the wayside.

In addition to bitter, adversarial politics, there has been an upsurge in reports of abuse, intimidation and assault. In recent years, independent inquiries into events at Westminster – including my own report into the bullying and harassment of Commons staff – have recorded a disturbing number of acts of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment alleged by members of staff and MPs against other MPs, as well as among staff and members of the House of Lords.

The macho behaviour and posturing so frequently displayed in our political debates have disproportionately and adversely affected women in public life. The women affected are not only politicians. Women journalists, academics, campaigners and political activists have all reported instances of intimidation, abuse and even physical violence. In June 2016 a serving MP, Jo Cox, was brutally killed on the street in broad daylight.

Why has our politics become so misogynistic? There are, in my view, a number of contributing factors, including the still unacceptably low numbers of women politicians; the rules and customs of the parliament where they serve; and the resistance to change of parliament as an institution.

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Reforming elections: assessing the government’s proposals

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In September, the Constitution Unit hosted a distinguished panel of experts to discuss the government’s plans for reforming election law, as set out in the Elections Bill and draft Online Safety Bill. Tom Fieldhouse summarises the discussion.

The Elections Bill, and the draft Online Safety Bill are two important parts of the government’s reform agenda which, in their current form, stand to significantly alter the UK’s constitutional landscape.

With the Elections Bill making its way through parliament, and the draft Online Safety Bill undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, the Constitution Unit hosted a webinar on 23 September entitled Reforming elections: assessing the government’s proposals. The event was chaired by the Unit’s Deputy Director, Professor Alan Renwick, and heard from four expert speakers: Louise Edwards, Deputy Director of Regulation at the Electoral Commission; Laura Lock, Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators; Justin Fisher, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Policy Unit at Brunel University; and, Baroness (Nicky) Morgan of Cotes, former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2019–20) – now a Conservative peer and Vice Chair of the APPG on Digital Regulation and Responsibility.

The summaries below are presented in the order of the speakers’ contributions. The full event, including the Q&A, is available on our YouTube page.

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Why the new Speaker may not always be able to play a straight bat

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NGQojaZG_400x400 (1)On 4 November, the House of Commons elected Lindsay Hoyle to serve as Speaker, following the resignation of John Bercow. It has been treated as accepted wisdom that a different approach to the Speakership is called for. However, Bercow has taken decisions about the Commons’ handling of Brexit in circumstances where several – or all – of the available choices were potentially controversial. Jack Simson Caird argues that his successor might therefore find that trying to ‘play a straight bat’ is not as easy or appropriate as it might appear.

Lindsay Hoyle is the new Speaker of the House of Commons. Hoyle, like many of his fellow candidates for the role, sought to emphasise that he would be very different from John Bercow. One of the main narratives around the election was that the Speaker should be, in the words of Chris Bryant, ‘an umpire and not a player’. All the candidates, including Hoyle, pledged to follow Bercow in standing up for backbenchers, but at the same time suggested that he had made procedural decisions in the 2017 parliament that were problematic. It is in that context that this post seeks to revisit some of the major decisions taken by Bercow during the last parliament. In the narrative established by the media and several of the candidates during the election for his successor, Bercow’s major Brexit decisions were portrayed as the product of his personality, and a desire to be the focal point of political debate. However, when the Speaker’s key decisions are examined in context, that narrative seems rather simplistic. If, after the general election, Lindsay Hoyle is faced with a minority government that is seeking to push through constitutional reforms in the face of opposition from large numbers of MPs, then he may find himself in the political spotlight. The analysis below suggests that in that context, balancing a commitment to be a champion of backbench MPs and the desire to play procedural decisions with a ‘straight bat’ may prove to be difficult in practice.  Continue reading →

Which MPs are responsible for failing to ‘get Brexit done’?

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meg_russell_2000x2500.jpgToday Boris Johnson will give his leader’s speech at Conservative Party conference, doubtless with a central argument about the need to ‘get Brexit done’. MPs have been blamed for the failure to achieve this. But which MPs precisely are responsible? Meg Russell argues that opposition parties cannot normally be expected to deliver government policy. Instead, government backbenchers usually have that role. It is resistance from Conservative backbenchers – including Johnson himself and others promoted to his Cabinet – to supporting Theresa May’s deal that provides the most obvious reason for Brexit not having been agreed.

The slogan for this year’s Conservative Party conference, under the leadership of the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is to ‘get Brexit done’. Immediately following the Supreme Court ruling against the government last week, ill-tempered exchanges in the House of Commons saw the Prime Minister repeatedly blaming parliamentarians for failing to deliver Brexit. For example, Boris Johnson commented that ‘Politicians of all parties promised the public that they would honour the result. Sadly, many have since done all they can to abandon those promises and to overturn that democratic vote’. In contrast he pledged that ‘We will not betray the people who sent us here; we will not’, adding that ‘That is what the Opposition want to do’. Far stronger words, characteristically, have been ascribed to his chief adviser Dominic Cummings in blaming parliament for the Brexit impasse. Several papers have reported Cummings as suggesting that it was ‘not surprising’ that people are angry with MPs, as they have failed in their duty to get Brexit done. Given the risks that such comments further stoke such public anger against our democratic institutions, it seems important to consider exactly which MPs primarily bear responsibility for the failure to agree a Brexit plan.

First, a quick recap on what happened in the months before Johnson took office. His predecessor, Theresa May, pursued a lengthy negotiation with the EU27 – resulting in a withdrawal agreement that was signed off on 25 November 2018. Under the terms of Section 13 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, this deal was then put to an initial ‘meaningful vote’ in the House of Commons on 15 January 2019. However, it was defeated by MPs by a whopping 432 to 202 votes. The Prime Minister subsequently brought the deal back for a second such attempt on 12 March. By this point various MPs had been brought round to supporting the deal; but it was nonetheless still heavily defeated, by 391 votes to 242. A third and final attempt at getting the House of Commons to agree the deal then occurred on the originally-planned Brexit day, of 29 March 2019. This was not a ‘meaningful vote’ under the terms of the Act, as Speaker John Bercow had hinted that such a move could be ruled out of order – on the basis that MPs cannot just repeatedly be asked to vote upon the same proposition – but it was again an in-principle vote on the deal. Again the gap between supporters and opponents narrowed, but the government was defeated by 344 votes to 286 – a margin of 58. Hence a further 30 MPs would have needed to switch from opposing to supporting the deal in order for it to be clearly approved. Continue reading →