The end of the small party?: Change UK and the challenges of parliamentary politics 9781526153029

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The end of the small party?

The end of the small party? Change UK and the challenges of parliamentary politics Louise Thompson

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Louise Thompson 2020 The right of Louise Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 4558 1  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

COVER IMAGE: Chris J. Ratcliffe, ‘Conservative MPs Resign to Join The Independent Group’ (Getty Images) Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For Percy, Alba and Claudia

Contents

Preface viii 1 Three days in February 2 Finding their feet 3 Establishing and resourcing a new parliamentary party 4 Making their voice heard 5 Whither the two-party system?

1 27 57 88 115

Bibliography 137 Index 144

vii

Preface

I was sitting on a train heading to Cardiff Bay to speak to Plaid Cymru and UKIP Assembly Members on 18 February 2019 when seven Labour MPs held a press conference to announce their departure from the Labour Party and the formation of The Independent Group. Twitter was alive with speculation about what was to happen, and it was good to see that people were, for once, actually talking about small parties in British politics. I was partway through a large research project examining the work of these parties at Westminster and in the devolved legislatures, something I had been fascinated with ever since the election of 56 Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs to the House of Commons in May 2015. As someone who researches and teaches about the UK Parliament it had begun to frustrate me that there was so little information about what goes on beyond the Conservative and Labour benches in the Commons chamber. For too long we seem to have made the mistake of assuming that the smaller political parties who take their seats in the Commons are somehow less worthy of study. viii

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This book draws on over 50 interviews with small party MPs in the House of Commons as well as elected members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament. Incorporating The Independent Group/Change UK/The Independent Group for Change has proved to be a challenge. Writing the manuscript in spring and summer of 2019 saw me focusing on a constantly moving target and the 2019 General Election required several chapters to be redrafted. The experiences of these Change UK politicians have, however, on the whole, mirrored those of other new party groups in the Commons and as such the rise and fall of the party acts as a useful case study showing the challenging electoral, political and parliamentary environment in which small parties operate. Some of those whom I have interviewed have expressed concern that I may portray the life of a small party MP as simply too difficult; that by exploring the challenges they face I am implying that they cannot perform the core tasks of being an MP as well as those who sit within larger parties. This is absolutely not the case. The MPs I have interviewed have all demonstrated a deep understanding of House of Commons rules and procedures (perhaps even more so than colleagues from other parties) and have the same strong commitment to representing their constituents as every other MP in the chamber. I’m enormously grateful to all of them and I hope that I have represented their experiences accurately here. I would like to record here my thanks to Mitya Pearson, who at the time of writing is a PhD student ix

Preface

at King’s College London, for assisting with some of the interviews and research in relation to the Green Party. Thank you also to my fantastic academic friends and colleagues Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Alexandra Meakin, Alia Middleton and Ben Yong, as well as my husband John for kindly reading drafts of the chapters and for convincing me to write this book in the first place. Emma Crewe was an amazingly thorough reviewer of the manuscript and made the redrafting process which occurred following the events of autumn 2019 a much easier process than it would otherwise have been. Jonathan de Peyer at Manchester University Press provided much encouragement and has kept me on track with his regular emails and conversations about the state of British politics and Jessica Cuthbert-Smith made my manuscript much more fluent during the copy-editing process. Finally, I must thank Alanna Ivin at Rapid Transcriptions, who has never been fazed by my requests for transcriptions of interviews recorded in the hustle and bustle of Portcullis House, train stations and cafés, or from a mobile with intermittent signal. She is an absolute star.

x

Chapter 1

Three days in February

At nearly three o’clock in the morning on Friday 13 December 2019, the General Election results for the constituency of Luton South were declared. Gavin Shuker, who had been the local MP since 2010, had lost his seat, winning just 3,893 votes. It was a huge fall from the 28,000 votes he had received in the 2017 General Election. Shuker was still the same constituency MP he had been since 2010, working assiduously for the people of Luton South. But he had changed his party identity. First elected to parliament as a Labour MP, he had left the party earlier that year, forming a new independent grouping with ten other MPs in the Commons which would later become a fully fledged political party, Change UK. Shuker left Change UK, along with several of his colleagues, in the summer of 2019 and stood as an independent in the General Election which followed. Just five minutes after the results of Luton South were announced, Shuker’s former Change UK colleague Chris Leslie would also lose his seat in Nottingham East. They would be followed over the 1

The end of the small party?

next couple of hours by Anna Soubry, Angela Smith, Sarah Wollaston, Chuka Umunna, Mike Gapes and Luciana Berger – all former Conservative and Labour MPs who were now standing under a different banner. Just a few days later Change UK was disbanded, with its leader Anna Soubry explaining that their lack of a parliamentary voice had forced them to ‘take stock’.1 This marked the end of a turbulent journey for the party’s former MPs, who had battled to create and maintain a small political party in a majoritarian political system. The party’s impact on the political landscape may have been minor, but its story provides an excellent case study of the electoral and parliamentary difficulties facing small political parties in contemporary British politics. To understand the story of Change UK and the challenge for small parties more widely we must go back to the morning of Monday 18 February 2019. It was the start of a normal week in contemporary British politics. Edging ever closer to a no-deal Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May was fighting a continuing struggle with the House of Commons on the one hand, and the European Union on the other, as she sought to pass her Brexit deal through parliament. For several months, parliament and government had been engaged in something of a battle of brinkmanship as MPs tried desperately to regain control of a Brexit which many felt was too harsh, while the Prime Minister tried almost as vigorously to resist attempts to undermine her position and a negotiated deal of which she was overtly proud. All of this was being played out predominantly in the House 2

Three days in February

of Commons chamber, through debates which stretched out into the late evening and seemingly endless rounds of voting on amendments, motions and amendments to motions. MPs were growing increasingly weary of traipsing through the division lobbies and of sitting through debates in which no new avenues were being explored, but things showed no sign of being resolved any time soon. The setting for this particular Monday, though, would be very different and, for journalists who had spent weeks watching the green benches of the House of Commons chamber for the first flicker of movement on Brexit, it was probably a welcome relief. The announcement of a press conference just down the river, a few minutes from parliament, had started the rumour mill churning in earnest. It had been something of an open secret in the Palace of Westminster that a group of MPs had been planning on leaving the Labour Party, but it was unclear which MPs were involved and whether we were about to witness statements by a few disgruntled Labour backbenchers or the birth of a new political party. With a complete lack of information on any of the finer details, a sense of anticipation was building among the crowd of journalists who were waiting in the conference room. Those assisting with the press conference had worried that attendance would be poor, reducing the size of the room to prevent any empty chairs. They needn’t have worried. The press in attendance began to feed everything they could see onto social media; most notably the presence of seven chairs and a stool on the stage. A covered sign was on the centre of the 3

The end of the small party?

podium, underneath which the word ‘independent’ could just about be read. Shortly after 11 a.m. seven Labour MPs – Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey, Mike Gapes, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Angela Smith and Chuka Umunna – walked into the room to begin their press conference. They had rehearsed this scene to ensure that nothing would go wrong.2 Though Chuka Umunna was widely seen as the leader of this splinter group, it was Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger who first took to the podium. She announced the resignation of all seven MPs from the Labour Party in what was a ‘painful’ but necessary decision. As each MP came to the podium in turn they provided their own personalised take on why Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party could no longer be their political and parliamentary home. Berger, Coffey and Gapes would cite their belief that the Labour Party was ‘institutionally anti-semitic’. Chris Leslie described how the party had been ‘hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left’, something which was echoed by Angela Smith. One of these MPs explained to me that his departure had been a long time coming; he had known within a day of Commons business after the 2017 General Election that he would not be a Labour MP by the end of that parliament.3 The question had not been ‘if’ he should leave the party, but ‘when’. It was clear that each MP had their own individual reasons for coming to this decision, but what bound them all together was the shared belief that the Labour Party had changed beyond recognition and was no longer the party which they had previously supported, joined, campaigned for and ultimately been 4

Three days in February

elected under. Their reasons for leaving went even further than this, though. Umunna’s broad contention that ‘politics is broken’ set the tone for the press conference and in many ways summed up the general political and parliamentary mood. In interviews and statements released over the next few days, the MPs went on to express a feeling of frustration not just with the Labour Party and its leadership, but also with traditional party politics, as they did so pressing for some kind of alternative. Just what that alternative was, however, was not yet clear. The former Labour MPs were casting aside their party label, but what were they to become? A company called Gemini A Ltd had been established the previous month with Gavin Shuker as its director. Berger announced that they would sit in the Commons as a grouping called The Independent Group. We must make an important distinction here about what this title means. When MPs leave the political party from which they were elected to parliament there are really only two options available. They can leave one party to join another, in what is known in parliamentary terminology as ‘crossing the floor’, or they may leave a party and continue to sit in the Commons as an ‘independent’ MP. The term ‘crossing the floor’ harks back to a time when there were only two dominant political forces in the political system. To leave one party and join another would mean physically walking from one side of the House of Commons chamber to the other. One would leave the party of government and join the party of opposition, or vice versa. In the context of an increasingly 5

The end of the small party?

multi-party system, an array of parties now exist for an MP to move to. Some, like Shaun Woodward in 1999, have moved from the Conservative Party to the Labour Party and gone on to serve in ministerial office. Others, such as Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless in 2014, have left a party of government to join a very small party. Carswell called a by-election in his constituency of Clacton, standing as a UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate and being returned triumphantly with almost 60 per cent of the vote; the biggest by-election success in history. The first UKIP MP to sit in the House of Commons, he was joined the following month by former Conservative Party colleague Mark Reckless, who had similarly resigned his seat, being returned as a UKIP MP following another successful by-election in Rochester and Strood. The ‘independent’ label is given to all MPs who are not aligned to an established political party. Independent MPs in the Commons are not a formal grouping. They have no leadership, do not necessarily share ideological outlooks and do not sit or vote together as a coherent and organised entity. Their paths to becoming an independent MP are notably diverse. Until the February 2019 press conference, most MPs sitting as independents in recent parliaments had left their parties not for principled ideological or political reasons, but because of personal misconduct. Indeed, of the 18 instances of MPs leaving a political party to serve as an independent from the start of the 2015 Parliament to January 2019, 14 had done so for alleged or proven cases of misconduct. This included allegations of sexual impropriety, financial 6

Three days in February

or expenses fraud, racist or sexist remarks and, in the case of former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya, a criminal conviction.4 If an MP has been forcibly removed from the party rather than leaving voluntarily, they may choose to designate themselves as an Independent Labour or Independent Conservative MP, indicating that their political beliefs continue to align with their former party. We saw this in 1994 when a group of ten Conservative MPs lost the party whip for failing to support John Major’s Government in a confidence motion. These MPs are often allowed back into the fold. Ann Winterton, for instance, served a short stint as an Independent Conservative MP in 2004 following offensive remarks made while serving as a Shadow minister, but was allowed to re-join the party and its parliamentary group when she apologised just a few weeks later. In the 2017 Parliament, independent MPs leaving their party for reasons other than misconduct included Frank Field – who decided not to continue as a Labour MP in August 2018, citing a ‘culture of nastiness’ in the party – and Stephen Lloyd, who left the Liberal Democrats in December 2018 in order to give himself the freedom to go against his party’s line on Brexit and vote in favour of the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal. The February 2019 announcement by the seven Labour MPs was something different. Although clear that they were not (yet) establishing a new political party, they intended to work together as a formal ‘group’ of independents. Those involved with the planning had anticipated that the group would spend time in this non-party mode while 7

The end of the small party?

they prepared the foundations and infrastructure required for the launch of a fully fledged political party. While parliament itself would designate them only as independent MPs on its official record (alongside the collection of nine existing independent MPs referred to above), they would create a more formal structure of cooperation and organisation between themselves from the very start. In the early days this meant a very basic group website, streamlined personal websites bearing the group name, regular appearances as the ‘magnificent seven’, as they were styled by the press, and the use of the WhatsApp messaging system to communicate and ensure some semblance of cohesion within parliament. At first sight the chances of success for the group may have seemed low. Berger highlighted at their first press conference how very different they all were in terms of constituency, age and experience in both the Labour Party and in the Commons. Ann Coffey had been a member of the party for 41 years while others like Berger and Umunna were relative newcomers, serving in the Commons only since 2010. All were MPs for English constituencies, but their constituencies stretched from Liverpool (Berger), Stockport (Coffey) and Penistone and Stocksbridge (Smith) in the north, to Umunna’s Streatham and Gapes’ Ilford constituencies in the south. Most held very safe Labour seats, winning their seats in the 2017 General Election with over 60 per cent of the vote. Luciana Berger was the most impressive in this respect. She had won Liverpool Wavertree with a massive 79 per cent of the vote; Chuka Umunna was not far behind, holding his Streatham 8

Three days in February

seat with just over 68 per cent. Angela Smith was the most vulnerable in these terms. Although she won her seat on 45.8 per cent of the vote, her Conservative rival had been only 1,300 votes behind. They also spanned several generations. At 72, Ann Coffey was almost twice the age of Luciana Berger and Gavin Shuker, both of whom were 37 when they left the party. Coffey had served as a Shadow minister at a time when Shuker and Berger were still in secondary school. If they were a diverse mix of MPs they at least had their former party affiliation in common. The disparate nature of The Independent Group would increase even more over the next couple of days. On the afternoon of Tuesday 19 February Joan Ryan, longstanding Labour MP for Enfield North and former government minister under Tony Blair, announced that she too would be leaving the party and joining The Independent Group. Her announcement was a ‘complete surprise’.5 There was speculation that three Conservative MPs – Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston – had gone underground and were not responding to messages from their party whips. Heidi Allen had a reputation within Westminster for being a forceful campaigner but was relatively unknown outside the Commons. Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston had a bigger public profile; the former was a former government minister and vocal critic of Theresa May during Brexit negotiations; the latter was a regular party rebel and chair of both the Health Select Committee and the formidable Liaison Committee, the group of committee chairs who, among other things, quiz the prime minister 9

The end of the small party?

on a bi-annual basis. The following afternoon, at another press conference, in the Institute for Engineers just a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster, the self-styled ‘Three Amigos’ similarly announced their resignation from the Conservative Party, pledging their allegiance to The Independent Group. The atmosphere was immensely positive, one conference attendee describing very vividly the ‘feel-good’ sense in the air.6 Sitting on the front row to support the Amigos were their eight new colleagues. Their motivations for leaving their party mirrored many of those expressed by the Labour MPs. They spoke of being unhappy with the Conservative Party leadership and the way in which the more hard-line Eurosceptic European Research Group, chaired by Jacob Rees Mogg had been allowed to dominate the party and to determine party policy almost unilaterally. Heidi Allen would go on to tell BBC’s Newsnight that she and her colleagues had been ‘clinging to each other on a shipwreck’.7 The three women had been in conversation with a small group of Labour MPs led by Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna since the previous autumn but discussions about creating a new centre-ground party were carried out with a high degree of secrecy. Such was the paranoia about information being leaked to the press too early that Allen, Soubry and Wollaston were not aware of precisely how many Labour MPs would be leaving the party or of who these MPs were until the morning of the press conference.8 Nevertheless, what had first started as internal divisions within the Labour Party had now become a much 10

Three days in February

bigger cross-party movement, setting the group apart from the Social Democratic Party (SDP) breakaway of the 1980s. They welcomed parallels made to the SDP and commentary on how this breakaway would be different resonated strongly among them. It was a ‘lightning in a bottle Parliament’;9 no one could remember a time when the two major parties had been so disunited. The combination of the government’s minority status in the Commons and the Brexit logjam made for a more extreme political pressure cooker than that seen in the 1980s and gave them hope that the potential for a major political realignment was stronger than that which many had hoped for following the formation of the SDP. At first glance there should have been nothing binding this group of 11 MPs together, apart from perhaps that they were simply a bunch of party misfits; MPs who had fallen out of love with their party leaders, policies and actions and could no longer stand under their party label. But one common thread running through the whole group was the frustration all had expressed with their own parties over Europe – or ‘this whole Brexit thing’, to use the words of Anna Soubry. All of the group identified themselves as remainers and five of them appeared in Politico’s list of the top 40 ‘Brexit Troublemakers’.10 Chris Leslie, coming in at 27th on the list, had been a vociferous parliamentary critic of both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit positions and described Corbyn’s refusal to commit the party to a second referendum or ‘People’s Vote’ as agreed at its annual conference as a ‘betrayal’. As the Commons debated government legislation to facilitate Brexit under 11

The end of the small party?

