This week we reflect on the career and ideas of Professor Meg Russell, one of the UK's leading experts on parliament and constitutional change.
Six prime ministers, a Brexit referendum, and an (unlawful) prorogation of parliament — it has been an extraordinary decade to lead the UCL Constitution Unit. Meg Russell steps back from that role and joins host Emily McTernan to reflect on a career spanning nearly three decades, from advising Robin Cook as Leader of the House of Commons to shaping parliamentary reform from the outside. Along the way, they discuss what this turbulent period reveals about the fragility of British democracy, the erosion of constitutional norms, and who is ultimately responsible for protecting our political system.
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[00:00:04] Emily McTernan: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we're discussing the career and ideas of Professor Meg Russell.
Hello, my name is Emily McTernan and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Our guest today is Meg Russell, professor of British and comparative politics.
Following her valedictory lecture, today we'll be taking the opportunity to reflect on her work, her ideas, and the remarkable political period through which she's helped us make sense of British politics. Meg is the author of an influential body of books, articles, and reports, including on the House of Lords Reform and the Parliamentary Battle over Brexit.
She served as an advisor for Robin Cook when he was Leader of the House of Commons. And for more than a decade, she led the Constitution Unit at UCL, a leading research unit on constitutional change and political reform, and what a decade in politics it has been to have that job with Brexit, six prime ministers, growing concern over democratic norms and the rise of populism.
So today we're going to look back at Meg's career and contributions so far, discuss the health of Britain's democracy and explore how our political system might be strengthened for the future. So welcome back, Meg, to the podcast.
[00:01:25] Meg Russell: Thank you. It's really nice to be here.
[00:01:28] Emily McTernan: So let's start with your leadership of the Constitution Unit. It's been an extraordinary decade to be in charge. What's it felt like running the Unit in that period and what stands out to you as the defining features of the last 10 years?
[00:01:40] Meg Russell: Goodness. What a big question. Well, I suppose I should clarify when I actually began, because it's more than 10 years ago. We are recording in a week and this is going to go out, I think, in a week when there's lots of talk of 10 years since the Brexit referendum. So it is well worth clarifying that I began before that, I began in Autumn 2015. But obviously there's a big coincidence between that period and the 10 years since the referendum.
But at the time that I took over, if you remember, there wasn't a great deal of expectation that leave was going to win that referendum. So David Cameron had just won a narrow single party majority, slightly unexpectedly, earlier in 2015. He was leading a single party government after the five years of coalition, and they had a commitment to holding a referendum. But I don't think anybody took particularly seriously, including, it seems some of those who were campaigning for Leave, the prospect that Leave might win. So the referendum is a very big part of what happened over that time and really, kind of, changed the culture and direction of politics for the 10 years afterwards.
I reflected in my valedictory lecture, which maybe I should say, it was a valedictory lecture in as much as I was saying goodbye to being Director of the Constitution Unit, I was not saying goodbye to UCL or goodbye to working life or anything. It was marking the end of my directorship.
But the Constitution Unit has now been running for 31 years and for the first 20 years it was run by Robert Hazell who set it up in 1995. And in the lecture I compared his period of Constitution Unit to my period of Constitution Unit. And of course, one of the factors that's very clear is one that you already referred to, that Robert in 20 years lived through four prime ministers, whereas I, in just over half the period that he had, had six prime ministers.
And you know, I mean he had the five years of coalition, he had the long Blair Brown period. It felt like politics was pretty busy and interesting at that time. But my goodness, it sped up and the degree of change over my period, and the degree of, kind of, conflict and uncertainty as well is really, really striking.
So running the Constitution Unit for the period 1995 to 2015 was quite a lot to do with thinking, well, how can we improve our constitution? What kind of reforms might be useful to make it run better? What can we learn from other countries in terms of ways that we might change our institutions? And I paid a part in that because I had been in the Unit for a lot of time before I became Director.
But in my period, yes, we were thinking about what might happen under the Conservative government, but very soon everything got kind of swept to one side. And it was all about the unexpected result in the Brexit referendum and what that was gonna do to our politics.
And I should probably pause for breath and let you direct the next part, because as I already warned you before we went on air, I can talk about stuff forever.
