Five unfinished Westminster stories
- Published
- comments
There are two things going on in Parliament: Brexit, and everything else.
And I thought it was worth looking at some of the stuff in the "everything else" box, while the party conference season reshapes the the Brexit debate…..because there's some pretty interesting non-Brexit action, under the radar, in Westminster.
Here are five continuing parliamentary sagas:
Modern Slavery: the crackdown that wasn't?
The hosannas that greeted the passage of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act assumed that it would destroy the genuine evils of people-trafficking and enslavement in Britain and abroad; in appalling conditions, in sex work, domestic service, drug production, agricultural labour or dozens of other fields.
Now there is rising concern that the legislation is failing to deliver, particularly section 54 on transparency in supply chains, which is supposed to spur companies into ensuring that their products are not manufactured in whole or part by slaves in other countries.
Watch out for a Westminster Hall debate to be led by Labour MP Gareth Snell, which is intended to feed into the independent review of the Modern Slavery Act launched by the Home Office and led by former ministers Frank Field and Maria Miller plus senior retired judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss.
Following the money
For a Parliament that once fought a civil war and beheaded a king, to assert its control of the national purse strings, Westminster's scrutiny of the budgets and spending reviews which direct the billions spent by government is remarkably glancing.
To be sure, the Treasury Committee conducts a series of hearings into each Budget, but these tend to be focussed on the big judgements of economic management. Then there's the Public Accounts Committee, which delves into particular areas of spending, often exposing waste and mis-spending, after the fact.
But there is little in the way of across the board scrutiny of government spending. No Commons committee looks at whether too much is being spent on this department of state and too little on that…. Still less at whether the plans gel into a cohesive strategy for government.
That might, just might, be about to change, thanks to pressure from the senior Tory backbencher Sir Edward Leigh, among others.
The Commons Procedure Committee has launched an inquiry into the case for a Budget Committee, probably backed up by a high-powered secretariat drawn from the super-accountants of the National Audit Office. It is not just the Treasury that should worry, if this comes to pass - most Commons select committees don't spend much time on how the government department they monitor spends its money, preferring to focus on policy issues.
So just about everyone around the Cabinet table could find this new committee on their case - if it is approved.
It is the kind of idea that a hung Parliament, where the government's control is tenuous, could just vote through, but only if there is a strong consensus behind it. And might a Budget Committee, muscling in on all kinds of issues, provoke a serious turf war on the committee corridor?
And that's before we get to the status issues. At the moment the Chair of the PAC, currently Labour's Meg Hillier, is probably the top dog in the select committee pack, chairing the oldest and most powerful committee….might the Budget Committee Chair claim that status?
The whipping yarn
After the row over the broken "pairing" arrangement, which was supposed to allow Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson to take maternity leave during a close Brexit vote, will there now be consequences?
The pairing system is a mechanism for allowing MPs to be away from Westminster - when one MP wants to skip a vote, a "pair" from the other side abstains from voting. But if these arrangements cannot be trusted, what then?
It happened in the 1970s, in rather similar circumstances, when the then Labour government whips were accused of breaking a pairing arrangement - and cooperation was withdrawn.
It meant the sick and the dying were required to vote, with invalids stretchered onto the premises and characters like Alfred "Doc" Broughton brought down to Westminster from his Yorkshire constituency by ambulance, to attend critical votes (he was finally too ill to attend the confidence vote which brought down the Callaghan government in 1979).
The politics of this is now entangled in the proposal to allow proxy voting by MPs who are expecting or new parents - a reform twice endorsed by MPs and promised by the government. There will be huge pressure on the Leader of the House, Andrea Leadsom, to deliver.
Fake news
Will Dominic Cummings give evidence to the Fake News inquiry, external by the Digital Culture Media and Sport Committee?
This has morphed into an increasingly detailed look into the conduct of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Referendum, and the committee, and now the Commons, is currently locking into a stand-off with Mr Cummings, the Campaign Director at Vote Leave, who has refused to appear before it to answer question.
The whole issue is now in the hands of the Commons Privileges Committee, who may find him in contempt of Parliament - although they too will seek to summon him before them, and may well have to cope with a further refusal, before they get to that point.
But what would happen if they did find him in contempt? The law here is murky and archaic, and has long fallen into disuse, so MPs may discover they have no workable sanctions to deploy. They've already resolved that they won't attempt to jail him, external.
And, meanwhile, what about the central question: do the breaches of election law identified by the Electoral Commission invalidate the 2016 referendum?
The DCMS Committee Chair Damian Collins carefully sidesteps, saying his committee is just seeking to discover what happened and that such questions are for others. But he knows he is targeting a very raw nerve - and they are expected to produce a further report or reports…
The Big Move
Will plans to move MPs and peers out of their Victorian home begin to firm up?
The new shadow Delivery Authority for the multi-billion pound "Restoration and Renewal", external project is now starting work.
A lot of MPs hate the idea and fear public wrath over the projected cost, but they're unlikely to have to face an immediate move, unless there's some kind disastrous systems failure, which is far from impossible.
At the moment, the likely leaving date has drifted back to perhaps 2024, well after the next election.
Meanwhile, Theresa May has promised MPs that a draft bill to put the delivery authority onto a statutory footing will be published "this year".