Theresa May’s premiership, he had been personally responsible for the tabling of hundreds of amendments designed to clarify the government’s intentions and to push to keep the UK in a customs union. As part of the cross-party People’s Vote campaign, Chuka Umunna (seventh on the list) had been a regular feature in the media as one of the most visible faces of the campaign. Alongside Gavin Shuker and other Labour MPs, he had been in contact with the Prime Minister in January 2019 to offer parliamentary support for the Brexit deal on the proviso that it was put before the British public in a referendum as well. The new independents were deeply frustrated with their own party leaders’ stances on Brexit and the way in which legislation was being facilitated by them. But it was about more than just Westminster; it was also about constituency representation. One of the former Conservative MPs described how the combination of Brexit and the disastrous implementation of the Universal Credit had made her embarrassed to be the MP in her constituency; so much so that she ‘couldn’t wait to get out’.11 Many of The Independent Group MPs would be labelled by the press at some point as ‘rebels’ following their resignations. But this terminology is confusing and presents something of a misunderstanding of the position and role of the group. In a political setting, to be a rebel suggests that you are going against the ideological outlook or path set by your party. The Labour MPs were clear that they were fighting for a Brexit position which had been decided by party members. If they were rebelling, then this was a rebellion against 12

Three days in February

the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for apparently ignoring the wishes of grassroots members by not endorsing a second Brexit referendum. In a parliamentary context a rebel is someone who votes the wrong way – against the wishes of their party leader. Some of the MPs in the group certainly had form for frustrating their party whips. Sarah Wollaston, for example, brought a rather independent mindset with her from the moment she entered the Commons. Just a few months into her tenure as an MP she heavily criticised the content of her own government’s Health and Social Care Bill and was blocked from taking part in the detailed committee scrutiny of the bill by the party whips who objected to her actions. Speaking in the chamber shortly afterwards, she stated that she profoundly objected to the notion that she should ‘always vote with the government’.12 Rebellion was something that this MP had always been prepared to do, though it should be noted that throughout the Brexit process the number of occasions on which she voted against the majority of her party increased. Others in the group, including Umunna, Berger and Shuker, had a very low rate of formal rebellion in Commons votes. Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn would be forced to implement an immediate containment strategy to try to prevent the further enlargement of The Independent Group. Shadow Labour ministers were sent out to denounce the MPs concerned – and to stress that they would be unable to hold their constituencies as independent MPs come election time. Emily Thornberry told a Labour supporters’ rally that they would be ‘crushed’ 13

The end of the small party?

in an election: a somewhat bizarre claim given that during the same week a YouGov poll showed that 14 per cent of the British public would vote for The Independent Group if it fielded candidates at a general election. Not bad for a political organisation which was only a few days old, and twice as high as the support being expressed at the time for the Liberal Democrats. Labour deputy leader Tom Watson launched the Future Britain Group in the committee rooms of the Commons in early March 2019, an understandable attempt to bring MPs from a more mainstream Labour background together into an organised group with the promise of influence on the policy and direction of the party. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, sensing the common Brexit anger among those who had left the Conservative Party – and the continued frustrations of many MPs still within it – offered MPs the opportunity to have a vote on delaying the date by which the UK was to leave the European Union as set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty if the Commons rejected her final deal which was to be put before the House the following month. The Liberal Democrats had a tough call to make: should they provide the new group with a friendly welcome or keep them at arm’s length for fear of being subsumed by them? In the end they chose the first option, with party leader Vince Cable proposing to work with them to pursue shared Brexit priorities in the Commons and suggesting that an electoral pact, an agreement whereby the two parties would not stand candidates against each other in constituencies at election time, was inevitable. 14

Three days in February

As the reverberations of the breakaway were being felt across the two main parties, The Independent Group held its first formal meeting in a small committee room in the House of Commons (the standard venue for meetings of political party groups) on the following Monday (25 February), before taking part in the first real votes in the Commons since their departure. Following the meeting, pictures emerged of the entire group enjoying a meal at Nando’s. Things may have been looking relatively rosy for the group over those initial few days, but it was clear that they were in the extremely early stages of party formation. Unbeknown to some, behind the scenes, tensions were already emerging around the speed at which the group should progress in its ambitions to become a political party. Given the centrality of political parties to contemporary British political and parliamentary life, some of the group wanted to acquire formal party status as soon as possible. The overwhelming majority of candidates at British general elections stand under a party label (just 187 independents stood in the 2017 General Election). After the election they are the means by which the government and opposition are formed. Discussion of the UK’s political system within political science is also dominated by references to its majoritarian nature. Indeed, it is seen as the archetypal model of a system which sits in contrast to the more consensual political and parliamentary styles of most other European countries. At Westminster this majoritarianism is characterised by the dominance of the two main political parties – the Labour Party and the Conservative Party 15

The end of the small party?

– and by the adversarial nature of parliamentary politics. The binary division inherent in the system, in which an elected government is opposed by an ‘Official Opposition’, predisposes it to revolve overwhelmingly around two main parties. Both have very well-developed mechanisms for organisation and communication, with a system of party whips and weekly meetings to discuss and manage parliamentary and party business. The dominance of the two main parties is deeply embedded throughout the House of Commons (in the Lords the presence of a sizeable number of crossbench peers with no party affiliation makes this slightly different) and it has long posed a challenge for all smaller parties who sit alongside them. We can see these challenges in the architecture and layout of the House of Commons chamber, which seems to have been designed with only two political parties in mind. The governing party sit on the green benches to the Speaker’s right and face the opposition parties, who sit on the green benches to the Speaker’s left. On the Table of the House (right in front of the Speaker’s Chair) are two wooden despatch boxes with microphones. Government ministers and Shadow ministers from the largest opposition party use these boxes to give speeches and to make or respond to statements and questions. Their frontbench colleagues sit alongside them on the first green bench. We are used to seeing opposition leaders leaning on the despatch box as they tear into the prime minister at the weekly jousting tournament of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). This image of the two-party system is most commonly presented on 16

Three days in February

national news and current affairs programmes and is the image of parliament which the majority of the general public will be familiar with. It is embedded in our political psyche. Smaller political parties are not well accommodated within the chamber. They sit on the green benches far away from the Speaker’s Chair, towards the bar of the House. Since the late 1990s the third largest party (the Liberal Democrats until 2010 and the SNP from 2015) has occupied some of the front bench in this section of the chamber, as well as the first couple of rows behind. Further behind them sit all of the other small parties whose MPs have been elected to the Commons. These MPs find themselves squashed into just two or three benches in perhaps the most remote corner of the chamber. They can easily find themselves pushed out of the centre stage. Their party leaders must speak from their seats rather than from the despatch boxes and they can find themselves virtually cropped out of any photographs or video clips of the Commons. Look at any picture of the Commons chamber printed in newspapers, magazines or online and you will most likely see the two main parties, perhaps with the occasional third-party MP sneaking in at the edges. If you go along to parliament as a visitor and sit in the House of Commons public gallery (as anyone is able to do), you will find yourself sitting above the smaller party benches. The public gallery is sizeable and offers a fantastic view of the chamber. But this view is primarily of the government and the official opposition. While some smaller party MPs can be seen, others will be 17

The end of the small party?

hidden from view. You can always hear them, thanks to the microphones dotted around the chamber, but you can’t always see them speaking. Those watching will need to view their speech on the screens in the gallery area. The struggle for visibility is a very real challenge for them. It is a challenge that many are willing to face. At The Independent Group’s press conference on 20 February Heidi Allen explained that the group were putting their heads ‘above the parapet’ and that they ‘might fail’. But she asked the journalists assembled in the room: ‘isn’t the prize worth fighting for?’. Many other parties will have asked themselves the same question as they arrived in the House of Commons for the first time. For although we tend to think of British politics as being a two- (or two-and-a-half-) party system, the reality is that the Commons has long been home to small opposition parties. The 2017 Parliament was composed of a total of eight political parties, with the SNP, The Independent Group, the Liberal Democrats, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Plaid Cymru and the Green Party sitting alongside the two main parties. Sinn Féin also has elected MPs, although the party abstains from taking its seats in the Commons and so plays no substantive part in Commons life. In the 2015–17 Parliament the number of parties with parliamentary representation stood at 11, with UKIP, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Ulster Unionist Party also holding seats in the chamber. Some of these parties have a relatively short history of representation in the Commons. The Green Party elected 18

Three days in February

its first (and only) MP, Caroline Lucas, in 2010, while UKIP held elected MPs between 2014 and 2017 only. Others have had a more long-standing presence. The SNP first won a Commons seat briefly in 1945, but has maintained a permanent Commons presence since 1967 when Winnie Ewing won a by-election in Hamilton, taking the seat from Labour on a swing of 38 per cent. Some of the most pivotal moments in UK parliamentary and constitutional history have involved small parliamentary parties. Take, for example, the role of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the collapse of the Gladstone Government in 1885, or the demands extracted from the Liberal Government for their legislative support for Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, culminating in the 1911 Parliament Act. The coalition government of 2010–15 formed because of the pivotal role played by the 57-strong group of Liberal Democrat MPs under the leadership of Nick Clegg. Small party presence is by no means a new phenomenon at Westminster and is increasingly becoming the norm, but we rarely hear about these MPs in discussions of current affairs. For most small parties, gaining their first parliamentary seat comes after not one, but many, long slogs on the campaign trail. The much-criticised first-past-thepost electoral system used for UK parliamentary elections is far kinder to the larger, more established political parties and thus it may take several electoral cycles for their smaller counterparts finally to see some tangible successes. It forces emerging parties to concentrate their campaign resources on just a few key constituencies to maximise their chances of winning. This can mean 19

The end of the small party?

that while they are trying to appeal to the whole electorate, in reality their success can hinge on just a few thousand people living in one constituency. The Greens had contested Brighton Pavilion at every general election since 1992 before Caroline Lucas swept to victory in 2010. Even when parties are successful, their prize is often much smaller than their share of the vote would suggest. Although UKIP gained its first seat in the Commons as the result of a defection by Douglas Carswell, the party’s performance in the 2015 General Election saw them push the Liberal Democrats out of third place, winning over 12 per cent of the national vote. This support was spread too thinly across constituencies, though, and as a result, the party won only one parliamentary seat, in Carswell’s constituency of Clacton. Even the then party leader and by far the most recognisable UKIP face, Nigel Farage, failed to win his South Thanet seat, falling over 2,000 votes short of the Conservative Party’s Craig Mackinlay. Occasionally the first-past-the-post electoral system can have the reverse effect. The SNP benefits from being a nationalist party and having its support concentrated in Scotland. The 50 per cent of the Scottish vote it received in the 2015 General Election gained the party 56 of the 650 seats in the Commons. This translated into less than 5 per cent of the overall UK vote, causing consternation from some about the legitimacy of its parliamentary weight. The Liberal Democrats held a higher percentage of the UK wide vote (just under 8 per cent), yet found themselves pushed out of the third-party position because they had won far fewer parliamentary seats. Electoral 20

Three days in February

and parliamentary arithmetic do not always match up. This was the reason why Tony Blair could govern with such large majorities; the larger parties never complain when the system benefits them. It can be frustrating for smaller parties and their MPs when their electoral efforts do not appear to have been rewarded. For The Independent Group, things were slightly different. Formed solely from MP defections and with no immediate elections to contest, the new group avoided having to undergo any immediate battles with the electoral system, launching themselves in the Commons as the fourth largest party, a title held jointly with the Liberal Democrats thanks to Lib Dem MP Stephen Lloyd’s departure from the party in December 2018. The nature of The Independent Group’s formation once again led to comparisons with the formation of the SDP in 1981. This too had been led by defectors from the Labour Party, including two sitting Labour MPs (David Owen and Bill Rodgers) who would later be followed by 26 more Labour MPs plus one solitary Conservative. Although two of the SDP’s founders (Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins) would later sit on the green benches thanks to successful by-election contests, the SDP also reached the position of third largest parliamentary party without having to contest a single parliamentary seat under their new party banner. As we will see, the electoral system is one challenge; carving out a position in the Commons and overcoming parliamentary obstacles is quite another. While they negated the usual requirement of a strong general election performance to propel them onto the 21

The end of the small party?

green benches of the Commons, The Independent Group would very soon take the decision to contest an election. EU elections were looming and the group had to make a decision about whether or not to field candidates. In order to do so they would need to apply for official party status with the Electoral Commission. It was a long process, taking up a great deal of time for the few administrative staff that the group had. The application was made in March and in April the group rebranded themselves as Change UK – The Independent Group. The creation of a new political party was a ‘potential consequence’ of leaving the two main parties, but for most of the group it was not the primary goal.13 Nevertheless, Change UK launched its campaign for the European parliamentary elections in the remaindominated city of Bristol. Here, the Change UK MPs spoke of an influx of 3,700 applications from across the UK to stand as candidates in the forthcoming election.14 Those who made the final cut included some prominent figures – journalists Gavin Esler and Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris Johnson) and former Labour and Conservative MPs (Neil Carmichael and Roger Casale). Although the results of the election were disappointing for the new party, winning just 3.4 per cent of the overall UK vote and failing to secure a single MEP, its founders initially put a brave face on the outcome, hailing it a success given the time constraints since the party’s formation. The failure was a stark contrast to the success enjoyed by another fledgling political party. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which had been formally registered only a couple of weeks prior to The Independent Group’s 22

Three days in February

formation, managed to elect 29 MEPs with a total of 31 per cent of the vote. This was over twice as many seats as the two main parties combined and dwarfed their combined total of 23 per cent of the vote. As a high-profile political figure with strong financial backing, Farage had not struggled to gain media attention for his party, or to put forward candidates to stand for election. The contrast between the two parties was clear; Change UK had been built almost completely from scratch, with few resources and a set of faces with which the general public were less than familiar. The performance of Change UK in the European elections served only to fuel the divisions within the group about its direction of growth. On Tuesday 4 June, following what the press described as an ‘amicable’ meeting, six Change UK MPs (Heidi Allen, Luciana Berger, Gavin Shuker, Angela Smith, Chuka Umunna and Sarah Wollaston) announced that they were leaving the party, returning to the Commons as independents who would work together on a group basis, similar to what they had initially planned to do as The Independent Group. Umunna would later announce that he was joining the Liberal Democrats. The five remaining Change UK MPs elected Anna Soubry as their new leader. In a statement, she announced that the party was ‘as determined to fix Britain’s broken politics as we were when we left our former parties’ and that they would be undergoing a process of policy development over the summer.15 Days later the remaining Change UK MPs announced that they were applying to change their party’s name once more – this time because of 23

The end of the small party?

legal action threatened by Change.org – to become The Independent Group for Change.16 When the House of Commons approved the Early Parliamentary General Election Act at the end of October 2019, the party saw further internal disruption. Joan Ryan had already announced that she would be standing down from parliament at the next election, leaving only Gapes, Leslie and Soubry standing under The Independent Group for Change banner. All three would lose their seats to candidates from the larger parties; in each case they lost to the party which they themselves had represented until the previous year. Chris Leslie summed up the general mood of the party when he said that it was ‘never realistically about standing to win’.17 The three MPs had been under no illusion that they could compete with the larger party machines at election time. This had been a common theme for the party since its creation. Just a few months prior to the election Anna Soubry had called for a ‘cross-party summit’ of all of the small parties in the UK to ‘discuss the democratic crisis facing the country, and the need to break the cartel of the bigger established parties’.18 This call for small party action amid the dominance of the two big parties speaks exactly to the purpose of this book. The political environment of Westminster can be a hostile one for those who do not sit under a Labour or Conservative Party banner. The very design of the political system, with its majoritarian electoral system, often opaque parliamentary procedures, combined with the lack of press interest as well as broader resource and information deficits, mean that small parties have 24

Three days in February

to work exceedingly hard if they are to survive. It is to their credit that so many small parties strive to, and are successful in, achieving this – finding creative ways in which to make their mark on the landscape of the British parliamentary system. This book takes the rise and fall of The Independent Group (from here on referred to throughout as Change UK) as its starting point, but it explores the experiences of all small parties in the House of Commons, demonstrating the challenges facing them and the means by which they utilise their limited resources to be effective MPs and political parties.

