This week we look at parliament’s role in shaping Brexit-related legislation between 2017 and 2019. We ask: What role did parliament play in Brexit? More particularly, how much influence has it had over Brexit legislation? And has it done harm or good?
Politics in the UK is in a state of turmoil. Every time we think it can’t get any crazier, it finds a way of doing just that. Many of the roots of the trouble can be found in Brexit. Whatever you think of Brexit, it’s clear that the referendum of June 2016 forced parliament to implement a massive switch in the direction of the country that most MPs thought was wrong, and split the main parties – particularly the Conservative Party – down the middle. The politics of ideology trumped the politics of competence.
This week we look at a new piece of research by two researchers here at UCL, which sheds light on an important aspect of the story. It assesses just how much influence parliament had in shaping the various laws that had to be passed to make Brexit a reality and put alternative arrangements in place.
The authors of the study are:
Dr Tom Fleming, Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science and a member of the UCL Constitution Unit,
and Lisa James, Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit and co-author of the forthcoming OUP book, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit.
Mentioned in this episode:
Season 7 Episode 4
Parliaments Role in Brexit
27 October 2022
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
parliament, brexit, government, legislation, mps, amendments, parliamentary, influence, lisa, paused, period, concessions, important, simply, question, uk, tom, debates, mechanisms, politics
SPEAKERS
Tom Fleming, Alan Renwick, Lisa James
Alan Renwick 00:05
Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we ask what role did Parliament play in Brexit? More particularly, how much influence has it had over Brexit legislation? And has it done harm or good?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy, and Department of Political Science at University College London. Politics in the UK is in a state of turmoil. Every time we think it can't get any crazier, it finds a way of doing just that. Many of the roots of the trouble can be found in Brexit. Whatever you think of Brexit in itself, it's clear that the referendum of June 2016 forced Parliament's to implement a massive switch in the direction of the country that most MPs thought was wrongheaded and split the main parties, particularly the Conservative Party down the middle. The politics of ideology trumped the politics of competence.
While we're not going to try to talk about all of that on today's episode, but a fascinating new piece of research by two of my colleagues here at UCL sheds new light on an important aspect of the story. It focuses on the role played by Parliament, as distinct from government. And it looks at Parliament's role in shaping Brexit related legislation, specifically between 2017 and 2019. That is between the 2017 general election when the Conservatives lost their majority in the House of Commons and the 2019 general election, when they won that majority back. During this period, Theresa May, and then Boris Johnson battled as prime minister to secure agreement on some kind of Brexit when it appeared that none of the options could command majority support.
The study that we're focusing on assesses just how much influence Parliament had in shaping the various laws that had to be passed to make Brexit a reality and put alternative arrangements in place and it raises many important questions. How unusual was this period? Did Parliament do good or harm? And what does this period tell us about debates about whether Parliament's role should be strengthened or weakened?
Well, the authors of the study are Dr. Tom Fleming Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science and a member of the UCL Constitution Unit. And Lisa James Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit, working now on its project exploring constitutional principles and the health of democracy, and previously on Brexit Parliament and the Constitution. Alongside Meg Russell, she is co author of the forthcoming Oxford University Press book, 'The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit'.
And I'm very happy to say that Tom and Lisa, join me now. So Tom and Lisa, your article is a fascinating in depth analysis of processes of Brexit lawmaking. But let's, let's set a bit of context. Before we delve into that detail. I've said a little bit about the Brexit process in my intro, but would you like to maybe just flesh that out a little bit more to remind listeners of what happened during the period we're looking at? Lisa, do you want to you want to kick us off?
Lisa James 03:21
Yes, thank you, Alan. And it's great to be on the podcast. So as as you mentioned, we're looking specifically at the 2017 to 2019 parliament which kicks off with Theresa May's snap election. And that took place just a couple of months after the triggering of article 50. And we end with Boris Johnson's landslide victory in the 2019 general election, which itself took place just a couple of months before the UK is formal exit from the European Union. So the parliament we're looking at spans the vast majority of the Brexit period, it spans the formal negotiations, and it also spans the period in which the struggles in Parliament over Brexit became particularly intense. And listeners may well remember the months of 2019. With knife edge votes, the landslide defeat of Theresa May's Brexit deal, and a period of really intense turmoil between Commons and government.