[00:04:53] Emily McTernan: And that was a big question, inviting you to reflect on a decade. So I think that's probably reasonable. Um, I wonder if we could zoom in perhaps on the six prime ministers and, of course, potentially, who knows, we might see another leadership contest soon. So I guess your reflections on that would
[00:05:10] Meg Russell: May even be in one by the time this goes to air, I guess, because we're recording two days before the Makerfield by-election.
[00:05:16] Emily McTernan: Exactly. So a great moment to be recording and thinking about leadership contests. Do you have any thoughts on what principles should guide how parties choose their leaders, especially if they're already in power at the time they're making these choices?
[00:05:29] Meg Russell: Goodness. I think principles, that's really difficult. I mean, you know, of course at the Constitution Unit, we are all about the rules, the procedures, the design of institutions. And a lot of that is sort of about how things work in an ideal world. I think in terms of the success of the Constitution Unit, one of our hallmarks actually is that we get beyond that.
That real politics takes place in a much sort of messier, more confrontational, more contested kind of environment than those nice written down rules, which of course we famously don't have a codified constitution. So we're not talking about the implementation of a codified document, but the theory and the practice can be quite different. And I think that we've always been very cognizant of that. And you need to take into account what's gonna work in practice as well as in theory.
So, you know, in theory you might have all sorts of rules about how leaders are chosen and what their qualifications ought to be, what their personal qualities ought to be, what their experience ought to be. But in practice, this rapid turnover of leaders that we've seen, it's who feels right for that political moment in that political party. And I think, I mean, honestly, I've been watching politics for decades now and something I often say to people is that in recent decades we have seen numerous prime ministers fail for numerous different reasons. And it makes you realise just what a huge job it is and what an extraordinary kind of collection of skills and aptitudes and just sort of personal qualities you need to have in order to do the job.
And you know, here we are in a moment where there are questions about whether Keir Starmer is gonna continue and should be replaced by a different Labour leader. Well, the last time we were in that situation was Blair Brown, really. And Brown was a person who had years and years and years of experience. He'd been right at the top of politics as Chancellor, he was known to be very, very clever, but he failed as Prime Minister once he got into that job. It's a very different kind of job.
And he seemed, you know, I mean, he, he did some things well, but he couldn't succeed the way that Blair succeeded. And we've seen people fail, as I say, for, for various reasons. He couldn't delegate. He had difficulty communicating. He didn't have the charisma of Blair. But then, you know, Boris Johnson failed in a different way to the way that Liz Truss failed.
And, I guess in an ideal world, no, I, I don't really want to pretend that this is a proper, ideal world, but some people might think that there should be a sort of more technocratic way of choosing leaders, that they tick a certain number of boxes. You know, I actually said in after the valedictory lecture, we had a private Q and A and it was held at the Institute for Government, which is a place that thinks very seriously about how we ought to do our government in a similar but also different way to how the Constitution Unit does. And one of the things that it has done is worked quite a lot on training for ministers, for example. And it has this wonderful archive of interviews with former ministers from which future ministers might learn. And I have wondered whether somewhere like the Institute for Government ought to be sort of preparing people to be Prime Minister.
But people arrive in different circumstances dealing with different kind of crises and they're chosen for different reasons. Because they might be from a particular faction of the party, or they might be very charismatic, or they might be very clever. They might be able to connect with the people, but then somehow they can't do the policy detail or somehow they can't handle the workload or somehow they can't hold the party together.
It's just such a difficult job. And I think we underestimate that at our peril. And I think it would be nice if there were a bit of work in this area, setting out what some of the ideal attributes are. You know, maybe so that if nothing else, individuals who are thinking of going for the job could look at that list of attributes that's been put together in a more objective, maybe academic way, to ask themselves whether they meet those criteria and where their strengths and weaknesses are.
I think it's really refreshing in politics, and the danger of saying this is, it sounds like I'm coming out for a particular candidate. That's not what I mean at all by saying this. But I remember hearing Angela Rayner talk a couple of years ago, and one of the things that really impressed me about Angela Rayner was that she was very upfront about her weaknesses. And she described how she built a team. Because she's open about the fact she's got a ADHD, that's a very particular thing. And she said, look, there's things I'm not good at and I have to deal with that by employing people who can do those things for me.