Notes 1 BBC News, ‘General Election 2019: Anna Soubry disbands Independent Group for Change’, 19 December 2019. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50858811 [accessed 29 February 2020]. 2 See N. Murphy, ‘The Independent Group wasn’t a failure – it was about putting country before party’, Huffington Post, 18 February 2020. 3 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 4 Onasanya would later lose her Peterborough seat following a successful recall petition signed by her constituents. Labour’s Lisa Forbes took the seat in June 2019, depriving the Brexit Party of their first Commons MP by less than 1,000 votes. 5 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 6 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 7 Newsnight, 20 February 2019. 8 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 9 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 10 Those included in the rankings were: Chuka Umunna (7th), Anna Soubry (12th), Sarah Wollaston (17th), Heidi Allen (18th) and Chris Leslie (27th). 11 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020.

25

The end of the small party? 12 S. Wollaston, ‘Creeping patronage, new politics and the payroll vote’, Guardian, 10 February 2011. Online at: www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/creepingpatronage-house-commons-mps-whips [accessed 7 July 2019]. 13 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 14 Heidi Allen, Change UK European election campaign launch, Bristol, 24 April 2019. 15 Statement, Change UK, https://voteforchange.uk/ [accessed 6 June 2019]. 16 P. Walker, ‘Change UK to change name again to Independent Group for Change’, Guardian, 13 June 2019. Online at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/13/change-uk-tochange-name-again-independent-group-for-change [accessed 13 June 2019]. 17 @ChrisLeslieUK, 13 December 2019, https://twitter.com/ ChrisLeslieUK/status/1205329746646704128 [accessed 20 February 2020]. 18 Statement, Change UK, https://voteforchange.uk/ [accessed 6 June 2019].

26

Chapter 2

Finding their feet

When the SDP formed in 1981 one of its number, former Labour MP Mike Thomas, raced to the Commons chamber to ask a parliamentary question, ensuring that the new party’s name was rapidly embedded into the official record of parliamentary proceedings.1 There was no such rush for the Change UK MPs. This perhaps reflects the importance of securing positive news coverage for the party. With little attention devoted by the press to business in the Commons chamber, they would need to focus on venues external to the green benches if they wanted to be front-page news. None of their number would therefore make a contribution in the chamber on the day of the party’s formation, though six of them did make it through the division lobbies that evening, albeit on relatively unimportant votes on financial services statutory instruments (SIs), where they found themselves walking through the no lobby with their former Labour colleagues. This number would fall to just three (Berger, Gapes and Smith) when the House considered an SI relating to preparations for a no-deal Brexit. 27

The end of the small party?

When the Commons adjourned at 10.30 p.m. that evening there had been no reference to the new group from anyone on the green benches. Their first proper mention in the Commons would come the following day. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock ensured the group’s first entry into the official Hansard report during a debate on Brexit contingency planning, chiding his opposite number on the Shadow Cabinet benches, Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, for not having ‘the gumption to join his friends over there on the back benches in the Independent Group’.2 Three of the group were in the chamber listening to this. Two of them, Angela Smith and Chris Leslie, jumped to their feet to try to intervene but were not called by the Speaker. Just ten minutes later Chris Leslie would be successful in marking the group’s presence clearly in the Hansard report, making a short contribution to a debate on the government’s Social Care Green Paper. Drawing on the group’s press conference the day before, he suggested that the government’s delay in publishing the green paper typified ‘what is wrong with the broken politics of this country’.3 Although his affiliation in Hansard at this time would be simply as an independent MP rather than as a new political party, BBC Parliament gave him the designation of ‘Independent Group’ in their coverage of the Commons right from the start. In her reply, Care Minister Caroline Dinenage welcomed Leslie to ‘his new location in the Chamber’.4 Her comments were a reference to the benches which the new group had chosen to occupy in the Commons. If you were to visit the devolved legislatures of Northern 28

Finding their feet

Ireland, Scotland or Wales you would see chambers large enough to accommodate every single member. In the latter two, MPs each have their own allocated seat, desk and microphone – a format common to many parliaments around the world. In some, complex seating plans exist when political parties change size to ensure that MPs know precisely where they should be sitting and to prevent arguments occurring between parties. In the Commons, however, seating is highly controversial and very political. Seats show the position of your party (government or opposition) and its relative importance in the Commons (the larger parties all have MPs who sit on the very front benches in the centre of the chamber). Changing your seating position can be seen as a form of political statement. When Boris Johnson removed the Conservative whip from the 21 MPs who supported a motion to allow MPs to take control of the Commons in September 2019, they occupied a position in the upper corner of the government’s benches, next to the Speaker’s Chair. MPs usually strive for a seat towards the centre of the chamber, where they can be seen and heard with ease. One former Liberal Democrat MP described this to me simply as ‘silly geography’, hinting that the importance MPs place on securing a good seat in the chamber is akin to primary school children racing into class or the lunch hall to try to sit next to their best friend, or to claim the best table.5 Regardless of that view, benches in the chamber are usually jealously guarded by political parties and individuals. The very seat that an MP or party occupies shows not only the parliamentary rights being afforded to the MP (more on 29

The end of the small party?

this later), but is symbolic of his or her status in the Commons. So, contrary to my interviewee’s perceptions, it is actually very different to the behaviour of a schoolchild: it really means something. Long-standing MPs often have one particular ‘seat’ on the benches which is effectively reserved for them. Dennis Skinner, for instance, sat not with the majority of his Labour Party colleagues behind the Shadow Cabinet front bench, but directly to their left, on what is sometimes known as the ‘rebels’ bench’. This seat is on the front row of the small party section of the chamber and was used by the Bolsover MP whenever Labour was in opposition – for a total of more than 40 years, until his election defeat in December 2019. His seat in the Commons is now occupied by the SNP, giving that party a better position in which to stand when asking questions in the House, particularly at PMQs. For other MPs and for new parliamentary groups, claiming a seat can mean waking at the crack of dawn and entering the chamber to reserve a place with a ‘prayer card’. Every Commons sitting begins with prayers, read by the Speaker’s Chaplain. MPs can write their name on a small card and place it in the brass frames which sit along all of the green benches to reserve their seat for prayers. So long as they occupy that seat during prayers it will be theirs for the rest of the day’s business. When trying to establish themselves as having official ‘third-party’ status in the Commons during the 1997 Parliament the Liberal Democrats would arrive in the chamber at 6 a.m. on Wednesday mornings before PMQs to insert their prayer cards and try to ensure that 30

Finding their feet

their leader would be able to quiz Tony Blair from a frontbench position in what was described by one as an ‘absurd game of musical chairs’.6 SNP MPs went through a similar process following their success in the 2015 General Election. With their number of MPs growing in size from six to 56, they were keen to establish their third-party status in the chamber and to ensure that their seats reflected their newfound position. Shortly after the election Chris Grayling told the House that Labour and SNP MPs were entering the chamber earlier and earlier each morning to reserve their seats, arriving well before 7 a.m.7 Not content with bumping the Liberal Democrats out of their seats towards the centre of the chamber, attempts were first made to take Dennis Skinner’s seat on the front bench, though this was a battle which was eventually won by the Labour MP. The party later tried to occupy the Labour front bench during the latter stages of the Welfare Bill in (July 2015) when Labour MPs did not show up. This was more of an opportunistic move to highlight that Labour was abstaining from taking part in the bill rather than a calculated attempt to claim the benches permanently. But it demonstrates the symbolism of seating in the chamber and the way in which seating positions can equate to power or at the very least, to the idea that you will be viewed as a more serious political force. It is no surprise then that when Change UK arrived en masse to make their first group appearance in the Commons ready for PMQs on Wednesday 20 February they had already given much thought as to where they 31

The end of the small party?

would sit. With 12 MPs they were now the fourth largest parliamentary grouping although, as they were not yet registered as a political party, they did not see this reflected in the official breakdown of the chamber into parliamentary party groupings listed on parliament’s website. Nor was their size reflected in procedural terms, for they were still independent MPs. Consideration had been given by the former Labour members of the group as to where they would sit. There was talk of trying to occupy the two SNP front benches, something which would be akin to the stunts pulled by the SNP MPs themselves, but they decided against this, knowing that the SNP would not budge.8 The third row back, where some SNP MPs sit alongside the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Green MP Caroline Lucas, was rather crowded, and it was clear that the DUP’s ten MPs would not be moving from their seats towards the middle rear of the chamber. As one Change UK MP put it, the Northern Irish party have a ‘no surrender’ policy on their territory in the chamber.9 This left the back two rows, those which are traditionally the spill-over seats for official opposition MPs, as the only real option for the new group to establish itself. Most of the group squeezed onto the same bench which they had occupied the previous day, on the second row from the back of the chamber, with the remaining MPs sitting on the very back bench. One of their number described this as the ‘floating independents’ bench’.10 The Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson would later write that it had ‘the look of a school assembly scene’.11 Chris Leslie, Anna Soubry and Mike Gapes in particular appeared 32

Finding their feet

to be very animated and could be seen waving at their friends and former colleagues sitting elsewhere. Parkinson described Gapes as the happiest Change UK MP by far that day, possessing ‘the demeanour of a guy who wins millions on the lottery, but tells his local paper he will continue his job as a gardener, because that is what brings him true happiness’.12 The new parliamentary group were clearly enjoying themselves. The day began with Scotland Questions, where the SNP’s Patrick Grady and Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell joked that it was good to see the small party benches so full for Scottish questions.13 Fellow SNP member Pete Wishart would later tell the House that ‘it certainly feels different up here on these benches today’, referring to the small party area of the Commons.14 These seats, further towards the bar of the House, are not one of the most coveted spots in the chamber. Small party MPs try their hardest to snatch a spot as close to the central gangway and the despatch boxes as possible.15 While the SNP and the DUP’s seats are almost exclusively theirs, the parties sitting on the third bench (Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens) have a negotiated arrangement whereby they will alternate their seats depending on parliamentary business. This means that if the Liberal Democrats’ Vince Cable was due to speak or to ask a parliamentary question, he would occupy the prime seat at the end of the bench, close to the centre of the chamber. As one MP explained, this position is ‘better in terms of getting your voice heard and it also looks a bit better because it’s right in the middle of parliament, or of the opposition side at 33

The end of the small party?

least’.16 This continual manoeuvring took some time to iron out at the beginning of the 2017 Parliament, but now works well and negates the need to compete for the best seats through the prayer card system. Change UK did not seem to have made any representations to the Speaker to join these negotiations and the DUP responded to the group’s arrival at the back of the chamber by arriving early in the Commons each day to put their own green prayer cards right along their bench. Change UK could therefore only occupy the very end of their benches when the DUP were not present in the chamber. The group did not particularly enjoy this new seating position; but it was the only viable place for them to sit. For some of them, the seats provided an alternative perspective on parliamentary life. Anna Soubry, for instance, told Newsnight very early on that now she was on the other side of the chamber she could really see how under-represented women were, pointing out the ‘rows and rows of males in suits’ on the Conservative benches opposite.17 There were few attempts from the group to speak in the Commons that first day, the MPs perhaps being content with making their presence felt on the benches and showing a united front, rather than trying to gain the parliamentary limelight. As we will see later on, this may also have been a sign that they were still trying to figure out what their parliamentary strategy should be. With their place in the Commons established, they could now begin to get to work as a parliamentary group. With Brexit frustration forming a large chunk 34

Finding their feet

of their motivation for leaving their parties the political context was particularly opportune. The Prime Minister was still struggling to get MPs to agree to her negotiated Brexit deal, with the government already being defeated on 15 January and the majority of parliamentary time being taken up with debate on the deal, or the process by which MPs might be able to debate alternative arrangements and force the Prime Minister’s hand. The group’s new parliamentary position, bereft of the procedural comforts of the two big parties, must have come as something of a shock for many MPs in the new group. Commons procedure operates mainly around party size and as such privileges the two largest parties enormously. Erskine May, the hefty book of parliamentary procedure which sits on the table in the centre of the House of Commons, in front of the parliamentary officials, describes how business is arranged on the basis of ‘a single clear-cut division between Government and Opposition’.18 While it acknowledges that smaller parties ‘complicate’ these arrangements, the book of procedure is clear that they do not ‘destroy the broad principle’ of them.19 At times there is an incredible degree of frustration about this from the smaller parties, who believe that the working arrangements of the Commons only really represent a government and an opposition.20 The Liberal Democrats felt a renewed sense of anger about this following the 2017 General Election when their poor conversion of votes to seats led to their eviction from the third-party benches by the SNP. For the first time since 1997 they had lost parliamentary rights.21 Liberal Democrat MPs described how ‘your status is 35

The end of the small party?

massively diminished’ and how as a result you ‘have very little as of right’ in the chamber.22 The best illustration of these party rights comes when we consider the right to speak in the chamber. Debate is a central feature of any parliament and fundamental to the work of elected representatives. During their inductions to parliament and to the workings of the chamber which are guided by the House authorities following every general election, MPs are told that ‘every MP is equal’.23 With 650 MPs, though, it is not possible for every member to speak on any given day, nor can it be guaranteed that all those with a particular interest in speaking on a topic are able to do so. Speaking rights must be regulated and distributed somehow. The Commons Speaker plays a critical role here, being the ultimate arbiter of who is allowed to ask a question or to make a speech. Former Speaker John Bercow had a reputation for standing up for backbench MPs and for trying to ensure as many MPs as possible were able to contribute. We can see evidence of this in the way that he regularly extended PMQs if the prime minister and the leader of the opposition had taken up too much time with their jousting, or through his promotion of ‘Urgent Questions’ as a tool to enable backbenchers to bring ministers to the floor of the House. The Speaker is constrained, though, by the need to take into account party balance in the chamber and the seniority of the MPs who wish to speak. We can understand the need to call MPs in such a way that it is in rough proportion to a party’s size in the House. Certainly it would be wrong if a 36

Finding their feet

party with a majority in the Commons was rarely called to speak. Seniority is a more controversial custom. It means that, should the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee (Yvette Cooper at the time of writing) and a new or more junior colleague both wish to speak during a Home Affairs debate, the select committee chair is likely to be called first. Smaller parties tend to have fewer MPs in these types of powerful positions and thus often lose out in the seniority stakes. It is difficult to know how often this type of scenario happens deliberately as the Speaker’s decisions do not need to be justified, published or explained in any way, but those on the losing end tend to blame the seniority principle for their inability to make as many contributions as they wish. Most of the business in the Commons is government business and as such most debates will begin with a speech from the relevant government minister at the despatch box. The official opposition party will then always be called next, with a member of the Shadow Cabinet responding to the minister’s speech and setting out their main objections or their support for the legislation or the government’s stance on a policy issue from the despatch box directly opposite. The third party will come next – in the 2019 Parliament this meant that the SNP always had the opportunity to put forward one of its frontbench spokespersons to make a speech also. This, of course, had to be done from their seat on the third-party benches rather than from a despatch box, given that the two despatch boxes in the chamber are reserved for the two largest parties. These first speeches 37

The end of the small party?

are guaranteed; there is no formal time limit for the party spokespersons to stick to and they will be able to go to the debate having prepared what they are going to say and knowing that they will have the opportunity actually to say it. Such guarantees do not exist for any of the other political parties in the House. If they are to be called to speak their contribution will fall within the collection of backbench speeches which follow. The requirement to take party balance into account means that in practice once the opening speeches have been made, most debates see a to-ing and fro-ing between Conservative and Labour Party MPs. MPs from the smaller parties will be called, but they often find that they are shoehorned into the very end of these debates. SNP MPs lament that it can often take several hours after their frontbench spokesperson has made a contribution to a debate before any more of the party will be called by the Speaker, and there is a general feeling from some members of the other small parties that the speaking order for backbench speeches is rather arbitrary and inconsistent in terms of acknowledging the size of the other party groups.24 Being called in the second half – or end – of a parliamentary debate makes it difficult for parties to make their mark. Most obviously, the Speaker typically introduces time limits during debates to maximise the number of MPs who are able to contribute. This time limit is not the same for all MPs. Those speaking at the start of the debate may have a relatively relaxed limit of say, ten minutes (or perhaps no time limit at all). If it becomes apparent that many more MPs are 38