Now many of the votes which people will remember weren't actually on legislation. They were on government motions, they were on opposition day motions, they were on a wide variety of other parliamentary mechanisms. But the important thing is that this is legislation which is happening at the same time, and in which the same people are key actors. So actually, we see the impact of that overall Brexit turmoil coming through in this study.
Alan Renwick 04:42
Yeah, so, that's really interesting. And you're pointing there to the fact that Parliament actually does quite a few different things. So you know, Parliament is a legislature therefore legislate, it passes law, but does quite a few other things. And I guess it's important for us just to be aware of the various roles of Parliament here as well. Tom, do you want to fill us in on this?
Tom Fleming 05:03
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks, Alan. So, I suppose what most people will picture when they think about Parliament doing its job, if they ever pause to picture that at all would be the sort of shouting and heckling that they might see on a Wednesday lunchtime at Prime Minister's questions. But clearly Parliament, both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, spend most of their time doing much less high profile things that are still nonetheless really important. So we we see them holding debates on various general issues and airing the concerns of their constituents. Parliament also has a very important role in scrutinising the executive ministers and holding them accountable, particularly by asking them questions at regular intervals. And then of course, Parliament also legislates.
Traditionally, Parliament's role of scrutiny is perhaps a little bit less extensive with matters of foreign policy, international negotiations, and treaties than it is with some parts of domestic policy, which might perhaps explain why some of the clashes that we saw during the Brexit process were quite so fierce and quite so tense. But I think as Lisa has sort of pointed out, lots of what went on and got the most attention during Brexit was the very dramatic things that was about approving certain deals and certain changes to the timeline for Brexit. But there was huge amounts of work going on behind the scenes on all manner of very big, very important laws that Parliament needed to pass in this period.
Alan Renwick 06:30
Yeah, so Lisa, do you want to just pick that up? Why was lawmaking an important part of the Brexit process? And in a sense, Brexit was just about kind of treaty-making and deciding to, you know, have the deal with the European Union. What's law doing in all of this process?
Lisa James 06:49
So this picks up I suppose, on the extent to which Brexit was not only a huge political question, but was also an enormous administrative exercise. The UK's 40 years of EU membership had left that the assumption of that membership really woven throughout the UK statute book. So if we think in terms of existing laws, there were lots of references to the EU, assumptions about EU regulation. Laws which had been derived from our EU membership and operated very much under that, under that working assumption. But there were also areas in which the UK had not needed to pass its own domestic law, because it related to policy competences which had been handled at EU level. And the return of those competences also required new legislation to create the regulatory regimes and ministerial powers, etc, etc. needed to operate the new, the new policy decisions in those areas.
So you have a combination of legislation, which was intended to tackle the overall question of how the statute book could be readied? And then you have a series of pieces of legislation that aim to pick up this challenge in particular areas. So you're looking at legislation, on trade, on tariffs, on immigration, but also on some sectoral areas like agriculture and fisheries.
Alan Renwick 08:08
And I guess we also had legislation just on Brexit itself, didn't we? So there was the sort of international treaty with the EU in order to make Brexit happen. But that also had to be implemented in UK law, 'just saying we are leaving the European Union' was something that had to be in UK law as well.
Lisa James 08:25
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. So you have legislation that both aimed to repeal the initial piece of legislation in 1972 that had prepared the UK for entry. And then you also needed legislation that would implement the Brexit deals. Struck first by May then by Johnson.
Alan Renwick 08:41
Okay, great. So we have lots of all sorts of different kinds of important legislation here. And what you're trying to explore in this article is how much influence Parliament had over that legislation? I guess one very broad question that we should start off with is, why should we care about how much influence Parliament have? Why is that an interesting and important question? Tom, do you want to go for that?
Tom Fleming 09:04
Absolutely. So I think there are a couple of reasons at least, for why we might care about understanding this. One is simply that if these laws are important then we should care about which actors, which political parties, which institutions shaped them. And that will give us some insight, perhaps into what views and interests shape those laws that ultimately will then be binding on all of us and have really important impacts on future British regulation, and policymaking, and day to day life.
But perhaps more widely. As many listeners will know, there have been lots of arguments and claims about Parliament's role in the Brexit process. It was very controversial both amongst politicians, amongst commentators, journalists, academics, and that's led to fierce debates about what Parliament really should have done and what role is appropriate for Parliament to play both in the Brexit process, but in politics more widely. And we see some legacy of that still with ongoing debates about the proper role of Parliament. And in a sense, we can't really have an informed discussion about what role Parliament should play, unless we have some quite good evidence about what role Parliament actually does play. And so particularly in periods where that's so contested, it's really important for us to have good, grounded, empirical evidence that can actually shed some light on what's going on.