And she was talking about how she loves doing prime minister's question time, which would, you know, that would keep me awake at night the idea anybody would ever ask me to do that, I find that terrifying. But she's not good at reading long and detailed documents and so she has people working for her who summarise things for her. And I just thought that was so refreshing. You're a senior politician and you're saying there's stuff I'm not good at, and it was on a public platform.
So I think a little bit more reflection by people as to which bits of the job they're gonna be good at and which bits they're not gonna be good at, and where they might need to compensate could be good, but maybe with some people, you know, I'm not sure Liz Truss could have done the remedial work to keep going for very long, even if she tried, you know?
And people inherit a poison chalice, don't they? You know, Theresa May, my book about parliament and Brexit, was by necessity, quite a lot about the Theresa May period, and she had her weaknesses as well as her strengths, but she also inherited such a difficult sort of set of political circumstances that it would've been very, very difficult for anybody to succeed. So it's a, it's a mixture of all that.
[00:11:54] Emily McTernan: So moving from the virtues of the individual prime ministers to the system, perhaps, I wondered if, kind of, coming from a novice's perspective, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the term you like to use, constitutional government, and what you mean by that, and also what you think the big threats are to constitutional government today.
[00:12:12] Meg Russell: Hmm. Okay.
[00:12:13] Emily McTernan: What do you worry about?
[00:12:14] Meg Russell: I think you've touched on a bit of that, and I've maybe touched on it a bit as well in terms of the shocks of the last 10 years. And the Brexit referendum was a particularly, I think, polarising referendum. Referendums are by their nature polarising. I mean, they are a, referendums are a mechanism in the constitutional toolbox. You know, we can talk about referendums and how they can be done and the parts that they can play. I think there's a lot of agreement that that was a referendum that wasn't particularly well thought through and particularly well conducted.
Referendums boil down matters that are often very complex. You know, politics by its nature, as I've just been indicating, I suppose, is complex. It's full of difficult decisions, trade offs, negotiating compromises, and so on. Referendums cut right through that and say, right, you can have this, you can have one thing or the opposite thing, there's your choice.
And that's, you know, it was Leave or Remain. But famously there was very little discussion as to what would happen if we voted for Leave because David Cameron did not have the expectation that we would. That wasn't the purpose of the referendum. The purpose of the referendum for him was to shut down a topic that was a nuisance so that we could get back to politics as normal.
So there was,
[00:13:40] Emily McTernan: Which backfired quite badly, which backfired quite badly!
[00:13:43] Meg Russell: It did indeed. I mean, Cameron is interesting in terms of referendums because, of course there were three major referendums held under his leadership. First of all, there was the AV referendum, the referendum on changing the voting system for the House of Commons to the alternative vote, which he only conceded because the Liberal Democrats wanted it in coalition, and he won and they lost. Effectively no change. And then he, he also presided over the Scottish independence referendum, which again, was because the SNP wanted that and he didn't, but his side won and their side lost. So I think he just quite blithely went into the Brexit referendum thinking he was good at this stuff, and it backfired, as you say.
But there had been effectively no preparation for what we would do if there was a vote for Leave. Even the way the referendum itself was put together, the AV referendum, this, I'm getting a bit techie now, sorry. The AV referendum had a whole lot of detail written into it as to what would happen if there was a vote for change. The alternative electoral system had been specified in all of its detail. There would've been no more parliamentary argument about how to implement it. The implementation would've just happened.
Whereas with Brexit, it was just Leave or Remain. And during the campaign, there really was no discussion about what do we mean by Leave, should it be a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit, the Customs Union, the Single Market, what do we do about the border in Northern Ireland? All of the things that went on to preoccupy us for years to come afterwards that were fought over and it all became very unpleasant.
So what it was was just a simple polarisation, are you in or out? And that, it's very well documented in academic work by people like Sara Hobolt at the LSE, polarised the public. We became increasingly in the run up to the referendum, but also afterwards when the implementation was so difficult, two tribes. Us and them, with us or against us. A very unhealthy kind of form of politics where you are turning people against each other and actually reducing the prospects for compromise and negotiation and understanding other people's perspective.