Finding their feet

hoping to contribute, the Speaker will reduce this time limit as the debate progresses. It may fall to eight minutes, then six, then four, before coming down to just two or three minutes as he tries to call as many MPs as possible before the debate must be wound up by the government minister. MPs who are called in the final stages of a debate may need to chop up any prepared speech quite severely. Talking of time pressures in the chamber, a Liberal Democrat MP described how ‘you just have to choose two bullet points and either make no comment whatsoever about anything that anyone else has said during the debate, which often you want to do because they might make points that you want to challenge or points that you want to score’.25 It is difficult to generate any momentum or to try to set the tone or agenda for a debate if you are speaking several hours in, perhaps to a much emptier chamber than those who were called at the beginning. You are also far less likely to have your comments picked up by the press. Of the few journalists who now report directly on parliamentary proceedings, most will stay in the press gallery for the opening speeches only, before leaving to write their stories. The content becomes inevitably about the divisions between the two main parties and tends to lack third, fourth or fifth party material. This is not a new feature of parliamentary reporting; the SDP struggled in the same way in the early 1980s.26 It is notable that three of the Change UK MPs saw a significant fall in the number of contributions (full speeches, interventions or questions) made in the Commons in their first 39

The end of the small party?

five months as Change UK MPs compared to their last five months as a larger party MP. Chris Leslie, for example, is recorded as making 67 oral contributions in the Commons between October 2018 and February 2019, but this falls to just 26 between February and July 2019. Angela Smith’s contributions also fell from 35 to 18, while the party’s convenor Gavin Shuker made only a single contribution in the chamber as a Change UK MP, compared to six separate oral contributions in his last four months as a Labour MP.27 This lack of air time in the chamber and the feeling that constituents cannot be represented as well within the confines of a small party, would fuel the desire of at least one of the Change UK MPs to join the Liberal Democrats.28 The lack of guaranteed speaking time can also mean a huge time commitment. MPs talk of the endless speeches that they have prepared but never actually delivered, or of the very long waits on the green benches as they hope to catch the Speaker’s eye. One Liberal Democrat described the frustration of sitting in a debate for six hours and then being called only for a short three-minute speech.29 This is one of the issues which prompted the SNP’s Pete Wishart to put himself forward as a candidate for future Speaker. As part of the reform agenda published on his website he stated that all MPs ‘should be considered equal and have the same entitlements as others’, committing himself to making participation transparent with the publication of a speakers’ list ‘before any debate is due to start’.30 This would at least provide some certainty for MPs in smaller parties and would help them to manage their parliamentary 40

Finding their feet

time more efficiently. Sir Lindsay Hoyle would echo this sentiment in his own pitch for the Commons Speakership in 2019, telling the House that he wanted to continue to ensure that the small parties had a voice in the chamber, as did most of the other candidates during the Speaker election.31 Small parties find themselves in a similar position during question times in the chamber. At PMQs on Wednesday lunchtimes, the two largest opposition parties have a set of guaranteed questions; usually six questions for the leader of the official opposition and two questions for the leader of the third party. The remainder of PMQs is filled with backbench questions on a balloted basis. Although the Speaker may call MPs who are not listed on the order paper, there is no guarantee that the smaller parties will be called. Plaid Cymru MPs estimate that they receive a question at PMQs every three to four weeks.32 It is rare for more than one small party or independent MP to be called during a single PMQs session, unless they have been very lucky in the ballot. Outside the chamber this two- (or three-) party dominance continues. Part of the problem is that so much of parliamentary business is arranged through the ‘usual channels’. This refers to a small group of MPs; the Leader of the House (a government minister), Shadow Leader of the House, chief whip (another government minister) and the opposition chief whip, plus representatives from the third largest party. Although all parties will have whips, Labour and the Conservatives have a greater number, with greater responsibility for 41

The end of the small party?

maintaining cohesion. These party whips provide information to their respective party leaders on how MPs are likely to vote. They are also the source of key information about parliamentary business. MPs will receive the ‘whip’ on a weekly basis, listing the debates and votes which are expected to be held and indicating both the way in which the MP should vote (in the aye or no lobby) and the importance of that vote. It is an ‘inside track’ 33 on what is happening in the Commons and additionally means that they will get advance copies of ministerial statements which are to be made in the chamber. Smaller parties have little capacity or need for a party whip, though they do have them. Their whips, however, perform a smaller set of duties and tend not to be included in the formal and informal meeting points of what is termed the ‘usual channels’. This can result in something of an information deficit when it comes to the business of the House. When the division bell rings on the parliamentary estate MPs have just eight minutes to walk to the division lobbies and cast their vote. Those MPs in the larger parties may receive a message or reminder from their party whips explaining which division lobby to walk through, but an MP from a smaller party will not necessarily have such easy access to information about what vote is actually taking place. For really important, big-ticket, votes such as the third reading of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, this is not such a problem. However, when it comes to voting on smaller-ticket issues – amendments to

42

Finding their feet

bills, statutory instruments etc. – it is not always clear which amendment is being voted on or which way the MP needs to vote. Sometimes MPs will be voting ‘yes’ on a motion protesting against a decision or policy and here it can be much more difficult for them to know which lobby to walk through. Much depends on the staff resources available to a party. Change UK had not planned on having a party whip when it first formed, but one of their members (Joan Ryan) designated herself as the group’s whip. A former Labour Party whip herself, she saw the need to have some sort of information system between the group.34 A member of the party’s administrative staff was later given the job of facilitating the distribution of parliamentary business, sending text messages to the MPs about imminent divisions and which way to vote. For very small parties such information requires a higher degree of preparation and research on the part of the MP, but often falls on those staffing their parliamentary office. The main party whips also oversee the division of resources and key parliamentary positions. When MPs walk through the Palace doors following a general election, the first thing they want to get hold of is an office. The parliamentary estate is vast, spanning well beyond the Palace itself. Some MPs and their staff are housed within the iconic Palace walls, but the vast majority will be allocated an office in Portcullis House, 1 Parliament Street or one of the two Norman Shaw Buildings (North and South). There is huge variation in the size and glamour of the offices in these external

43

The end of the small party?

buildings, with Portcullis House offering the plusher office accommodation and the Norman Shaw Buildings being perhaps the most spartan but more spacious.35 The party whips are the ones who control the allocation of these offices to their MPs. Those occupying rooms in the Palace itself tend to be government ministers or party whips. Though some are windowless and rather gloomy, they have the benefit of providing easy access to and from the Commons chamber and the division lobbies. With no official whip to negotiate their office allocation, the smaller parties can find themselves at the bottom of the pecking order for an office. Green MP Caroline Lucas wrote that she and her small party colleagues ‘go to the back of the queue and wait for [the] chance to squeeze into a broom cupboard with limited ventilation’.36 She rejected the first office allocated to her by the larger parties, but still resides in a small office in the furthest building from the Commons chamber (Norman Shaw North), a building also inhabited by the four elected Plaid Cymru MPs. This control and apportionment of parliamentary space can also extend into arguments over seating in the House of Commons tea rooms. In an interview with the History of Parliament Trust, former Conservative MP Sir Teddy Taylor described how the House of Commons tea rooms were divided by party, with specific seating areas for Labour and Conservative MPs. The Liberal Democrats would have a small table in the middle, but at the time there was no reserved seating for other political parties.37 When Plaid Cymru’s first 44

Finding their feet

ever MP, Gwynfor Evans, was elected in 1966 he was told he would need to leave and eat his lunch elsewhere. Only when the SNP’s Winnie Ewing was elected the following year and ‘caused all kinds of trouble’ did the House of Commons Catering Committee decide to allocate a specific table for minority parties.38 The SNP’s new MPs in the 2015 Parliament expressed their disbelief at this system, baffled by the entrenched nature of party divisions through the Commons and pushed for their seating area to be bigger.39 The party whips also control which MPs are appointed to bill committees, something which is agreed through the Committee of Selection. Bill committees have around 15–30 MPs whose job it is to scrutinise bills on a lineby-line basis. In practice this means spending many hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, often for several weeks, debating the finer details of legislation and voting on possible changes to its wording. As with most aspects of parliament’s work, membership of these committees must be in proportion to the overall party balance in the House. This means that the government will always have a majority and (unless the parliamentary arithmetic changes dramatically), the official opposition party will also have a substantial number of MPs on committees. The third party has rights to committee places here, but usually only in the form of one or two committee members. As with everything else, the smaller parties have no guaranteed seat on these committees. The Committee of Selection is rather obscure, publishes no minutes or records of its meetings and is not required to justify any of its decisions. As Change UK MP Chris 45

The end of the small party?

Leslie points out, the dominance of the main parties on this committee means that other parliamentary groups and new parties cannot ‘get a word in edgeways’ in what he describes as a ‘cosy cartel’.40 His colleague Heidi Allen has also described how the two main parties want to ‘crush’ them.41 In the current Parliament the smaller parties have a greater chance of a place, given that the third party, the SNP, may have little interest in sitting on a committee which is considering Englandonly or England- and Wales-only legislation. Here, seats may be forfeited by the third party and handed out to others. Select committee places are also calculated on a proportional basis, though there is no formal requirement for this in the Standing Orders (the written rules) of the House, with the two largest parties receiving most of the chairmanships. In the 2017 Parliament the SNP had an entitlement to two chairs (International Trade and Scottish Affairs), with the Liberal Democrats holding one (Science and Technology). There is a process of negotiation between the larger party whips as to which committee chair goes to which party. The Liberal Democrats are clear that they received Science and Technology because it was ‘the last one on the table when everybody else had taken what they wanted’.42 The Greens, Plaid Cymru and the DUP have had no committee chairs to date. General membership of these committees is similarly sparse for small party MPs. The SNP has at least one elected member on each select committee, with three

46

Finding their feet

members on the Scottish Affairs Committee; the Liberal Democrats have one representative on the Public Accounts Committee, Exiting the EU Committee and the Scottish Affairs Committee; Caroline Lucas sits on the Environmental Audit Committee (though notably not on the more prestigious Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Committee); Plaid Cymru sits on the Exiting the EU Committee and has two members on the Welsh Affairs Committee, though it does not hold the position of chair. Once again, the divvying up of committee places is done by the larger party whips who decide on the number of places to be held by parties on each committee. The Liberal Democrats described their allocation to the Public Accounts Committee – arguable one of the bigger and more important select committee roles – as ‘a sort of favour, a crumb off the bigger parties’ table’.43 The DUP did particularly well in the committee stakes, perhaps because of their confidence-and-supply arrangement with the government. In the 2017 Parliament, the party’s ten MPs had a representative on the Defence, DEFRA, International Trade and Transport Committees plus three members on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, though again the DUP does not hold the position of chair.44 With the same number of MPs as the Liberal Democrats, we would expect that Change UK would (had their move come at the start of a new parliament when committee places are decided and elected) have had a similar number of committee positions. At the time of

47

The end of the small party?

their formation, though, committee memberships had already been allocated on the basis of the 2017 election results. Fortunately for Change UK, it was already extremely well served by committee positions. One of its MPs (Angela Smith) was a member of the DEFRA Committee, two sat on the Equalities Committee (Gavin Shuker and Anna Soubry), Mike Gapes had a place on the Foreign Affairs Committee and Luciana Berger was a member of the Health and Social Care Committee. Chris Leslie was a member of the International Trade Committee, and a further two Change UK MPs held places on the Work and Pensions Committee (Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry). In addition to this, Dr Sarah Wollaston held the chair of the Health and Social Care Committee and was also the chair of the prestigious Liaison Committee, the group of select committee chairs who most notably quiz the prime minister roughly twice a year. Between them, the Change UK MPs held nine select committee positions – almost as many as the DUP. When embarking on the move out of their political party homes, the Change UK MPs had anticipated that they might lose their committee places, and this issue had been discussed. The matter was in the hands of their former parties and it was a risk that they had to take. Grumblings about the dominance of the group’s MPs on select committees quickly surfaced and by March 2019 the Labour Party made plans to remove some of its former MPs from their positions. Changes to select committee membership can be made, with a motion placed before the House for debate and then voted on. Mike 48

Finding their feet

Gapes was one of these early victims, removed from the Foreign Affairs Committee along with his former colleague and sitting independent MP Ian Austin45. Gapes is a well-liked, affable MP with friends on both sides of the House and the move was clearly a partisan one. Bill Wiggin, moving the motion on behalf of the Committee of Selection, noted that ‘if the Independent Group is treated as a party, it is very over-represented on Select Committees, given the number of members of the group in the House’.46 In the heated debate that followed, MPs from all parties paid compliments to the expertise and experience of Gapes, as a former chair of the committee and committee member for a staggering 19 years. The current chair, Tom Tugendhat gave a solid defence, supporting the calls for him to remain, while one Conservative MP went so far as to say that if the Ilford South MP did not exist ‘we would have to invent him’.47 Gapes would later tell the House that it was like listening to his own obituary.48 The Labour Party had set a three-line whip for the vote, something which its own MPs told the Commons was not the usual behaviour for such a motion. There was also reference to a possible precedent set by Labour members defecting to the SDP in the 1980s. None of these MPs had been removed from their committee positions in such a manner and most continued in their committee role until at least the end of the Parliament. Nor was there precedent in the current Parliament. When Frank Field resigned from the Labour Party in August 2018 to become an independent MP there was no attempt to remove him from his position on the Work 49

The end of the small party?

and Pensions Committee. There is however, some more recent precedence elsewhere in the UK. When UKIP Assembly Members in the National Assembly for Wales broke away from the party to join the Brexit Party in May 2019 they lost their current committee positions, much to their dismay, though they were reallocated to other committees. Speaking on behalf of Change UK, Joan Ryan described the motion to remove Gapes as an example of ‘how the main parties have a stranglehold on how Parliament works’.49 The words ‘vindictive’, ‘witch-hunt’ and ‘tragic’ hung in the air as MPs walked through the division lobbies. Despite 13 Labour MPs voting against their party whips, the motion was carried by 199 votes to 134 and Gapes was removed from the committee. Interestingly given their own over-representation on select committees, the DUP all voted in favour of the motion. Surprisingly, the SNP abstained (only Stephen Gethins cast a vote against), while Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats showed their support for small party representation, voting solidly in favour of Gapes and against the motion. In early May 2019 two more Change UK MPs (Chris Leslie and Gavin Shuker) would be removed from their select committee positions. This time the motions were not put to a formal division of the House, with Leslie explaining that such a move would be futile given that he and his ten colleagues did not have the numbers to overturn the decision. It is interesting that there were no attempts to remove the former Conservative MPs (Allen, Soubry and Wollaston) from their committee 50

Finding their feet

positions. Heidi Allen was perhaps the only one who felt confident that her committee position would not be taken from her. Work and Pensions was not an area in high demand from Conservative MPs courting select committee positions and, as such, the committee was regularly short of Conservative MPs to serve on it. Sarah Wollaston’s coveted position as Liaison Committee chair was much more of a contender to be taken away, but this would have been interpreted as a major political statement. It is not clear why the party decided to leave all three women with their committee positions, but we can speculate that the combination of minority government and the ongoing Brexit battles in the Commons meant that the power of the party whips was reduced. There was likely to have been little appetite from the government for another possible confrontation with its backbenchers if they rallied around their former colleagues in the same way as Labour MPs had with Gapes. Wollaston was particularly vocal about the impact of further attempts to remove MPs from select committees, writing on the PoliticsHome blog that the committee system was being ‘needlessly diminished’ and that the Labour Party whips were degrading the entire select committee system.50 The sackings from select committees were clearly a source of frustration for the Change UK MPs, albeit an expected one.51 The removal of these MPs also seemed antithetical to fairly recent parliamentary reforms intended to strengthen the Commons committee system. Until 2010 the membership of these committees was firmly in the hands of the party whips. Under Blair’s 51

The end of the small party?

massive parliamentary majorities in the 1997 and 2001 parliaments this led to some tussles between very active and independent-minded Labour chairs (namely the formidable Gwyneth Dunwoody and her colleague Donald Anderson) and unsuccessful attempts to remove them. A series of reforms introduced in the 2010 Parliament by the Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons – or the Wright Committee, as it is more commonly known, named after its chair, Labour MP Tony Wright – included changes to the way in which MPs would be appointed to select committees. Although political parties still had an allocation of positions which was roughly in line with the overall party balance in the House, committee chairs would be elected by secret ballot. For the first time since their creation, backbench MPs themselves would have a say in who chaired these committees. It propelled numerous freethinking backbenchers into key committee positions. Labour’s Frank Field, for instance, elected to chair the Work and Pensions Committee in the 2015 and 2017 parliaments, would have been an unlikely candidate had the whips had a say in the matter. The former welfare minister caused huge problems for the Labour Government with his strident opposition to Gordon Brown’s disastrous abolition of the ten-pence tax rate.52 Likewise, Sarah Wollaston would have been hard pressed to get the whips to accept her onto the Health and Social Care Committee given her critical remarks and rebellions on government health policy in the past. Despite the removal of some of Change UK’s ex-Labour MPs from their spots, the group still held two committee chairs, 52

Finding their feet

plus spots as members on a further five committees. In the context of small party rights in the Commons, they were still doing relatively well. The initial weeks following Change UK’s formation demonstrates that when a new party enters the House of Commons for the first time, or vastly increases its size and significance at a general election, there is much excitement among MPs about what their new group will be able to do. However, the manner in which the Commons works, and the privileges afforded to the two largest parties, mean that the desire of a smaller party group to make an impact in the chamber and to scrutinise or hold government to account is not always matched by the opportunities available to them in practice. The key issue seems to be the lack of guarantees in terms of parliamentary rights – whether in speaking slots, office allocation or committee positions. As we will see, procedural and party constraints necessitate the need for negotiation by smaller parties, as well as the development of good working relationships with those in positions of power and influence.