Alan Renwick 10:21
Great. So you've raised an important agenda of issues that we're interested in shedding light on here. So we'll get back to those questions. But before we do so we should see what your evidence actually is. And in order to see that, I guess we know, as ever in political science, we need to understand the the methods through which you have gathered that evidence.
So the article seeks to measure Parliament's influence. How can you actually do that? And Lisa, I guess there are various mechanisms through which Parliament might have influenced, so somehow you're going to need to capture what are those mechanisms, and then you're going to need to find a way of, of measuring the influence that is being exercised through those various mechanisms.
Lisa James 11:06
Yeah, that's exactly right. And as ever, some of these mechanisms are easier to pin down than others. So when people think of parliamentary influence, the thing that typically first springs to mind is the set piece defeat on, the in the chamber of either house. The government comes forward with a proposal and either MPs or peers vote against it, you get a clear numerical outcome very, very straightforward case of parliamentary influence. But actually, what scholarship has been doing increasingly in recent years is to look at how we can measure parliamentary influence beyond that, and how we can develop a slightly more rounded idea of how Parliament influences policy. And there are two other ways that we that we can do that that we picked up in this paper.
So the first of those is to look at when Parliament inspires the government to concede. So when the government openly changes its mind, changes its ideas, gives Parliament what Parliament has been pushing for. And the third is through something that we call anticipated reactions. And what that essentially means is that the government looks in advance at what is likely to happen in Parliament, and adjusts its plans accordingly. So that sometimes takes the form of a climb down on something that has been announced publicly, you know the government might announce a policy and then decide to roll back on it, not to push it to a vote. Because the outcry from MPs has been such that it becomes quite clear the government's going to lose. People may be able to think of some recent examples of that sort of thing.
Alan Renwick 12:33
I can't imagine what you are talking about!
Lisa James 12:35
But the other way in which anticipated reactions takes places when, is perhaps the most difficult to measure. And this is when the government trims its ambitions in the first place. So the government may not even announce something from which it then rolls back, it will simply make its plans in the first case, taking into account what it will be able to get through Parliament. And in terms of how we measured that Brexit on Brexit legislation, we conducted a study of these 13 bills, and what we did was to look at all the amendments tabled to them, whether that's by the government or by others. So across the 13 bills, we looked at over 3,000 amendments, coded them for lots of different factors. You know, who's tabling them? What kind of change are they aiming to make? What happens to them? And then we look at the success rate of those things. So we can look at, for example, on non-government amendments, how many of these made it into into law? How many times was the government defeated on this legislation?
If we're looking at government concessions, then you can look at which amendments the government itself has tabled and trace those back and try to work out where they've come from. So that often involves looking at the parliamentary record, looking at the record of debates, thinking about how the government justifies its decisions. Does it refer to the fact that it's picking up the concerns of others? Is this amendment suspiciously similar in wording to an amendment that might have been tabled by a backbencher at the previous stage? That kind of thing.
Alan Renwick 14:05
So what you're doing with these 3,000 amendments here, it's not just a very simple matter of kind of identifying who introduced them, whether they were passed or not passed, there's a whole process of tracing, what's the processes underlying. You're kind of matching up this amendment, you're seeing was there something else that was similar? This sounds incredibly in-depth the process of working all of this out.
Lisa James
It's a quite enormous spreadsheet Alan.
Alan Renwick 14:07
But the spreadsheer is underpinned by an enormous amount of work. It is not an automatically generated spreadsheet. This is something where you have to dig into the process, read it make judgments as to what appears to be happening.
Lisa James 14:48
Yes, yeah. It's a very interesting process for that reason, because it does really require you to dig into the detail of the legislation and understand exactly what people are aiming to do at different stages. Where were they most fevered debates over these things. And these are often on quite technical matters as well. So it's a great window into some of the real complexities of the Brexit process.
Alan Renwick 15:08
And I interrupted you there before you've got to how you measure the third element, the anticipated reactions element, which I guess is even harder than than measuring the concessions point, because you don't even have something that was voted on when you're looking at the anticipated reactions.