So to go back to your question about constitutional government, which I haven't forgotten, to me constitutional democracy is democracy with limits that show respect for other people's points of view. It's not knee jerk, right? We've won, we are gonna take all the spoils. Am I gonna trample over the rights and interests of other people? There are checks and balances in the system. There are protections for minorities. The government can't just do whatever it wants. It is under scrutiny. It has to act within the rule of law. There have to be proper parliamentary processes to examine the proposed policies of the government. There have to be other centres of power. You know, there's, you have a free media so that all politicians are under scrutiny. You have opposition parties that can ask awkward questions and so on.
And the danger with becoming more polarised, and we've seen this in this country to an extent with Brexit, we've certainly seen it in many other countries around the world. I mean, you know, a few years ago we would've talked about Hungary and Poland and places. Now everybody immediately switches to talk about Trump's America. It becomes the winner takes all, you take all the spoils, you trample over the interests of everybody else. You denigrate and rubbish your opponents. You talk down the media, you shut out the journalists that you don't like. You completely control the narrative. And you damage the reputation of anybody who's not with you. You know, you threaten to take people down even in your own party and you damage the reputation of the system. You raise questions about the integrity of the system, whether it's right to have an opposition, whether it's right to have a questioning media. This is very, very, very unhealthy.
And we saw some of this after Brexit. You know, ultimately I am a parliamentary specialist. And one of obviously the key moments of the Brexit arguments, so plenty of other detail, but one of the key kind of iconic moments, if you like, was the shutting down of parliament by Boris Johnson, the prorogation of parliament. Parliament was getting in the way, so the executive shut it down and then it was put back in place by the Supreme Court.
So we got worryingly close to, kind of, this strong man politics that we've seen developing in various other places around the world. And I think that is the environment that we're living in, still, in many countries around the world. The weakening of checks and balances, and once they've been weakened, it's quite hard to build them up again because it's kind of in every government's interest to hold onto the power that it's got. It's quite hard to give away power. It's quite, sort of, counter cultural, counterintuitive if you're a government to spread the power around because people who've won generally want to use the power that they've won while they've got it for fear of losing it again. But that makes for a rather unhealthy and unstable kind of politics, which is what constitutional government, to go back to that, is there to sort of smooth away.
[00:19:10] Emily McTernan: And you've argued that MPs play a particularly important role in protecting constitutional democracy. Why are they so important, especially in the UK system? We've talked a bit about what leaders might do to disrupt the checks and balances. Why is it that you see MPs as having a particular role to play here?
[00:19:25] Meg Russell: Well, as I said, I'm a parliamentary person, so I do think that MPs or legislators, as they might, you know, be referred to differently in different systems, are very important in all systems. But you certainly can make a case that they have a particularly important role in the UK because we have this tradition of so-called parliamentary sovereignty which means that parliament really has the last word on the law.
You don't have, as I already referred to, a codified constitution which has a status of higher law, which sort of sits above the legislature and says that there are certain things that the legislature can't do because they're unconstitutional. In those systems the backstop, the kind of final backstop is the judges who will step into adjudicate on whether the politicians have acted in an unconstitutional manner, and we don't have that.
So if anybody's going to protect British politics from going off the rails and turning into sort of autocracy, it has to be the politicians themselves. Now, in some regards, I think that's quite healthy because in a lot of these other systems that I've mentioned, we've got into these kind of face offs between the politicians, particularly the political leaders, and the judges.
And the judges become part of that body, which is denigrated and criticised and presented as being the kind of out of touch metropolitan elite and all of those kinds of things. And in the end, judges cannot save democracy. I think we've seen this, you know, if the judges are doing things that the people don't like and the people support the leaders, the leaders can defang the judges, you know, they can pack the courts, they can reduce judicial power. So there is a risk if you think that politicians can just behave however they want and the judges will somehow be there to sort it out. I think that's quite a fragile system.