Notes 1 M. J. Stephenson, Claret and Chips: The Rise of the SDP (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), p. 6. 2 HC Debates, 19 February 2019, c. 1317. 3 HC Debates, 19 February 2019, c. 1320. 4 HC Debates, 19 February 2019, c. 1320. 5 Interview, Liberal Democrat peer, 12 July 2018. 6 Interview, Liberal Democrat peer, 12 July 2018. 7 HC Debates, 4 June 2015, c. 772. 8 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019.

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The end of the small party? 9 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019. 10 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 11 Hannah Jane Parkinson, ‘For the Independent Group, even Nando’s is a photo opportunity’, Guardian, 26 February 2019. Online at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/26/ independent-group-nandos-photo [accessed 1 March 2019]. 12 Parkinson, ‘For the Independent Group, even Nando’s is a photo opportunity’. 13 HC Debates, 20 February 2019, c. 1447. 14 HC Debates, 20 February 2019, c. 1452. 15 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 16 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 17 Anna Soubry, Newsnight, 20 February 2019. 18 D. Natzler and M. Hutton (eds), Erskine May’s Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, 25th edition (London: LexisNexis Butterworths, 2019), Part 1, Chapter 4, para 4.5. Online at: https://erskinemay. parliament.uk/ [accessed 2 July 2019]. 19 Natzler and Hutton, Erskine May, Part 1, Chapter 4, para 4.5. 20 Interview, Liberal Democrat, 19 February 2019. 21 Some Liberal Democrat MPs may have felt the same way about the 2010 Parliament when they were in coalition with the Conservative Party. Although they were a party of government, they were not entitled to the same parliamentary rights associated with being the third party. 22 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019; interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018. 23 Interview SNP MP, 6 July 2016. 24 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 30 October 2018; interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018; interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018. 25 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 30 October 2018. 26 See I. Crewe and A. King, The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 256. 27 Interestingly, once Shuker left Change UK his contributions began to rise again, perhaps a sign that party administration had dominated his time while he was a member of the party. 28 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020.

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Finding their feet 9 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 2 30 Peter Wishart, ‘The Speaker of the House of Commons’, blog post, 1 May 2019. Online at: https://petewishart. wordpress.com/2019/05/01/the-speaker-of-the-house-ofcommons/ [accessed 30 June 2019]. 31 HC Debates, 4 November 2019, c. 613. 32 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 33 Interview, Green MP, 22 November 2018. 34 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 35 Having said this, the leader of the opposition has held a suite of offices in the Norman Shaw Buildings for over a decade. 36 Caroline Lucas, Honourable Friends? Parliament and the Fight for Change (London: Portobello Books, 2015), p. 4. 37 The situation is slightly different now, with some smaller parties having tables. See Emma Crewe’s fantastic book The House of Commons: An Anthropology of MPs at Work (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 38 Sir Teddy Taylor, interview with the History of Parliament Trust, 18 January 2012. Online at: www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ volume/oral-history/member/taylor-teddy-1937–2017 [accessed 27 June 2019]. 39 S. Smith and L. Kernan, ‘Nat girls mean business: tea room shakeup plot’, Sun, 12 May 2015. Online at: www.thesun.co.uk/ archives/news/211724/nat-girls-mean-business-tea-roomshake-up-plot/ [accessed 12 May 2015]. 40 HC Debates, 8 May 2019, c. 623. 41 Newsnight, 20 February 2019. 42 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 43 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 44 Other MPs sit on sub-committees but only the main departmental and cross-cutting committees are included here for simplicity. 45 Much press at the time referred to Austin as a member of the Independent Group. This was incorrect and at the time of writing he continued to sit as an independent MP with no affiliation to Change UK. 46 HC Debates, 19 March 2019, c. 980. 47 HC Debates, 19 March 2019, c. 985. 48 HC Debates, 19 March 2019, c. 1008. 49 HC Debates, 19 March 2019, c. 992.

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The end of the small party? 50 S. Wollaston, ‘Select committees must not become tools of the party whips’, PoliticsHome, 11 March 2019. Online at www.politicshome.com/news/uk/politics/opinion/housecommons/102412/dr-sarah-wollaston-mp-select-committeesmust-not [accessed 2 July 2019]. 51 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 52 Field resigned from the Labour Party in August 2018 for reasons relating to anti-semitism in the party and thereafter sat in the Commons as an independent MP.

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Chapter 3

Establishing and resourcing a new parliamentary party

On 25 February 2019, the members of Change UK tweeted a series of photos of them enjoying a meal at the Nando’s restaurant chain. Described by Chuka Umunna as their first night out, it prompted intense speculation about their choice of meals and whether or not this meant they were seasoned Nando’s diners or first-timers trying to make a good impression on the public. While the food choices seemed significant for some, the more important thing was what this showed about the group’s size, structure and organisation. In particular, it highlighted just how small the new parliamentary group was. The informality of the meeting place is typical of the smaller parties. One of the ‘original’ six SNP MPs (those who were in the Commons prior to the 2015 political earthquake in Scotland) described how the whole party went for a similar dinner right before the 2015 General Election along with a handful of parliamentary staff. So small was their parliamentary group at the time that they ‘could fill two taxis just about’.1 With many of the party’s MPs 57

The end of the small party?

choosing to base their staff in Scotland and with the national headquarters of the SNP housed just off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, they were relatively isolated in Westminster. At the time of the Nando’s meeting the group’s party framework was even smaller than that of the SNP back in 2015. Although each Change UK MP had retained the typical complement of researchers, diary managers and caseworkers in their own individual parliamentary and constituency offices; they had no national party body to confer with. Heidi Allen told BBC News at the end of March 2019 that their situation was ‘David and Goliath stuff. We are literally just starting out and building a party together.’ 2 Her words were very reminiscent of the SDP’s battle to build a political party while at the same time processing lists of supporters, donations, trying to maintain consistent media attention and have a parliamentary presence.3 With local and European elections looming, Change UK did not have long to get its political act together and begin to carve out the foundations of its future. This time pressure, as we will see, caused friction within the group and contributed to the decision of six of them to leave the party in June 2019. Once again we can look to the experiences of the SNP for comparison. That party’s success in the 2015 General Election, where it turned the electoral map in Scotland almost completely yellow (winning 56 of the 59 constituency seats up for grabs), saw the size of its parliamentary group increase more than nine-fold. While the group had previously operated relatively informally, 58

Establishing and resourcing a new party

it now needed to introduce more substantive structures and communications systems. Just like Change UK, it needed to do this quickly. Although the SNP knew from regular polling that the party’s share of the vote would increase substantially in 2015, the MPs did not want to prepare too much until they knew the final election result. Parliamentary business does not wait long after an election and so once the size of the victory in Scotland was clear, frontbench teams had to be set up very quickly to ensure that the group could participate in debates, question times, statements and committees. The question of parliamentary roles and portfolios was therefore an early challenge for both the SNP in 2015 and now for Change UK in 2019. Given the nature of the latter’s move out of the Labour and Conservative parties, the group did not even have the luxury of those first days after a general election to find their feet. They needed to perform parliamentary roles from day one. All of the group’s MPs were used to being members of parties which had the capacity to allocate highly specialised roles and portfolios. The Labour Party at this time had around 30 Shadow ministers sitting on its front bench while the Conservatives had 23 Cabinet ministers, plus around 100 additional junior ministers and whips.4 Both of the larger parties can also take advantage of having a sizeable number of peers in the House of Lords who can take up ministerial positions as and when required. With 19 government departments to cover, plus other portfolios like shadowing the Leader of the House of Commons, small parties cannot allocate 59

The end of the small party?

their MPs one specific policy or departmental portfolio. Each member must wear multiple hats. One Plaid Cymru MP used the idea of a parliamentary tea party to show the difference in portfolio situations across the Commons. He explained that as an MP from one of the larger parties ‘you could have someone specialising in teacups and someone specialising in saucers’. With a much smaller pool of members, smaller parties ‘have to do a whole tea set’, or ‘juggle all the balls at once’ as another SNP MP pointed out.5 In most cases there are more portfolios than there are party MPs. Change UK was not alone in experiencing the move from a large parliamentary group machine to a much smaller one. Shunted into fourth position by the SNP in 2015, the Liberal Democrats also found themselves in this situation and had to rework their parliamentary group structure. One of the first things to go was the separation of a Shadow Cabinet meeting and meetings of the full parliamentary party. When you are only a group of eight MPs such separation is futile.6 For all of these smaller parties, portfolios are typically allocated on a cluster basis, with one MP being responsible for several complex and often unrelated policy areas. In the 2017 Parliament, Plaid Cymru’s Jonathan Edwards, for instance, was covering transport, treasury, foreign intervention, business, energy and industrial strategy for his party in the Commons; a tough job compared to larger party MPs, who will only need to master one of these. If one (or more) of these portfolios falls within your particular area of interest or expertise you are in luck. If none of them does, things will be more 60

Establishing and resourcing a new party

challenging. Most parties strive to allocate portfolios according to expertise, but this is not always possible. The Liberal Democrats avoided having these multiple portfolios in the 2017 and 2019 parliaments, partly because their numbers were just about large enough to cover single policy areas, but also because they took the difficult decision (in terms of visibility) to rely on Liberal Democrat peers in the House of the Lords to take the lead on important policy issues. Health and social care, for instance, would ideally be covered by an MP in the Commons who could put the secretary of state for health on the spot during health questions, but this job instead fell to Baroness Judith Jolly in the Lords who could only directly quiz her counterpart in the upper chamber, Baroness Blackwood, who served as a junior minister in the department. The perception by the Liberal Democrats that all possible portfolios should be covered was demonstrated by the arrival of Change UK’s Chuka Umunna to the party in June 2019. Just days after announcing that he was joining the Liberal Democrats he was appointed as the party’s treasury and business spokesman, supplementing work already being carried out by Liberal Democrat peers Susan Kramer and Chris Fox in the House of Lords. MPs can expend considerable energy trying to keep up with the demands of these multiple portfolios. There is nowhere to hide; ‘every MP has to carry his or her weight’, with no room for passengers. It means that every single member of a small party is effectively a frontbencher from their first day in parliament. There is no time to sit on the back benches, honing debating 61

The end of the small party?

skills and learning the procedural ropes from more experienced colleagues. One Plaid Cymru MP described the challenges of trying to perform multiple spokesperson roles for the party while being completely unaccustomed to Commons speaking traditions and procedures. He did not realise that bobbing up and down from his seat (as you will notice MPs doing when they wish to intervene or to ask a supplementary question) was unproductive when Labour MPs were asking questions at question time. Only several months in did he become aware that if he wanted to be called to ask a supplementary question he should really be jumping up from his seat during questions from Conservative MPs opposite. This way, when the Speaker looked back from the government benches to the opposition benches, he would have more of chance of catching the Speaker’s eye and being called.7 Such experiences may seem trivial, but in the context of operating within the Commons they are crucial if you are to maximise your efficiency and enhance the visibility of yourself and your party, especially when trying to act as your group’s parliamentary spokesperson. Portfolio allocations need to be combined with other parliamentary roles (select committees, appointments to public bill committees) as well as constituency roles, and they can lead to very busy schedules. Considerable time may need to be spent sitting in the chamber for questions, responding to statements and contributing to general debates or legislation on different policy areas for which a small party MP is responsible. In this position it is all too easy to end up as a ‘jack of all trades, 62

Establishing and resourcing a new party

master of none’, with too few party members to do ‘proper scrutiny and proper opposition work’.8 There is a danger of becoming too reactive to the parliamentary agenda – filling your days with responses to government business, rather than being able to scrutinise proactively and hold government to account on issues which you or your party feel are the most pressing or embarrassing for government. The Liberal Democrats are all too aware of this problem. With a pretty threadbare coverage of portfolios in the 2015 and 2017 parliaments, they took the decision not to participate in the detailed scrutiny of government bills in public bill committees, or in the scrutiny of secondary legislation, in order to enhance the value of their parliamentary work elsewhere.9 The SNP talks of the struggle to find an MP who is available to sit on a public bill committee to scrutinise legislation in detail. Others note having to turn down senior positions or parliamentary interventions due to multiple workload issues. As the only Green MP in the Commons, Caroline Lucas MP was rightly proud of her work on the Prime Minister’s Sexual Harassment and Bullying Commission, but turned down a position on this commission when it met for a second inquiry due to the multiple other demands on her parliamentary time and the recognition that she simply could not be in two places at once. The requirement to hold multiple portfolios can place MPs under considerable time pressures, particularly those whose constituencies are several hours away by train or plane. This is particularly an issue for parties such as the DUP, SNP and Plaid Cymru as it affects not 63

The end of the small party?

just a group of MPs within a party, but the entire party. It is particularly acute for Plaid Cymru given their much smaller size and lack of capacity to distribute policy portfolios. There can be tension between parliamentary and constituency offices if the party’s MPs are unable to travel back to Wales until very late on Thursday afternoons. With a tiny pool of potential substitutes should parliamentary business run late, or urgent statements suddenly be given space in the Commons timetable, it can mean limiting or having to cancel important constituency engagements because of the realities and unpredictability of parliamentary business.10 The Liberal Democrats readily admit that they are unable to ‘cover all the bases all the time’ but are wary about falling into a reactive parliamentary stance rather than focusing on key issues and outcomes.11 Given the difficulties of allocating and performing these spokesperson roles, we may question why smaller parties do not simply dispense with them once and for all. The answer to this lies in the desire for credibility and prominence. When parties gain parliamentary representation for the first time the excitement of taking a seat on the green benches is tinged with something of an inferiority complex. If you lack strong Commons roots and your party has had no experience of government there is a worry that others will judge you harshly, or assume that you are not up to the job. Parties in this situation need to establish their credibility, making strong first impressions to prove their critics wrong. This need for credibility translates into a push to act like a big party; directly mirroring the organisation and 64

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activities of the government and the official opposition. If the Labour Party can put a Shadow Cabinet member up against a government minister at departmental question time each day, the smaller parties feel the need to prove that they can present someone to do this too. This need for credibility is not unique to Westminster; in interviews the Greens in the Scottish Parliament and UKIP in the National Assembly for Wales have also expressed the need to make fast impressions upon entering parliamentary institutions for the first time. Change UK definitely felt this urge to perform the roles of the larger parties too, but its members were very aware of what the consequences of doing so were. As one member explained, ‘the moment you become a political party you are judged by the standards of the other political parties’.12 These standards were not something that a fledgling party could necessarily meet. There was a concern that although it did not have the capacity to act like a larger party, it would feel compelled to do so. The group had spent time prior to their jump from their respective parties studying how the smaller parliamentary parties operated, coming to the conclusion that they did not really want to fall into this trap of trying to appear bigger than they were. If they had wanted to give the impression of being larger than their numbers would suggest, they certainly had the right mix of MPs. The party’s members were no strangers to long hours on the parliamentary estate. Heidi Allen, for instance, had twice won the Conservative MP of the Year award for her campaigning work in the Commons. Others, 65

The end of the small party?