Lisa James 15:27
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And there are various different ways to do this. And one option, which other studies have used, for example, is to is to use interviews and to talk to people about you what they were thinking, the decisions they made at different stages. What this period allowed us to do was to take a slightly different approach to that, because one of the really interesting facets of this legislation is actually how much didn't make it into law. Sort of the 13 bills that we looked at only 6 actually became law, made it onto the statute book, before the 2019 election. It's really unusual for that much legislation to be paused.
And by the way, what I say when I mean 'paused' is essentially that the government didn't shedule it for its later stages of consideration. So there's no formal abandonment, the government just sort of stopped scheduling any further stages in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. So it sits in limbo effectively. But but to have that level of, of pausing of legislation, is really, really unusual. And in order to try and work out what was happening there, and how far that was about anticipated reactions, we went back to the parliamentary record, and looked for instances of MPs in particular pressing for this legislation to come forward, and how the government justified its decision to pause it.
Alan Renwick 16:44
Great stuff. So we've got this huge amount of analysis and data. Tom, what what does it all tell us? What do you find?
Tom Fleming 16:55
So I think we can take the findings for each of those different mechanisms that Lisa has outlined in turn. And despite the analysis being very complicated, as you've said, and involving lots of amendments, I think the key messages are fairly simple and straightforward. So when we look at whether non-government amendments, that's amendment supported by opposition parties, or government backbenchers, or some combination of those groups, when we look at how successful those were, we find that very, very few were successful. So there were about 2,614, non-government amendments, of those just 68 were successful. Only 68 of these attempts to change legislation did directly change legislation. And that's only about a 2.6% success rate. So that sounds very low in absolute terms, and it's low in relative terms. If we compare it to the government's success rate of the government's amendments that it put forward, 93% of those were passed. And those that weren't, it was usually not because they were defeated, but because they would would have been withdrawn or otherwise not put to a vote. So the key message, I think, on that first mechanism is that when non-government MPs tried to change the government's legislation, it was rarely directly successful. On occasions, it was on some of those occasions were very important. But it was rare.
However, that shouldn't lead us to conclude that Parliament didn't wield influence in this period, because when we turn to the second mechanism, we find there. And just to remind people, this is where we looked at amendments that were formally sponsored by the government and asked whether they could perhaps have their origins in earlier pressure from Parliament. There, we found a very different picture, we found that around two thirds of government amendments could be traced to some kind of pressure from Parliament. And a much higher number in the Lord's was actually more like 90%. So that two thirds figure is in the House of Commons. It's more like 90% in the House of Lords. So this is a clear majority of things that were put forward by the government, came from pressure from MPs. So we see that as being evidence that whilst MPs are rarely successful at pushing their own amendments forward, they actually were quite successful at getting the government to react to them, and to implement these sort of compromises or concessions. And then on the third, sorry, yeah.
Alan Renwick 19:07
Hust before you go on to the third, it is curious that. And why does that happen? Why does Parliament, why does the government not just allow an amendment to go through? Why does it defeat an amendment and then introduce its own amendment in order to do basically the same thing? It seems like a very inefficient way of doing things.
Tom Fleming 19:24
So there are several reasons that we could think of and these. So there are several reasons that we can think of and these like many of the things we've been discussing here in terms of the ideas and the measurement approaches, we can look to other recent work from various other scholars, some of whom are also based at the UCL Constitution Unit for thinking about this. But we know that sometimes ministers will say no to non-government amendments, and then introduce very similar ones simply to save political face. It may be that ministers don't want to give the opposition some sort of political win that they can trumpet in the press and to their constituents, and they want to make it look instead like a government concession. So there's depriving the opposition of political capital is one reason.
A second reason is sometimes that ministers simply aren't authorised there on the day to make these concessions, they need to go and check with the wider government, consult with ministers or the parliamentary management team to check whether this amendment is okay with the, for the rest of the government. And then a third reason is a slightly more technical but still important one, which is that often, ministers may not be sure that amendments drafted by other MPs are legally watertight in the way that government drafted amendments might be. And this isn't just because other MPs are sort of inherently worse at drafting legislation or have worse ideas. But it's because they simply don't have the huge teams that will have been working on drafting government legislation, of lawyers and parliamentary drafts people. And so those kinds of technical quality checks are also one reason why the government would bring forth their own amendments, rather than simply accepting the opposition's.