So in some ways, I like the fact that in our system, the politicians have the last word, but it does mean that the politicians need to be aware of that fact. They need to remember that in the UK they're not just playing the job of politicians. They can't just rubbish each other and rubbish the system and say, you know, Westminster is broken and the other lot are all corrupt. They do need to be able also to rise above that and protect the system because nobody else is going to.
And so we have in recent years, particularly since the difficulties with Brexit, put quite a lot of energy, we have this project called Constitutional Principles and the Health of Democracy, which people can read about on the Constitution Unit website. And that was very targeted at just trying to explain what some of the principles of our system are, and particularly to communicate to policy makers that no matter how polarised things might get, no matter how difficult political decisions might be, they must bear in mind the necessity of defending the system itself. Because democracy, I think we are seeing around the world, is more fragile than we might have liked to think. And people need to take their responsibilities seriously to protect and maintain it. And for us, that's MPs.
[00:22:49] Emily McTernan: So this is a very kind of anti that popular strand of thinking at the moment, that it's frustrated by the ways the checks and balances and political systems shut down any kind of radical change. So here you've got quite a strong argument in support of those checks and balances of not falling into those kind of populist strong man type politics. Is that the direction that this project is taking?
[00:23:13] Meg Russell: Well, the project is largely, it's done a number of things. It's produced a lot of materials which are designed to be very accessible, which point out in quite, you know, succinct, digestible form what some of the principles of our constitution are, you could say, because we don't have a constitution, you know, a single constitutional document to set them out. But actually, those documents vary widely. You know, the US Constitution is famously very short and very old. And therefore a lot of what runs the rules that guide the US actually are in judicial rulings and so on. Some constitutions are very long and detailed. Many of them are very difficult to change. So they're not always the best guide to the way that things actually work right now today. And they're not always particularly accessible. And also I always emphasise that even places that have these written codified constitutions depend a great deal on convention and good political behaviour.
So one of the things we've seen over the last 10 years, we've talked quite a lot about polarisation and the dangers of polarisation and the threats that that brings to checks and balances. But I suppose it is connected to the checks and balances point. You mentioned it in your intro, the decline of norms. That's not so much about changing the rules, it's about changes to expectations and behaviour and the extent to which people act with restraint. And I think that that has happened, that we have seen a breakdown, you know, the prorogation was an example of that. So not just saying, what can I get away with, i'm gonna use my powers to the maximum, but thinking, well what is a responsible use of my powers? How would I wish my opponents to behave if they were in government? I don't want to trample on other people's rights or opportunities.
And I think that in the Brexit years, we did see a breakdown in those kinds of, Peter Hennessy famously called it the good chaps way of governing. Of course, you know, we hope that many of the chaps are women these days. But that sense that people behave with courtesy and consideration of each other, not just sort of grabbing all the power that they can get because there isn't a rule against doing something.
And those kinds of things exist in all systems actually. No matter how written down it is, if you look at some of the behaviour of Donald Trump, he is doing some things that maybe other people wouldn't have dreamt of doing. Maybe they're not written down and he thinks he can get away with them and other people wouldn't have behaved that way. So I think it's a slippage of the norms as well.
So on the project, the briefing materials that we have provided have been not just about sort of the rules of how the system works, because you can find those written down in other places, but the expectations of behaviour in the system and also the sort of softer bits of the system. So we have briefings on things like how the civil service works and the expectations that we have of impartiality in the UK civil service, which differs from some other countries. The importance of parliamentary scrutiny, what the courts do, how devolution works. These are sort of fairly well-defined things, but also things like the role of the media, the importance of civilised political discourse, which are much sort of softer and more cultural.
And I think it's worthwhile reminding politicians, but people in general of the extent to which the functioning of our system depends, not just on following formal rules and precedents, but also sort of respecting norms of good behaviour in the system and the responsibilities that we all share to keep it going.
[00:27:14] Emily McTernan: Let's turn to reform in the parliamentary system. So away from the soft norms stuff and straight into the business of parliament and how it's run. Let's start with the House of Lords. So you've called this despite the changes that have been made quite recently, and the Constitution Unit's and your excellent work on this, one of the disappointments of how things have gone so far. So why is that? What's gone on in the House of Lords?