such as Chris Leslie and Anna Soubry, had spent many an hour in the chamber debating Brexit legislation and amendments over the previous 18 months. Alongside their strong work ethic, they still needed to prove that they could be effective outside the opportunity structure that is enjoyed by the bigger parties. It took a few weeks from its creation for Change UK to announce the policy portfolios of its MPs, but by April 2019 these had been decided. Interestingly for such a small party, only eight of them had clear policy portfolios and the leadership positions of the group were somewhat diluted. The distribution of portfolios was partly derived from observing the experiences of other small parties and partly because of split of opinion among Change UK MPs as to the best way to organise themselves. Some, such as the group’s convenor Gavin Shuker, pushed for a much broader policy structure focusing on four areas: prosperity, society, security and democracy.13 These would have provided a base for the party to tackle key issues and enabled it gradually to build up a research and spokesperson structure, forgoing the need to put an MP forward as spokesperson at each and every question time. Others, however, were keen to grasp more specific policy portfolios in line with their political interests and their previous parliamentary experience. At the inaugural parliamentary group meeting any coherent discussion of this went out of the window. There was ‘a rush in the room’ 14 and ‘a pretty crude post-it-note exercise’ 15 as each MP began to claim the policy portfolio for which he or she wished to be responsible. 66

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The result was a mix of fairly random portfolios that did not necessarily gel together well. Former Conservative MP Heidi Allen became the ‘acting leader’. This was largely cosmetic; she was not the group’s official spokesperson in the Commons. That role fell to Chuka Umunna, who combined this position with being Cabinet Office spokesperson. A third leadership role went to Gavin Shuker, who was appointed as the ‘group convenor’. This title sounds somewhat opaque but in practice meant that he was responsible for the bulk of the behind-the-scenes work required to establish a political party. He oversaw the writing of the party’s constitution as well as organising the more practical elements of party formation such as its financial and legal foundations. Essentially he was in charge of building the foundations for the party’s future growth. The group’s official leader was to be elected at its first party conference in September 2019. These leadership roles were somewhat superficial; decisions were often made by just a couple of individuals and not communicated to everyone.16 The most pertinent example of this was the final sign-off given to the campaign leaflets to be used for the European elections; leaflets that most of the group had not yet seen.17 It is clear that the group tried to allocate portfolios on the basis of expertise. As former Shadow finance minister and International Trade Select Committee member, Chris Leslie took over the reins for the group on treasury and trade issues, while Mike Gapes became spokesperson for foreign affairs and defence. As a former government whip it was a sensible choice to make Joan 67

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Ryan the group’s business manager. There were some potential discrepancies, though, in terms of the policy and parliamentary weight of these responsibilities. As Brexit and justice spokesperson, Anna Soubry was required to spend a great deal of time on the green benches. Similarly, Angela Smith’s role required her to be present for all transport, local government, housing, energy, environment and rural affairs statements, debates and questions, a far more time-consuming responsibility perhaps than Anne Coffey in her role as spokesperson for children and education. The most ambiguous role allocated by the group was that of Dr Sarah Wollaston, whose only responsibility was for ‘new colleagues’ – perhaps simply a reflection of her already heavy parliamentary workload as chair of the Health and Social Care Committee and of the Liaison Committee. The mix of roles, however, was justified in that the group did not want to end up mirroring the Liberal Democrats, who gave individual policy roles to their entire parliamentary group in the Commons.18 If a small party has allocated portfolios to its members, it has already created a fledgling parliamentary structure. It should ensure that they know which of the group should be sitting on the green benches to respond to particular statements, ask questions of ministers and contribute to debates on government bills. Spokespersons from the larger parties do not do this work alone; they rely on a team of skilled researchers to keep them up to date on policy areas. Some of these researchers will be based in the party’s headquarters, observing the work of government or opposition spokespersons very closely 68

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in order to scope out the key differences or dividing lines between them so that they can provide their own party spokespersons with detailed briefings. Others will be based in parliament itself, responsible for the heavy lifting of policy research and preparing robust questions, briefing packs for debates, bill committees and select committee inquiries. Creating this sort of staffing structure to support and underpin the work of parliamentary spokespersons is another pressing challenge for new or recently enlarged parliamentary groups. It is also an area in which we can clearly see how better resourced the two main political parties are. Comparing the scale and size of national party head offices demonstrates the impact of this financial unevenness well. While the Conservatives reportedly had 150 members of staff in their central campaign headquarters on Matthew Parker Street in 2017, The SNP headquarters in Glasgow had just 21 staff, while Plaid Cymru listed five full-time and three part-time staff in its Cardiff Bay headquarters.19 The academics Ivor Crewe and Anthony King described this superior resource and staffing as a form of ‘institutional life support machine’ for the big political parties, a very apt description given how much MPs in these party groups rely on them.20 Within these structures, the two main parties have well-established research teams. The Conservative Party has a research department (CRD) dating back to 1929, when it was established to provide briefings to party spokespersons. For a long time this was based within the party’s central office and acted as a very efficient 69

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recruitment service or rite of passage for budding Conservative MPs (both David Cameron and George Osborne cut their political teeth there). In recent years, it divided itself between more explicit political and parliamentary functions, with a small team of staff advising (then) Conservative Shadow Cabinet members from within the parliamentary estate. The party additionally has a Policy Research Unit (PRU), created in 1998, which runs on an individual subscription basis, providing specialist ‘briefing, research, correspondence and related support’ to MPs21 in an attempt to cut out any duplication of effort and help its MPs be more efficient in carrying out their parliamentary work. Labour now has a similar structure, opening its Parliamentary Research Service (PRS) based in the Norman Shaw Buildings in 2011, though policy briefings were still shared across MPs before this through Parliamentary Labour Party officers and through policy officers based in the party’s headquarters. Labour’s PRS website has the disclaimer that it is intended for useby PRS Members ‘in support of their Parliamentary duties’.22 Both the PRS and the PRU must abide by these constraints, given that they are funded directly from members’ parliamentary allowances. A constituent writing to a Labour or Conservative MP about the implications of, say, the Wild Animals in Circuses (No. 2) Bill will likely find that the MP can access key policy information on this bill quickly if the MP subscribes to the PRU or PRS research services. If an MP lacks this sort of support it can slow down his or her parliamentary office. Parliamentary researchers, who staff the offices of individual MPs, are not typically 70

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recruited on the basis of any specific policy expertise. Where the smaller parties are concerned the researchers may not even be party members. The smaller recruitment pool of fully paid-up and active SNP, Liberal Democrat, Plaid Cymru, DUP or Green Party members means that it is often necessary for these parties to hire staff on the basis that they agree with the aims and values of the party they will be working for, rather than that they are active party members. Several MPs told me that their staff had gained parliamentary experience with one of the larger parties before moving to work them. They bring essential parliamentary knowledge with them, but not necessarily the policy knowledge required to respond accurately to constituents’ letters or to draft questions or speeches for their MP. Building up a network of party staff in parliament and party headquarters is therefore fundamental for smaller parties and their MPs to carry out their work efficiently. The funding for these staff will come from one of two sources: donations which have been made to the party or public money available to support parliamentary opposition parties. In both we see a massive difference between the funds available to small parties and that which is enjoyed by their larger counterparts. The salaries of researchers with a more party political role will be paid for through membership fees and donations to the party. All registered political parties must submit annual accounts to the Electoral Commission, which are then freely available for anyone to view. These accounts detail each party’s income and expenditure and provide an overview of its national 71

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and regional structures. They demonstrate how much better resourced the two largest parties actually are. At the time of writing, the latest available accounts were submitted in 2018 and covered the year 2017. Bearing in mind that this was an election year we would expect party donations and expenditure to be relatively high. For the two biggest parties this is certainly the case. The Labour Party reported its total income to be £55.7m, with over £18m received in donations, while the Conservatives’ accounts show an income of £45.9m, with just over £34m in donations.23 These parties’ additional funding comes from things like membership fees, party conferences, investments and grants. These annual pots of income contrast markedly with the third largest parliamentary party, the SNP, whose total income stood at £5.8m, with just £1.4m stemming from donations.24 As a more national party, the Liberal Democrats outperformed the SNP on this front, taking £6.1m in donations and reporting a total income of £9.7m, though this is still over five times less than that of the Labour Party.25 The Green Party reported an income of £2.04m that year, with Plaid Cymru finding itself towards the bottom of the income table with just £1.2m going into the party’s coffers in 2017.26 This was still higher than the DUP though. The small Northern Irish party lists its total income as just £510,362 in 201727. This means that it took the DUP a whole year to raise the same amount of funds as the Labour Party collected in the space of just a single day. Party research staff whose roles are more policy orientated tend to be based on the parliamentary estate 72

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and are paid for through Short Money. This is effectively a government grant, allocated to all opposition parties who obtain either two seats in the Commons or more than 150,000 votes at the previous general election. It must be used to facilitate the work of opposition and cannot be used for party political purposes. The allowable expenses under Short Money funding fall into three categories: research associated with frontbench duties; developing and communicating alternative policies to those of the government of the day; and shadowing the government’s front bench. We can assume that this includes things like the research and preparation of responses and amendments in relation to government bills. Short Money is calculated on a formula basis, according to the number of MPs and the total votes received by a party. The amount received therefore changes after each general election. A small pot of money for travel expenses is also divided up among opposition parties according to their size and total votes received at election time. The official opposition party receives a bonus amount (£823,420 in the 2017 Parliament) to contribute towards the running costs of the leader of the opposition’s parliamentary office. This is directly related to the adversarial style of the Commons and the perceived need for a ‘strong’ opposition to scrutinise the government. In the 2018–19 parliamentary session Labour’s Short Money allocation came to over £7.8m. It was the only opposition party to receive a grant of over £1m. As with total party income and donations, then, the difference between the official opposition party and the 73

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smaller parties is enormous: the SNP received just £808,000; the Liberal Democrats received £630,000; the DUP was awarded £228,000; the Greens got £110,000 and Plaid Cymru was allocated just £99,000.28 In recent years parties have had to submit short reports detailing how this Short Money grant has been spent. In 2017–18 Labour reported almost 100 members of staff based at Westminster whose salaries were funded wholly or partly (50 per cent or more) through Short Money. This included Jeremy Corbyn’s aide Seamus Milne as well as staff working for Shadow Cabinet members. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had nine members of staff working for him who were funded in some way through this grant.29 For the SNP, Short Money contributed to the salaries of 15 members of staff, 12 for the Liberal Democrats and just three for the DUP and the Greens. As would be expected given the small size of the grant for Plaid Cymru, no members of staff were listed. This does not mean that the funds did not contribute to any staff members for the party, only that it did not constitute 50 per cent of any individual’s total salary. In addition to this Short Money allocation, all opposition parties with two MPs who have taken the oath following an election are entitled to a Policy Development Grant – a pot of £2m which is divvied up according to party size. In the 2017 Parliament this meant that Sinn Féin and the Greens were excluded; the former because its MPs do not take the parliamentary oath at the start of the sitting (and thus do not attend the Commons) and the latter because they failed to meet the threshold of two MPs. In the 2019 Parliament the 74

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Alliance Party was also excluded as, like the Greens, it had only one MP in the Commons. The SDLP, on the other hand, just qualified, with two elected MPs. Of the functioning small parties in the Commons, it is the Green Party and the Alliance Party which take the biggest hit here, receiving no Policy Development Grant at all. In 2017 Labour received £757,000 compared to £432,000 for the Liberal Democrats and £179,000 for the SNP and £135,000 for Plaid Cymru. We can see how gaining an additional MP at the next general election would make a massive difference to the resource structure of the Green Party and the Alliance Party in the 2019 Parliament. The Policy Development Grant they received would likely double the parliamentary funding available to them. Once in receipt of a Short Money grant, political parties can begin to build the parliamentary research structures which they need to up their game. Most will begin with a very small core group of researchers, often trusted former political party staff on short-term contracts, before beginning to broaden the policy areas covered and recruiting skilled researchers with detailed policy expertise on permanent contracts. Small parties choose to structure these units very differently. The Liberal Democrats, for example, have a Parliamentary Advisers Unit – a team of very experienced people who typically have experience in the world of NGOs and campaigning outside parliament. This unit has responsibility for parliamentary campaigns and reports directly to the chair of the parliamentary office of the Liberal Democrats (at the time of writing this was Alistair 75

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Carmichael). Staff in this unit need to identify topical political issues and construct organised and coherent parliamentary strategies to raise awareness of them. The SNP began the 2015 Parliament with a very small team of just three researchers. The party began strategically to prioritise the policy areas their research team would be involved in. One early issue was the Trident nuclear deterrent. All available research assistance was focused for a short time on this one issue, producing material which could be drawn on by all of the party’s MPs when in the chamber during debates and question times. When Trident was being debated, the party encouraged all of its MPs to attend the Commons chamber, maximising its presence on the opposition benches. Photos of this particular debate and the attendance of virtually the entire parliamentary group of SNP MPs (compared to very poor attendance from the other parties) spread across social media.30 When the maximum parliamentary airtime had been gained on the issue, the research team would move on and focus their collective energies on another policy area, such as the parliamentary scrutiny of the Scotland Bill in which SNP MPs tabled a very large number of amendments and made more contributions to the debate than a party of their size would typically do. One MP likened this behaviour to that of a swan ‘gliding serenely on the surface while kicking furiously underneath’.31 The SNP complements its research unit with a separate group of staff funded by salary contributions from its MPs. By pooling a small proportion of each MP’s staffing budget, the party is able to have dedicated staff in 76

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its whips’ office, supporting the MPs further in their parliamentary work.32 Some parties rely on things like the Hansard Society’s Scholars Scheme or the Commons Speaker’s Parliamentary Placement Scheme, which provide for paid ninemonth internships in parliament, effectively to ‘top up’ their research team, though success in gaining an intern from these schemes is not guaranteed.33 Occasionally we may see smaller parties working together on policy areas to supplement policy expertise which is lacking in their own units. Plaid Cymru has in the past relied on Caroline Lucas’s team, for example, to provide specialist information and advice on green policy issues.34 The teamwork between the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP stems from their longer history of cooperation within the same political grouping in the European Parliament.35 There can be a lot of pressure on these small research units compared to those of larger parties. Not only are researchers often juggling multiple research roles (just like the MPs who they are working for), but these research teams often constitute the largest professional wing of the political party. If a party’s head office has few or no permanent research staff, the parliamentary research team may come under pressure to research for both MPs themselves and the broader national party.36 For this reason some MPs at Westminster and in the devolved parliaments have expressed concern about the Short Money system being unbalanced. One SNP MP explained that the parliamentary research team provided for by Short Money funding was ‘never going to be able 77

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to match what the government have’.37 Small parties perhaps require a greater level of public funding than their larger party counterparts in order to find themselves on a level playing field in terms of resources and infrastructure.38 There is no doubt, though, that the funding is imperative for small parties to be able to act effectively in the Commons. Caroline Lucas certainly relies on her dedicated team of Short Money-funded researchers, noting in her own book how they worked ‘behind the scenes to skewer Ministers’.39 Short Money is a fairly reliable source of income for all political parties, though the actual grant allocated will fluctuate in each parliament on the basis of a party’s general election performance. Smaller parties are perhaps more adversely affected for the simple reason that they are unlikely to have the same financial reserves to fall back on should they find that their Short Money funding has dropped substantially. In the 2015 Parliament, for instance, the Green Party received a grant of over £216,000 thanks to the 1.1 million votes they received from the British public. In the 2017 Parliament, however, things were very different. A loss of over half a million votes saw the party lose over £80,000 from its Short Money grant, the equivalent of three and a half members of staff. With Green Party staff now at risk of losing their jobs, the party ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to recover the difference and ensure that it could continue to function as it did before. As Lucas herself wrote on the crowdfunder, a cut in staff would ‘hugely reduce’ the impact she could have in the Commons. In just over a month this campaign 78

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raised £62,000 – enough to retain her staff.40 This has since been supplemented with further crowdfunding campaigns, something which will have to continue indefinitely until the party acquires additional MPs or increases its vote share. UKIP is the obvious exception here. When Douglas Carswell was elected as UKIP’s only MP in the 2015 Parliament he was entitled to over £500,000 in Short Money funding. Although the party had only won a single seat, their overall share of the vote (3.8 million or 12.6 per cent) meant that it trumped several other political parties for a sizeable Short Money grant. Carswell was obviously nervous about accepting such a large amount of money, given the party’s lack of any significant parliamentary presence, dismissing his party’s hopes of hiring 15 members of staff and ultimately claiming less than half of the money to fund UKIP’s parliamentary research team of five staff.41 The divisions between Carswell and the then party leader Nigel Farage over the issue of Short Money demonstrates just how much of a lifeline it can be to a small party trying to make its mark at Westminster. Change UK experienced difficulties establishing its fledgling parliamentary structure and Short Money funding would have helped to grow the group’s core research team. They were not, however, entitled to any Short Money because the group had not fought a general election campaign under the party banner. Only if they successfully returned at least one MP to the Commons at a general election would they meet the threshold to qualify for a Short Money grant. 79