Alan Renwick 21:01
And you've mentioned there that you're building on earlier work being done by people in the Constitution Unit, I guess we should say that a lot of this is building on work done by Meg Russell, who for many years has been examining the role of Parliament within the British political system.
So, Tom, I interrupted you again. So you had taken us through the findings on the first and second of the mechanisms, the direct defeats of the governments and government bringing forward concessionary amendments in response to Parliament. What about the third one on anticipated reactions?
Tom Fleming 21:34
Yes, here, I think, appropriately enough, Lisa has also slightly anticipated the conclusions when she was explaining how we measure this, which is, the simplest measure we look at is how many of these bills simply got paused by the government and never brought forward again, for further consideration.
And as Lisa said, we look at 13 government proposed bills in this period. And of those just 6 became law. So 7 of these were simply stopped, they were never brought back for a further legislative stage. And they were just never seen again, or came back in modified forms after the 2019 election. And some of those that was as early as the winter of 2018, or the spring of 2019, was the last time they sort of were seen at a parliamentary stage. And they were paused after that. Some of these were brought in by Boris Johnson's short lived government in late 2019. And so just fell at the at the time of that election. But the large majority of these these bills were paused. Not because they were defeated by MPs, not because they were voted down or faced severe obstacles to their passage, but simply because the government appeared to fear that if they brought them forward, they would be amended in ways that would be out of line with government policy.
Alan Renwick 22:48
And can we see evidence for for that? Can we see that it really was government looking at what Parliament is going to do? And as a result deciding okay, we'd better not try to push this horrible.
Lisa James 23:01
Yes, absolutely. So, so we do see evidence of that. And the clearest evidence of that is when we looked at business questions, so this is the the weekly events when the Leader of the House of Commons lays out the upcoming agenda, and MPs have the opportunity to ask them questions about it.
And repeatedly, it would be the case that opposition MPs in particular would say, what's happening to the trade bill, where's the agriculture bill, when are we going to talk about fisheries? And the clearest evidence we have of government thinking on this comes from a session in September 2019, when the response from the Leader of the House was, there is no certainty that these bills will get through without doing things as a contrary to government policy, and therefore, it's unlikely that they will make progress. So that's essentially a statement from the government saying we won't bring these bills back, because we're concerned about the way the MPs and peers, because of course, this is also happening in the House of Lords, are likely to amend them.
Alan Renwick 23:54
Okay, that's very clear. So we have the findings. So one important aspect of this is just thinking about whether these findings are unusual. So you know, clearly the Brexit process has been a very unusual process. But 2017 to 2019 Parliament was an unusual parliament for the UK, there was no single party that had a majority, the government was a minority government, which is still fairly unusual for the UK. Was this period very, very different from other periods? Can we make generalisations? Is it, was it just a unique thing and a one off? You know, what, what should we think about that, Tom?
Tom Fleming 24:34
Yes. So you're right, that part of our motivation for even studying this period and asking this question was our impression that this looked like a very unusual period for all the reasons that you've described. And so it seemed to us worth asking of where the patterns in terms of Parliament's influence behind the scenes in less obvious ways, actually particularly different from before. And we're able to actually answer that question to some extent because we've used an up proach that's very similar to earlier work by Professor Meg Russell, and other colleagues. And we can look at their figures that they found from earlier periods, what we might think of as, quote/unquote, more 'normal' periods under the coalition government and under New Labour, to see how the figures we find compared to those.
And we find, interestingly, a combination of both change and continuity. So in terms of the continuity, there, that's really the first few mechanisms of influence that we talked about. So as I said earlier, we found that Parliament had very little direct effect in terms of passing its amendments on government legislation, but quite a lot of indirect influence by inspiring government concessions. And that is exactly what earliest studies have found. Earlier studies have found that that is normally how MPs and peers successfully change government legislation. Not by passing their own amendments, but by inspiring concessions. And we found very similar numbers. We can't compare them exactly across our study and there's for various technical reasons. But we can broadly compare them and they show a very similar picture. But the change is in those anticipated reactions we were talking about, it is clearly unusual for this amount of legislation to simply not make it onto the statute book. Usually, governments may pause their bills, they may very rarely withdraw them entirely from the legislative process. But it's highly unusual to introduce a huge body of proposed legislation, and to withdraw almost half of it before it even reaches the end of its process. So that's the big stark change that I think we found from earlier periods.