[00:27:35] Meg Russell: Well, you know, I said at the beginning of the lecture, I arrived at UCL in 1998 on a one year contract to work on House of Lords reform because at that time they'd just set up a royal commission on House of Lords reform. It reported in 2000 and Labour had said that it was going to sweep away the majority of hereditary peers and then move on to a second stage of reform.
And my initial project and the royal commission's project was to think about what that second stage should be. And I could almost repeat the words in the lecture, 28 years later after that one year contract, I am still at UCL and the hereditary peers, the final ones have only just left.
So the second stage of Lord's reform has proved much, much more difficult than anybody really anticipated. I've written two books on the House of Lords. My first book was on reforming the House of Lords, which was a result of that project. And it looks at the way that other countries run their bicameral or two chamber parliaments and what we might learn. So, you know, do we want direct election like they have in Australia, or do we want maybe indirect election like they have in Germany or appointment of a different kind like they have in Canada, et cetera.
My second book on the Lords was about the House of Lords and how it actually works, which bizarrely, I suppose I entered this topic in the way that many people enter it, which was, let's ignore the actual House of Lords and just talk about reform. Having written a book on reform, I thought, well, maybe I should take a step back and look at the actual House of Lords and what it is and how it works and what it does. And my book is sort of the definitive book now on the Lords, because these are not questions that many people ask.
In researching that book I wrote a history chapter and I looked back at how the House of Lords had developed over time. And really at that point I realised that anybody who knew their history should have been able to anticipate in 1998 that nothing else much was gonna happen soon. Because we've been debating this actually for centuries. The first bill to restrict the number of people who could be appointed to the House of Lords was over 300 years ago. And it failed. And we have never succeeded in bringing that reform in. And to me that is the single biggest problem with the place, is the fact that the Prime Minister has unrestricted patronage, which is an extraordinary thing.
If we weren't the UK, if we were some other country that didn't have the sort of reputation, you know, our parliament has a good reputation around the world. It's inspired many others. If you look at that just objectively, the fact that the prime minister can pick how many people can be appointed to one chamber of parliament and there's no limit on the size of the place or even the balance among. The prime minister can put people in who are all from their own party potentially. That's another convention actually, they don't, but they could. And it's always tilted towards the prime minister's party. So it is a frustration to me that we haven't got any further.
I've softened my view, my first book said that we should have a largely appointed second chamber, largely or wholly appointed second chamber. I've softened my view partly out of pragmatism because I think that big reform has never happened and may never happen. And actually, if we can make incremental changes to improve things bit by bit, then that is good in itself. And it may be as far as we're ever able to get. So I've been talking for years about the need to limit appointments, the need to have a more regulated appointment system that talks about why people are qualified to be in there and to put in a limited number per year.
And I said in the lecture, I first published on this 23 years ago and have tried to persuade, uh, we've just been through how many prime ministers there have been in the last 23 years. Now we're wondering, can we convince Andy Burnham of this because we thought Keir Starmer might be up for it. We thought that Theresa May might be up for it. We thought that Gordon Brown might be up for it. But it goes back to what I said before, when you've got hold of a power, it's quite hard to grit your teeth and give it up. And I think that Prime Ministers who get hold of that patronage power are reluctant to give up the power that all their predecessors have had.
But the principle thing to do is to move to a more regulated system where the House of Lords is of a fixed size and you can only have appointments up to that limit. You might also want to go further. You might also want to have election. And the Labour manifesto did promise a consultation on going further, but we haven't even seen the beginning of the consultation, let alone any sniff of anything actually happening.
[00:32:17] Emily McTernan: So perhaps a slow moving change there if it's 300 years on and we're still working on it. Perhaps something we'll see, eventually one Prime Minister or another might finally go for it. What about something where there's been clearer change? I wondered if we could turn to the Commons and so one reform where your work's had a direct impact, I understand, it's the creation of the Commons Backbench Business Committee in 2010. So how did that come about? What difference is that making?
[00:32:40] Meg Russell: That was a really interesting time. I mean, you may remember the MP's expenses crisis back in 2009.
[00:32:47] Emily McTernan: I'm sure all our listeners can remember.