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As a result, Change UK was heavily reliant on individual donations from supporters to offset the lack of public funding. Following its launch, when it was not registered with the Electoral Commission as a political party, the group organised itself through a company called Gemini A Ltd which was set up and directed by Gavin Shuker. Shuker and Chuka Umunna were reportedly the most adept at bringing in substantial donations from businesses in these early days, using them to build up a small team of staff.42 When the group became an official political party this company name would change to The Independent Group (TIG) Ltd. Two additional directors were added to the group’s registered officials (Nicola Murphy and Neil Davidson, the partners of Chris Leslie and Anna Soubry). When Shuker resigned from the group in June 2019 his colleague Mike Gapes was also added as director. The official address of the party was listed as 52 Grosvenor Gardens, just a short walk from Victoria Station. A small office with a shared kitchen was rented by the week, though the party also had some other offices from which staff would work thanks to relationships with outside groups.43 There was no one base for staff to work from as the party sought to establish itself. The recruitment of these staff was difficult, requiring a balance between the need to get feet on the ground in order to get the party off to a solid start and the need for rigour to ensure that the staff who were recruited were the right ones for the longer term. As a result, most staff were appointed on three-month contracts.44 This is a similar process to that followed by the SNP in 2015 when it needed to 80

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build up a more comprehensive staffing infrastructure. The party built its team gradually and intuitively, using temporary contracts to bring in those with previous parliamentary experience while searching for experts in particular policy areas or research fields. It took the SNP over a year to build its full complement of parliamentary group staff. For Change UK another important priority was to ensure that a sizeable number of staff did have former political experience within the two main parties, though this was not a ‘hard and fast’ rule.45 For a small party with big ambitions, this type of insider knowledge and experience of how large party organisations work was invaluable. To assist with this, staff who had previously worked for individual MPs for some time began to take on broader parliamentary group responsibilities. Chuka Umunna’s staffer Stuart Macnaughton, for example, took on the role of communications director, responsible for dealing with the group’s media requests.46 The rush to gain a small complement of staff while dealing with an extraordinarily complex set of issues relating to establishing a new political group or party is demonstrated by early teething problems around the party’s name, website address and Twitter handle in what seemed like perpetual rebranding. The hijacking of its old Twitter account by a pro-Brexit group also demonstrated that the party’s online communications were being managed by generalists rather than mediaor web-savvy specialists.47 With no policy department, candidates department, finance or human resources department, staff were multi-tasking and working very 81

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long hours. One MP described how the work required to keep going eventually ‘became intolerable’ for them and their staff.48 Once a party is registered with the Electoral Commission its donations are reported and published online on a quarterly basis. The invisibility of early donations to the group caused a great deal of speculation about which individuals (if any) lay behind the MPs, with some arguing that the lack of transparency seemed to be at odds with the new type of party which the MPs had said they wanted to create. Luciana Berger had told the press that the MPs had funded their February launch themselves. They quickly picked up a large number of small donations, reporting over 15,000 individual donations of £5 or more in February and March 2019. This was a necessary first step given that, as the group stated clearly on its website, ‘we don’t have the big money or infrastructure of the political parties’.49 Given the lack of funds for the DUP, Greens, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the SNP already described, the group presumably meant to emphasise the contrast between themselves and the two main parties here. The group did not have to wait long to attract larger donations of the sort commonly received by the Labour and Conservative parties; the Telegraph reported that property developer and former Labour supporter Sir David Garrard had donated £1.5m to the group in early 2019.50 Garrard had previously been a staunch backer of Labour, providing the funds to underpin the creation of New Labour’s first city academy in Bexley in 2002 and donating £500,000 to the party under Ed Miliband’s 82

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leadership. Unhappy with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and concerned about anti-semitism within the Labour Party, Garrard had resigned his membership in early 2018. Through this donation alone Change UK was now bringing in more income than the DUP or Plaid Cymru had managed through the whole of the 2017 financial year. In line with its promises to declare all donations of £7,500 and above, Change UK released the details of several further large donations received in February and March 2019. These donations came from six individuals and one company and totalled over £130,000.51 Some of these donors had no record with the Electoral Commission as having made any prior party donations. Others, like Roger Nagioff and Paul Myners, had previously contributed large sums to the two main parties. Nagioff was a former Conservative Party donor, with regular £50,000 donations to the party’s central office, while Myners had previously donated to individual Labour MPs and Labour Party groups. If smaller parties are on the whole under-resourced compared to the two main parties, Change UK certainly got off to a good start. Still, as with all small parties, it had to battle a system in which the two main parties are much better funded. Small opposition parties receive disproportionately less public funding than the official opposition, far fewer donations, have fewer staff to provide research services and must usually double up (or triple up) policy portfolios among their MPs. This is not to say, however, that they are so under-resourced and over-burdened that they cannot be effective in the Commons. They just have to be very strategic about 83

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the sort of parliamentary work they get involved in. For some parties this has been a steep learning curve, particularly in the early days following their election to parliament as this is a time when small parties strive to be noticed, drawing attention to their cause. It is the time in which they straddle the divide between being and feeling like a small party and wishing to act like a much larger one. The decisions made around the use of their sparse resources can be crucial.

Notes 1 Interview, SNP MP, 6 July 2016. 2 BBC News, ‘Independent Group of MPs to become political party’, 29 March 2019. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-politics-47745166 [accessed 6 May 2020]. 3 See I. Crewe and A. King, The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997), p. 238. 4 See www.gov.uk/government/ministers#cabinet-ministers [accessed 1 June 2019] for the full list of these ministers. 5 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 10 July 2018; interview, SNP MP, 20 July 2016. 6 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018. 7 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 8 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 10 July 2018. 9 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018; interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 10 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 11 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018. 12 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 13 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 14 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 15 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 16 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 17 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020.

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Establishing and resourcing a new party 8 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 1 19 All figures taken from party 2017 annual accounts submitted to the Electoral Commission. 20 Crewe and King, Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 249. 21 See www.pru.org.uk/text.aspx?id=1 [accessed 6 May 2020]. 22 See https://parliamentaryresearch.uk/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. 23 Labour Party, ‘Financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2017’, p. 2, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/ Accounts/Documents/20546 [accessed 24 June 2019]. Conservatives, ‘Annual report and financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2017’, p. 10, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/ Api/Accounts/Documents/20554 [accessed 24 June 2019]. 24 SNP, ‘Review 2017/18’, p. 19, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/ Api/Accounts/Documents/20553 [accessed 24 June 2019]. 25 Liberal Democrats, ‘Annual report year ended 31 December 2017’, p. 11, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/Accounts/ Documents/20415 [accessed 24 June 2019]. 26 Plaid Cymru, ‘Report and audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2017’, p. 9, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/Accounts/ Documents/20548 [accessed 24 June 2019]. Green Party (2018) ‘Reports and financial statements, year ended 31 December 2017’, p. 12, available from the Electoral Commission. Online at: http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/Accounts/ Documents/20395 [accessed 24 June 2019]. 27 Democratic Unionist Party, ‘General account: report and accounts, 31 December 2017’, p. 2, available from the Electoral Commission, . Online at: http://search.electoralcommission. org.uk/Api/Accounts/Documents/20550 [accessed 6 May 2019]. 28 If you’re interested in Short Money, read House of Commons official Richard Kelly’s fantastic note on the history and development of it, as well as key controversies: Richard Kelly, ‘Short Money’, House of Commons Library

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The end of the small party? Briefing Paper No. 01663, 4 October 2018. Online at: https:// researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01663/ SN01663.pdf [accessed 18 June 2019]. 29 UK Parliament, ‘Short Money financial reporting requirements 2017–18’. Online at: www.parliament.uk/documents/ commons-finance-office/Short%20money/Short%20 Money%202017-18%20Allocation.pdf [accessed 16 June 2019]. 30 @MikeWeirSNP, 28 May 2015. Available online: https://twitter. com/mikeweirsnp/status/604019060599341056 [accessed 30 May 2017]. 31 Interview, SNP MP, 1 June 2016. 32 Interview, SNP MP, 6 July 2016. 33 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 34 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 10 July 2018. 35 Interview, Green MP, 19 March 2019. 36 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 37 Interview, SNP MP, 20 July 2016. 38 Interview, UKIP AM, 21 February 2019. 39 ‘Help support Caroline Lucas in Parliament, Crowdfunder. uk, June 2017. Online at: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/help-fundcaroline-lucas-in-parliament [accessed 1 June 2019]. 40 ‘Help support Caroline Lucas in Parliament’, Crowdfunder. uk. 41 UK Parliament, ‘Short Money financial reporting requirements 2017–18’. 42 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 43 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020; interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 44 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019. 45 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019. 46 S. Bush, ‘Why has the Independent Group chosen Gavin Shuker as its convenor?’, New Statesman, 25 February 2019. Online at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2019/02/whyhas-independent-group-chosen-gavin-shuker-its-convenor [accessed 26 June 2019]. 47 A. Griffin, ‘Change UK’s old Twitter account hijacked to tweet pro-Brexit propaganda’, Independent, 8 May 2019. Online at: www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ change-uk-twitter-brexit-account-independent-group-bluetick-a8904721.html [accessed 26 June 2019].

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Establishing and resourcing a new party 8 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 4 49 Change UK donations page. Online at: https://voteforchange.uk/ donate/ [accessed 25 June 2019]. 50 E. Malnick, ‘One of Labour’s biggest private backers gives £1.5m to the Independent Group’, Telegraph, 23 February 2019. Online at: www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/23/ one-labours-biggest-private-backers-has-donated-independent/ [accessed 25 June 2019]. 51 Change UK, List of donations received. Online at: https:// voteforchange.uk/donate/donations-received/ [accessed 25 June 2019].

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Chapter 4

Making their voice heard

Once the excitement of Change UK’s creation had settled down, things must have felt pretty tough for its MPs. The reality of being a small party without the backing of the big party whips hit them hard; it was ‘quite a shock to the system’.1 This was especially true because they wanted to make a strong first impression on their fellow MPs as well as on the general public in order to keep the momentum of their launch going. This is where the group could have learnt some lessons from their new colleagues on the small party benches. For while the procedural rules of parliament can seem harsh for these parties and their exclusion from the ‘usual channels’ can leave them with the parliamentary leftovers in terms of committee positions, the more established small parties are still able to operate effectively. This is primarily because they have adapted to their position, developing strategies to overcome procedural obstacles and to amplify their status and voice in the Commons chamber. After all, who would want to vote for a small party MP if they weren’t able to represent you as effectively as the bigger parties in the Commons? 88

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One of the easiest ways for small parties to overcome procedural hurdles is to make informal arrangements with key parliamentary players to maximise their presence and voice on the green benches. Their involvement in PMQs demonstrates this well. The Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Green MP Caroline Lucas, for instance, had an informal arrangement with former Speaker John Bercow whereby they were called to ask a question at PMQs on a rota basis, so long as there was enough time in a given PMQs session. It provides them with greater certainty that they will be able to quiz the prime minister directly at least once every three or four weeks, though they will continue to table questions for the PMQs ballot in the same way as every other backbench MP. Evidence from the 2017–19 parliamentary session suggests that the Speaker kept to his side of the deal. On most weeks a small party MP did get the opportunity to ask the prime minister a question and where this was a Green, Plaid Cymru or Liberal Democrat MP they would speak from that coveted seat at the end of their shared bench in the chamber, the spot being allocated depending on whose turn it was to be called.2 For example, on Wednesday 1 May 2019, Vince Cable rose from this seat to ask the Prime Minister about climate change and Heathrow expansion,3 while on Wednesday 5 June 2019 Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts asked David Lidington (standing in for the Prime Minister, who was away at the D-Day commemorations) about Welsh exports post-Brexit from the very same seat.4 There are some weeks where no small party receives a question, though on these occasions it may 89

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be that an independent MP has asked a question (former Labour MP John Woodcock stood at the top of the order paper for PMQs on 22 May 2019 and no small parties were then called), or where there are later statements by the prime minister in which the Speaker intends to call small party representatives. Change UK MPs had some success at PMQs, but, as Joan Ryan’s question to the Prime Minister about Brexit on 8 May 2019 demonstrates, they tended to make these from the less hospitable areas of the chamber. On this occasion Ryan was sitting at the wrong end of the DUP benches, in the furthest part of the chamber from the Prime Minister.5 On 19 June 2019 Anna Soubry pressed the Prime Minister to confirm that the House would have the opportunity to sit in September and October to ensure that ‘all options are available to this Parliament’ to prevent a no-deal Brexit including the revocation of Article 50. Once again, she was seated in a less desirable location on the green benches. Her question, however, was effective in the sense that the Prime Minister refused to confirm this, simply replying that sitting dates would be ‘published to the House in due course’ 6 and giving the appearance that the government did not want to make any firm commitment. Further informal arrangements are made between the small parties to share forthcoming parliamentary business to ensure that MPs are not completely out of the legislative loop. The SNP plays a key role here and has been very accommodating to its nationalist counterpart Plaid Cymru as well as to the Green Party. Their similar ideological backgrounds and history of cross-party 90

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working in the European Parliament paved the way for cooperation in the Commons. Both parties send a representative to the SNP’s weekly business meetings to ensure that they are privy to information about key votes and debates.7 The same applies during debates in the chamber, where the SNP whip will act unofficially as the whip for these parties, also, checking with Speaker on their behalf to see if there is any chance of their being called to speak and how long they may need to wait in the chamber in order to do so. As one of these MPs explains, it means that ‘[we] know where we are in terms of the Speaker’s list of speakers and gives us a rough idea of how long we’re likely to have by that point’.8 They may still find themselves squeezed in at the end of a debate with a limited speaking time, but at least they have prior notice and are not left in a state of Commons limbo. There is an obvious sense of camaraderie on these small party benches. One Plaid Cymru MP described how small party colleagues are a regular source of support or a morale booster, adding the ‘hear, hears’ after his speeches in the same manner that backbenchers from the larger parties would do to show their support for one of their own party colleagues. His description of this was as a reassuring support system in what can be ‘a very crazy and lonely place’, adding that ‘it just makes you feel a little bit more at home’.9 This is a stark contrast to the experience of SNP MPs prior to 2015 who reported Labour MPs regularly sitting around them as they made speeches in the chamber, shouting ‘ridiculous nonsense’ in an attempt to distract them 91

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from their speeches.10 Developing good personal relationships with other parties and key figures, then, can be more important than the actual written rules and precedents of the chamber.11 This is particularly true in areas such as speaking rights, in which procedures are governed largely by precedent and in which the Standing Orders and other procedural guidance establish no firm rights for small parties and their MPs. A direct relationship with the Speaker or with the government whips can cut through these grey areas of Commons life, providing clarity and greater certainty to the work of an MP. Caroline Lucas is an excellent example of a small party MP who has demonstrated time and time again that she can make a big impact in the chamber. As the sole representative of the Green Party in the House of Commons she must take on the role of both individual constituency MP and the party’s parliamentary spokesperson for each and every policy area (though in practice she takes a very common-sense approach and is selective about the policy areas she gets involved with). She straddles these dual roles well, articulating key concerns for her Brighton constituents in the chamber, such as the need for more affordable housing, complementing this with a strong focus on two of the Green Party’s core issues of climate change and nuclear weapons. While small parties as a whole struggle to achieve adequate representation on Commons committees, Lucas has managed to secure roles for herself which are closely aligned to her policy priorities. She has been a member of the Environmental Audit Committee ever since her 92

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election to parliament in 2010. Although perhaps not one of the most prestigious and well-known select committees, it fits neatly with Green Party goals. Recent committee work has included inquiries into the greening of government commitments, green finance, disposable coffee cups and a review of the UK’s progress in meeting sustainable development goals. She is also chair of the All-Party-Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Climate Change. All-party groups are cross-party groups of MPs who come together because of a shared interest in a policy issue. Some are supported by outside organisations, charities or think tanks who will assist with their organisation, research and event management. In this case, the APPG on Climate Change is supported by Policy Connect, a cross-party think tank which supports a series of APPGs in the Commons. Lucas’s group has hosted student climate change activist Greta Thunberg who gave a speech to MPs in the Commons before meeting party leaders (except for Theresa May, who failed to send a representative to attend).12 Like other small party representatives, Lucas still faces something of an uphill struggle to achieve representation in other areas of the Commons. Bill committees are an example of this. As a single MP, she falls outside the usual apportionment of committee places and must utilise her relationships with other party whips to negotiate a place on relevant committees. When she is successful (as she has been on several occasions over the previous three parliaments), she works hard to maximise her involvement. After gaining a place on the Energy Bill Committee in 2011, she wrote and 93