In lots of ways when Parliament was actually allowed to look at legislation, it wielded influence in fairly conventional ways, despite the unusual wider circumstances. The big change was that quite often, Parliament wasn't allowed to look at legislation, the government anticipated likely amendments or defeats and simply withdrew it or paused it.
Alan Renwick 26:49
Okay. And, Tom, you started off by telling us that this is important work, because it informs the debate about whether Parliament is a good thing, whether Parliament exerts valuable influence. I guess the kind of final step in the chain before we were able to make any judgments on that question is, we see that Parliament was exerting influence here. Did it exert influence for the good? Or did it cause harm through these various changes that that it forced? Or did it cause harm by stopping things from going through that might have got through? Lisa, what do you think? I mean, I realise your question is, your study is, is measuring the extent of influence and the mechanisms of influence. But do we learn anything through this research about the value of the influence that Parliament had?
Lisa James 27:45
So I think we have to look here at the different reasons for which parliamentarians propose amendments in the first place. So as I mentioned earlier, an awful lot of this legislation is highly technical. And when we look at both defeats and concessions on some of this, we see quite technical changes to that legislation taking place. So if I take one bill as an example, there was a bill called the EU Withdrawal Bill, which went through Parliament in 2017, and 2018, which was all about getting the statute book ready for Brexit. It was heavily amended, particularly in the House of Lords. And a number of the amendments that took place on that bill, were proposed by legal specialists sitting in the Lord's who were concerned about making sure that issues like legal continuity, legal clarity, adequate instruction to judges were well taken care of. And that was really a good example of, of Parliament exercising its role as a as a revising chamber to try and improve the quality of legislation without necessarily aiming to alter the legislations underlying aims.
Alan Renwick 28:53
And that's particularly, that's the influence of the House of Lords in particular and often the House of Lords is quite controversial, because clearly it's not a democratically elected chamber. But you're pointing out there that we can see quite clearly a positive influence of the House of Lords on the quality of the legislation that was produced.
Lisa James 29:14
Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's a really good example of the House of Lords utilising its vast reservoir of expertise, particularly on constitutional matters, to look at the quality of of legislation. I think the other thing that happens in this period, is that we increasingly see this legislation becoming a battleground over the form of Brexit as a whole. And there's a really good example of that, on two consecutive days in July 2018, the government was defeated on an amendment which came from what we might call the soft Brexit or the more pro-Remain leaning wing of the Conservative Party, and accepted amendments from the ERG. These are things pushing in two completely different direction
Alan Renwick 29:57
We should just explain the ERG is the European Research Group.
Lisa James 29:59
The European Research Group the hard Brexit wing of the Conservative Party. And so what we see is all all wings of Parliament and all wings of the Conservative Party using this quite pragmatically minded legislation in a way to advance particular forms of Brexit and and when we look at the legislation that's paused, it seems quite likely that it's fears about that kind of amendment that are really that, that are really influencing the government in its decision not to take the legislation further. Now, whether you think that is a good or a bad thing, it depends entirely on your view of Brexit. And that is well beyond the scope of this paper and its authors. But I think what is interesting is that we see, we see the different ways in which Parliament is trying to use this process.
Alan Renwick 30:49
Yeah, so with some of this stuff, we can see that in technical terms, Parliament is clearly improving the quality of the legislation on other matters, it's a matter of political judgement, essentially, as to whether you think what the government wanted or what the majority in Parliament wanted, was better or not.
So, Tom, how would you conclude on this? We've had big, big debates in the UK over recent years over the appropriate relationship between Parliament and government. And we have have some people arguing that Parliament has been sidelined by government or at least government has sought to sideline Parliament. And that that has harmed the quality of scrutiny of legislation. You have other people in government and close to government arguing that if you have Parliament trying to take over and and shape the legislative agenda to too great an extent, then you end up just having chaos, that you need a government. I mean it sounds a bit difficult to make this argument right now, given what is happening in British politics right now. But fundamentally, you need a government that is capable of putting together a coherent programme of policies, and then getting that through Parliament. And if you don't have that, you just have chaos. What do you think the lessons of this article, this study are for those debates?