[00:32:49] Meg Russell: Well some of our listeners, um, may have been at primary school at the time, I imagine. So there was a big scandal about the way that MPs had been claiming things on their expenses because the expenses rules were quite lax. I mean, that in itself is a big complex topic. To some extent people were encouraged to claim on expenses to compensate for the fact their salaries hadn't gone up very much and so on.
But it was what it was, it was all over the front pages of the newspapers, big scandal at Westminster. Some former MPs actually went to prison. Many left parliament at the 2010 election as a result of that scandal. And at that time, a committee was set up on reform of the House of Commons to try and sort of clean up the reputation of the place.
It looked at completely unconnected topics. So it was nothing to do with expenses, but it was sparked. This is one of the, I wrote a paper at that time using that quite well-worn phrase. It's not my phrase. Never let a crisis go to waste. We had a crisis over the House of Commons, and we had an opportunity then to get some reform of the House of Commons in a totally unconnected way.
So that was the thing that is commonly referred to as the Wright Committee because it was chaired by a Labour MP called Tony Wright. And it came up with a series of proposals. One, the best known and perhaps most important one, was the election of chairs of select committees. So that the scrutineers, the chief scrutineers in parliament are being chosen by MPs rather than being chosen by party leaders and whips, which they were before. And I think that's been a really, really good change. That I'm sorry to say was not my idea.
But another thing that was my idea was this creation of a backbench business committee, which means that some of the time on the parliamentary agenda every week is controlled by backbenchers rather than the government deciding what gets debated. That committee was established 15 years ago. It just reported on its 15 years and, you know, what's been learned and what could be improved. And I submitted some evidence to that and that was quite strongly reflected in what it concluded. And I think it has been an important reform because previously the government was in control of nearly all time, and now members have a lot more opportunity to decide what gets discussed at certain times of the week.
It's not been as powerful as I had hoped, which is one of the things that my evidence to its 15 year review said that I think they could be a bit bolder in terms of scheduling more controversial topics sometimes. But also there's a problem that remains that while the government doesn't choose the topics of debate it chooses when those debates happen and they tend to get scheduled on Thursdays when many MPs are already heading back to their constituency. So it's quite a hard time to get a high profile debate happening and particularly to get people being present in the chamber and voting. So I think there's still more change needed there to get backbench business into more sort of prime time.
Connected, I suppose, a bit to the question of, it's, it's, is it separate matter, but we've seen a lot of debate in the last year because of the so-called Assisted Dying Bill about private members bills and the extent to which members ought to be able to control what legislation gets discussed. And that suffers from a similar problem that it's in this sort of backwater of Fridays.
Basically the House of Commons does remain still very government dominated. And so it's an ongoing battle to make sure that MPs get a slice of the pie, that it's not just that party leaders decide what gets discussed, but that MPs themselves have some opportunity to get debates, but also perhaps to get legislation.
[00:36:35] Emily McTernan: Fascinating. And did this come out of your time working in Robin Cook's office? Was it that experience that led you to this or was it separate?
[00:36:43] Meg Russell: The thing I should have said about the Wright Committee, which I omitted to say it was an exciting time. It's not just that they picked up my idea, I also worked for the committee. So I was working as a, an advisor to the committee and that was really, really interesting working behind the scenes with the committee, helping to write the report and so on.
And yes, before that I did this time working for Robin Cook. It is literally a lifetime ago now. It was 2001 to 2003. You know, many of our students were not born at that time. It's terrifying. But that was also a brilliant time. Seeing behind the scenes inside government as well as inside parliament, the, the leader of the House of Commons is, it's a very interesting role. It was certainly at that time, it isn't always, but he was a member of the Cabinet. And he was also the person in parliament who announced the government's business to the house every week. So you're sort of like the government's person in parliament, but also parliament's person in the Cabinet. Quite a difficult role to navigate. You can end up being unpopular at both ends. He certainly wasn't always in Tony Blair's good books. He was seen as a bit of a troublemaker, but he was trying to stick up for what parliamentarians wanted.