Tom Fleming 32:15
So I think when we, when we tend to think about the influence of Parliament, we can sort of break that down into at least two different components. One of which is simply about sort of MPs and peers behaviour, the willingness of parliamentarians to do things that run contrary to the government's wishes, and to challenge the government. And we could contrast that with sort of institutional changes. Often when people talk about strengthening Parliament's they have in mind passing laws or creating new procedures that give Parliament new tools, when often a lot of the thing that really decides how far Parliament is or isn't influential, is more in that first category. It's more about how far MPs are willing to stand up and disagree with the government. And so one lesson we might take from this paper is actually, MPs can wield quite a lot of power, as, as they currently do. You know, you, you might see the Brexit period as suggesting that the government had really tight control and sidelined MPs. And that Parliament was shut out. And to an extent this paper does show some evidence of that in the way legislation was withdrawn. But it also shows that MPs and peers were able to wield plenty of influence within the existing institutional framework. Either directly through passing the right amendments, or more often indirectly, by encouraging government concessions. Even a government that at times appeared very inflexible, and had a lot of rhetoric about sort of Parliament needing to let government get on with things and implement the referendum result. Even there, we do see that government being willing to make quite a lot of concessions.
The response to that would probably be that those institutional changes might on their own not to have very much impact, even if MPs from the opposition or from backbenchers had the opportunity to put legislation on the agenda and try and get it through, Parliament is still dominated by political parties that on the whole are really cohesive. And so really, it could come down to the raw of politics rather than these, these sort of institutional fixes that some people suggest we might want to make.
You might still take your lesson away from this, though, about whether institutional changes in how you can set the agenda inside parliament and who gets to propose and control the passage of laws, you could perhaps suggest, well, maybe there are ways you could tweak that that would give MPs more of a positive rather than simply a negative role. The evidence we've suggested here is to the extent that Parliament wielded a different kind of influence in this period to earlier periods, it's that it blocked things, and that probably won't be surprising to people who were following the Brexit process. Largely, MPs and peers said no to legislation, or didn't say no, but suggested they would amend it and force the government to preemptively withdraw things. And so clearly, we could see Parliament's influence in this period is more preventative than constructive. So one might suggest well perhaps if you change the way Parliament works, gave MPs more power to push their own legislation. Parliament could have a more constructive positive influence by pushing things through, rather than simply voting against things or discouraging them.
Alan Renwick 35:18
Lisa, what do you conclude?
Lisa James 35:21
So I think what we see here, and Tom has alluded to this already is quite an interesting balance in the power of government and Parliament. Because if we look again at that legislation which was, which was ultimately paused Effectively nobody was happy about that pause. The government would far rather have been able to get its legislation through. But when we look at how parliamentarians responded, they weren't happy that the legislation had been paused either. For some of them, they were concerned about the UK the level of readiness for exit. And there is a real, very real kind of threat of concern that runs through some of the questioning around this. But also, many of them would have liked to have the opportunity to vote on the amendments that they wanted to put forward to it.
And so what we saw here was that through a combination of the political arithmetic, which meant that the government was likely to be defeated, and the formal rules which allowed the government to decide that it would rather pause the legislation, than risk that defeat government and Parliament, in effect ended up in ended up in in a deadlock. On this as on so many other things related to Brexit, that they could both block the other from doing the thing that they wanted to achieve. But actually, that resulted in in a degree of inertia with no real way to resolve it.
Alan Renwick 36:39
Well, we could keep on talking about this for a much longer and explore how we could reform the system in order to potentially avoid those kinds of difficulties, though, perhaps sometimes the difficulties are such that no institutional structures are going to be able to deal with them as we might like.
Thank you so much, Tom, and Lisa, for a really great discussion, fascinating to hear about the research and also about the broader implications of the findings as well. The paper that we've been discussing is by Thomas G. Fleming and Lisa James. It's called very simply 'Parliamentary Influence on Brexit ;egislation 2017 to 2019'. It was published in the Journal of Parliamentary Affairs over the summer, and you can find those details in the show notes for this episode, where you will also find a link for pre-ordering Lisa's book with Meg Russell, on the Parliamentary Battle over Brexit.
Next week, we're looking at climate change with the COP 27 Climate Summit in Egypt just around the corner. We'll be asking, how can such a large scale event bringing people together from around the world be run without creating even more environmental damage? And how can the countries that are least responsible for co2 levels but often the most damaged by climate change, contribute in a fair and just way?
Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics. All you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Conor Kelly and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.