And so, yes, I think that that proposal was informed by that time. The fact that the government had so much control of the agenda really struck me at that time. And I think I may be anticipating another of your questions here, but to go back to something I said much earlier, the Constitution Unit, I think, has a tradition of high quality academic research, which is well informed by sort of empirical study of the UK system through looking at data, interviewing people, also study of other systems overseas and how they work differently and so on.
But also informed by having a foot in the policy world so that what it says is both well-informed, but also when it proposes reform, being realistic about what is achievable. So, you know, when I was talking about leaders, you can have your brilliant theoretical ideas on paper, but in practice is it gonna work?
It's hard to really understand that if you haven't been on the inside of the system. And I just think it was phenomenally valuable to have that. I had two years working in government and I learned so much about the way that government worked as well as about the way that parliament worked. I'd worked in parliament before, but not in government.
And I think it's a shame that more people don't have the opportunity to do that in academia. There is more of it than there used to be in terms of secondments. There's other people in our department who've done secondments into government. Jack Blumenau is the obvious one who I think has spent time working in the Cabinet Office.
You learn so much about the realities of politics, which makes you a better researcher because when you are thinking through the options, you are not coming up with crazy stuff that would never work in practice. So I wish there could be more of a sort of revolving door in a sense between academia and politics.
It's good for the people who come from the other side to come in and see how academic work works as well, but to understand each other better I think makes for, will make for better teaching of students, better writing of textbooks and so on. But also for better government if it's well-informed by research, which itself has been informed by people who've been in the system.
[00:40:19] Emily McTernan: Yeah, make it much closer knit, I suppose, right? The researchers will ask better questions because they know what the politicians actually need to see and might be interested in.
[00:40:26] Meg Russell: And I suppose, I mean, nobody would suggest it quite was like this, but to go back to a word we've used a fair few times, to not have a sort of polarised us and them, you know, there's the academics and there's the politicians, but to have people who have worked together and have a better understanding of each other and each other's priorities and standards and so on, I think is a healthy thing. And I, I feel so pleased that I did that. That's been really important to my career.
[00:40:54] Emily McTernan: Let's squeeze in one more question, but with, even if it's slightly cheeky for the point of view of our timing. So now what's next? Now you stepped down as Director of the Constitution Unit. What are you gonna be filling your time with that's now freed up?
[00:41:07] Meg Russell: Well, this is an exciting ongoing project. I mean I've been kind of institutionalised. I've been in the Constitution Unit for 28 years, aside from the two years I spent out working for Robin Cook, and in the role of Director for more than 10 years. So I'm just sort of arriving, blinking into the daylight, wondering what the possibilities are.
The key thing I suppose to say is I have not left UCL. I have not retired. I remain, you know, like you, a member of staff in the department doing my teaching and with I think a bit more freedom to think about the direction I might want to go in, in terms of things that I study, debates that I contribute to, things that I might write about.
And I'm at the early stages of that really. I mean, without a doubt, I'm gonna keep talking about parliament and, you know, the things that I'm well established in. But it's exciting to think, I might be able to start thinking and writing and talking about some slightly different things. But the most liberating thing is I'm not running anything now.
You know, I mean, people, often with organisations, people look at them and think they run themselves somehow. I mean, hopefully people who do things well make them look easy, but there's a lot of behind the scenes work as my close colleagues, two of whom have just taken over know, to keep an events programme going, to keep a blog going, to keep a newsletter going and so on.
And I've now stepped back from doing that. So I have got more time on my hands, but I also have gone half time. So I'm hoping to do some things that are not work, and maybe not politics as well but I'm just at the early stages of working out what all the exciting opportunities are.
[00:42:57] Emily McTernan: That sounds absolutely fantastic. I'll look forward to seeing what you produce over the next many years. Thank you so much, Meg, for coming on.
Today we've been discussing Professor Meg Russell's career and Ideas, some part of it at any rate. You can watch her valedictory lecture on YouTube, celebrating her decade running the Constitution Unit, more than a decade running the Constitution Unit, links will be in the show notes of this episode.
This is the last episode of this season of UCL Uncovering Politics. We'll be back after the summer break. Remember to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on any of the usual podcast providers. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment to rate or review us too.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Matthieu Dinh. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.