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discussed 42 amendments to the legislation over the course of the committee’s ten sittings. This was more than any other opposition party on the committee. Even Labour, which had seven MPs serving on the committee to provide the ‘official’ opposition scrutiny, only moved 39. None of Lucas’s amendments were formally accepted by the government during the bill committee, a regular occurrence for all opposition amendments in this parliamentary session because of the government’s inbuilt majority and the protectiveness of ministers over their own bills. She was successful, though, in pushing the government to clarify its position in a number of areas, including making changes to the secondary legislation accompanying the main text of the bill. Such was the quality of the work she performed over the course of the bill’s scrutiny that the then Secretary of State Chris Huhne commended her during the bill’s third reading as someone ‘who worked tirelessly and made a substantial contribution to the debate’.13 If you get an opportunity as a small party MP you need to seize it with both hands and get as much parliamentary airtime out of it as possible. Lucas does this spectacularly well. Another tool utilised well by the Green MP is the combination of parliamentary work with external direct action. In November 2010 while MPs were discussing the merits of the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill, Lucas was out on the streets of Westminster joining students who were protesting about the planned university tuition fees increase. Having witnessed the kettling of students and schoolchildren by police in Whitehall, she returned to the Commons chamber, raising a point of order from 94

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the floor of the House in which she asked if the Home Secretary might be coming to the House to make a statement explaining why the protestors ‘have been kettled for more than four hours and, according to the police, will be out there for several more hours in the freezing cold’.14 Although activities such as this are part of her expressed wish to get outside the Westminster ‘bubble’, keeping one foot in Westminster and one foot outside, it additionally helps to raise the profile of key issues in the Commons. This technique has since been mirrored by other small parties, including Change UK. When Anna Soubry attended a People’s Vote rally at lunchtime on 9 April 2019, she told the Commons later that day how the ‘overwhelming message’ from the young people there was that the reality of Brexit had made their parents and grandparents regret voting to leave in the 2017 referendum.15 Bringing the outside world directly into the Commons chamber in this way provides extra visibility for Lucas and helps her to move policy issues further up the political agenda, putting them in the parliamentary as well as media spotlight. Given the neat overlap between her own (and her party’s) political beliefs and the roles and responsibilities she has assumed in the Commons, she is also able to complement her committee and APPG activity with her work in the chamber itself. As the sole party member, we would expect her to be called as often as the average individual backbench MP, but her speeches in the Commons are more frequent than this. Since she was first elected in 2010 Hansard records her making over 1,800 contributions in the Commons.16 95

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In the first half of 2019 when the Change UK MPs were showing a lack of activity in the Commons, Lucas made 75 oral contributions on 37 different occasions.17 Along with other small party MPs, she is adept at intervening during the speeches of other MPs. Interventions take a different form from full parliamentary speeches; they must be short, succinct and should relate directly to the content of the speech itself. Some MPs use them to ask questions, to give support, or to add additional facts or evidence to the speech which is underway. An MP making a speech does not have to allow another MP to intervene, but courteous debating usually allows for a few interventions during a speech. For small party MPs it is a means by which they can get their voice on the parliamentary record regardless of whether they will later be called by the Speaker to make a full speech themselves. Given the tendency for small parties to be called much later in debates, intervening during the initial speeches of a debate can offset this somewhat, providing them with a more prime-time slot to get their opinion on the official record. When the Commons debated a cross-party motion to take control of the parliamentary timetable and stop a no-deal Brexit in June 2019, the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens all supported it. As official opposition spokesperson, Labour’s Keir Starmer introduced the motion, making the initial speech. During his speech he took interventions from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, the SNP’s Neil Gray and Philippa Whitford and Plaid Cymru’s Hywel Williams, as well as from Caroline Lucas.18 Although the SNP spokesperson Peter Grant 96

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would be called by the Speaker to give a speech shortly afterwards, the other parties had to wait their turn. Vince Cable spoke for the Liberal Democrats at 3.45 p.m. (over an hour into the debate)19 but there was no time for the remaining small parties who had supported the motion to be called to speak before the House voted on it shortly before 4.30 p.m. Their interventions at the very start of the debate therefore provided Plaid Cymru and the Green Party with an opportunity to speak which they would not have received had they waited to be formally called by the Speaker. Interventions may not offer the same degree of parliamentary airtime as a full speech, but they can be an important platform for MPs to get their message across. Perhaps the most extreme use of interventions has come from the SNP. In early 2017 MPs were debating the wording of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill which received its committee stage on the floor of the Commons. This is the point at which MPs have the opportunity to go through the bill on a line-by-line basis, suggesting amendments to the text. Most of the time this work is undertaken by just a few MPs in a small room on the committee corridor, but very important bills will receive their committee scrutiny in the chamber itself. The Notification of Withdrawal Bill was only a couple of lines long, containing just 133 words, but those words were highly controversial and politically potent. This was the bill more commonly known as the Article 50 Bill. It gave the Prime Minister the power to notify the EU that the UK would be leaving and therefore start the official Brexit countdown. The 97

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timetable for the bill’s consideration was tight, so there was not a huge amount of time available in the chamber for MPs to debate it. On the first day of the committee stage the SNP’s Stephen Gethins was called to give a speech early on. He spoke about some of the amendments the SNP had tabled to the bill and also expressed concerns about the compressed timetable for its debate, something which was also raised by MPs from the larger parties.20 He took a handful of interventions during his speech, including from his colleagues Ian Blackford and Roger Mullin. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh gave another speech for the SNP in the middle of the debate, once again allowing interventions from her colleagues Alex Salmond and Neil Gray. Towards the end of the debate, a third SNP MP, Joanna Cherry, was called to speak. She noted that she would ‘be brief so that others [from the SNP] might have a chance to speak’ 21 but was cut off almost straight away by the then Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who was keen to give another MP a turn before the debate ended. Cherry protested and, when Hoyle asked the government minister to stand and sum up the debate (as is standard practice), Cherry’s colleagues Alex Salmond and Pete Wishart also joined in the protest, with Salmond telling Hoyle that it was ‘quite clear’ that Cherry had not ‘resumed her seat’ and still wished to speak. SNP parliamentary leader Ian Blackford explained the frustration felt by the party, which wanted to ensure that ‘the voice of the people of Scotland [was] heard correctly’. It later transpired that the SNP whip had pleaded with Hoyle for an extra SNP speaker and 98

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that Hoyle had agreed to squeeze one in before the end of the debate. The Sun would later report it as an ‘eck of a bust up’ and a ‘blazing row’ between the SNP and the Deputy Speaker.22 On a normal parliamentary week the argument would probably have ended there. This, however, was no regular week. The following day’s business saw the second day of the Article 50 Bill’s committee stage, once again taking place on the floor of the Commons chamber. It is here that we can see most vividly the SNP’s mastery of the intervention technique. The debate began as normal with some interventions from the SNP MPs being made very early on, clearly anticipating that they might not get much parliamentary airtime for the second day in a row. When Patrick Grady was called to give a speech on a new clause which his party had tabled for potential inclusion in the bill, he noted how the SNP had tabled ‘a total of 50 new clauses and amendments’ in all and that he hoped that they would ‘get a chance to debate as many of those’ as possible.23 As his speech progressed, Grady began to take intervention after intervention from the other SNP MPs sitting around him, refusing to give way to some MPs from the two larger parties, including Conservatives Alan Duncan and Andrew Murrison. The situation became almost comical, as Grady looked behind him, seemingly calling any SNP member he could see to stand and make an intervention. Those called by him did not necessarily have an intervention planned; they thought on their feet. Other MPs began to protest at this apparent monopolising or filibustering of the debate, but the 99

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Deputy Speaker was unable to do much to censure the MP as he was operating within Commons debating rules. By the time Grady sat down he had held the floor of the Commons for almost an hour and had allowed 41 interventions, the vast majority of which had come from other SNP MPs. Summing up the day’s debate, Brexit minister Robin Walker congratulated the MP for ‘the ingenuity with which he made sure that the Committee heard so many Scottish voices’.24 Such an extreme example of utilising interventions has not been seen in the Commons since this debate, but it demonstrates how small parties can use parliamentary tools to their advantage and overcome the lack of speaking time. In fact, the camaraderie between many of these parties means that they will often give way to MPs from other small parties when called to give a speech, working together to maximise their visibility and impact. Written parliamentary questions are another way of overcoming the obstacles to oral participation on the floor of the Commons. We have already seen how Caroline Lucas found opportunities to speak extensively in the Commons between February and June 2019 in ways that many Change UK MPs did not. Over the same time period, she alone tabled 138 written questions to government ministers, almost as many as all of the Change UK MPs put together.25 Written questions are a useful tool for MPs when facing a government with superior resources and a parliamentary chamber in which they may not always get to ask oral questions. Through this tool Lucas was able to quiz Business and Energy 100

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Minister Chris Skidmore on the number of civil servants working on renewable and nuclear energy26 and has pressed the Foreign Secretary to speak to his US counterpart regarding potential human rights violations in US-run detention centres on the US–Mexico border.27 There appears to be a clear recognition within the chamber that Lucas is the representative and parliamentary leader of a political party, rather than just an individual MP. Thus, when Brexit legislation and related motions were being discussed in the Commons in 2017–19, Lucas was given the opportunity to talk in each key debate (along with each of the other small party leaders or spokespersons). All were given the opportunity to highlight a particular amendment they would like to see MPs vote on; Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle felt that it was important to do this to ensure parity between the parties. As such, Lucas was able to deliver a speech, albeit sometimes a short speech, in each key Brexit debate. Her contribution to the next steps debate on EU withdrawal on 27 February 2019 included an intervention in which she accused the Prime Minister of ‘dither, delay, faffing and kicking the can down the road’ in the event of an extension to Article 50.28 When she was called to give a full speech later on in the same debate she was able to weave both her constituency and her party’s commitment to environmental protection into her speech. She expressed her concern that delaying the next meaningful vote on the Brexit deal was ‘deliberately’ creating uncertainty for businesses in her constituency and described a potential no-deal Brexit as an ‘economic and social catastrophe’, 101

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pushing for a people’s vote as both ‘most democratic option’ and the only way out of the mess. Finally, she spoke to an amendment she had tabled, requiring environmental principles to be properly embedded in UK law by strengthening the government’s proposed Office for Environmental Protection in England.29 The amendment was not in the end selected for a Commons vote, but the Liberal Democrats also expressed their support for it during the debate.30 In fact, while Brexit was such a thorny issue for the two main parties, highlighting their internal splits and punishing their party leaders, it had the opposite effect on the smaller parties. The chaos within the two larger parliamentary groups and the growing pressure to find a Brexit deal which could command a majority in parliament actually facilitated the work of the small parties and arguably made them much more prominent players in the Commons. They were called to speak during each of the second reading debates on Brexit legislation. This occurred in everything, from the European Union Withdrawal Bill to the Fisheries Bill. They may have had to sit in the chamber and wait their turn for several hours, but they did get the chance to put their view across. During the second reading of the Trade Bill in January 2018, for instance, Plaid Cymru gave the thirteenth speech, the DUP was called for the fifteenth speech and Caroline Lucas made the twenty-first speech on the floor of the Commons. One MP explained how the smaller opposition parties tried to cooperate around Brexit amendments, to increase the likelihood of their being called for debate or a vote.31 Brexit also facilitated 102

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more direct interaction between small parties and the government. When the Prime Minister overcame a motion of no-confidence in her government in January 2019, she pledged immediately to work with all of the opposition party leaders in the Commons, highlighting the ‘constructive meetings’ she had already had with the leader of the Liberal Democrats and the Westminster leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru.32 She would go on to meet the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas the following day too, with Lucas tweeting about the messages she would pass on to the Prime Minister during the meeting about a possible citizen’s assembly.33 As we have seen, turning up to as many parliamentary debates, questions and statements as you can and being ready to contribute to them is seen as a key way of enhancing a party’s credibility and professionalism and demonstrating that it can cover as much ground as the larger parties. One Plaid Cymru MP, for example, spoke of how his party had once tried to cover ‘the policy universe’ before relaxing into a system where each member of the group could focus on the particular policy areas which were of most interest to them.34 De-prioritising some policy issues and relaxing the idea that you need to engage completely with the entirety of parliamentary business helps parties to move away from simply reacting to Commons business and building in some space for proactivity in terms of the policy areas or issues which they feel should be raised. The ability to lobby the Speaker for an ‘urgent’ question in the chamber is a useful device to use to do this. The urgent question tool enables MPs to apply to the Commons 103

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Speaker to ask a question on the same day. This contrasts to the usual procedures for departmental question time whereby each department comes to the House once every two to three weeks on a rota basis and MPs must submit questions in advance. If selected by the Speaker, an urgent question will bring the relevant government minister before the House after regular departmental question time to take questions on the issue. It allows MPs to question the government on matters which may only have come to light that morning. The number of urgent questions being granted rose substantially under the speakership of John Bercow. While just 57 such questions were granted during the entirety of the 1997–2001 Parliament under Speaker Betty Boothroyd, the 2015–17 Parliament saw this almost triple to 151. Small parties are very aware of the opportunities that this prime-time slot in the chamber brings and use the device to get their message across and to try to get the upper hand in terms of setting the news agenda. It has the ability to provide a ‘hole in one’ in terms of holding the government to account,35 and Liberal Democrat and SNP MPs in particular can’t get enough of them. Sometimes these urgent questions are used simply to press the government to make a statement on an issue, such as when the SNP’s Europe spokesperson Stephen Gethins asked minister Mark Field to make a statement on Libya in April 2019. It enabled the government to provide an update on the political and economic situation in the country. It also enabled a follow-up from the SNP member, in which he pushed the government to consider the lessons they 104

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had learnt from the Iraq conflict and asked for details of the support being provided by the UK government to promote good governance as well as internal and external security measures in the country.36 In the short debate that followed, his party colleagues were also able to press further on this issue, alongside MPs from other parties. Gethins has also used the urgent question tool to highlight internal divisions within the government and to keep the issue of Brexit on the political and parliamentary agenda. In autumn 2016, at a time when it was unclear what level of involvement Commons MPs would have in Brexit decision-making and in the approval of the negotiated Brexit deal, the SNP MP tabled an urgent question to ask for an update on Brexit negotiations. The resulting exchange was captured in the press, with Gethins highlighting the ‘ongoing splits in Cabinet’ and his concern that the Prime Minister had ‘lost grip of all her warring government ministers who are fighting like cats in a sack with the Cabinet splitting’.37 Another tactic that small parties learn quickly in the Commons is the need for repetition. Within the environment of the Commons the repetition of key messages becomes a must-use technique. This means quite literally ‘saying very similar things over and over again until it is picked up, until it’s drilled in’.38 This could mean holding an adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, and then also asking a question on the same topic at departmental question time or PMQs, tabling written questions to relevant ministers and publicising the answers. It is about using each and every 105

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parliamentary mechanism available in order to build pressure on the government and to construct an organised campaign. The more an MP does this, the greater the likelihood that the issue will be picked up by the press. It is particularly important for small parties who lack the colleagues to push key points several times within the same debate. We can see Change UK following this strategy in their push for a second Brexit referendum or ‘People’s Vote’. In March 2019 the party’s amendment calling for a second referendum was selected by the Speaker for debate and a vote on 14 March 2019. This was one of the few policies which Change UK MPs all signed up to and on which the party line was clear. It was the first Change UK amendment to be successful in being selected by the Speaker (a previous attempt by the new group had been unsuccessful). The amendment was also significant because it provided MPs with the first opportunity to have a direct vote on a second referendum. Although MPs from other parties supported the campaign for a second referendum, calls by the official People’s Vote campaign for supporters not to vote for the amendment scuppered its chances and it was defeated by 85 votes to 334. Change UK MPs continued to push the issue, though, through all possible parliamentary outlets. In the following month alone Change UK Brexit spokesperson Anna Soubry used business questions to request an opposition day debate on a second referendum as well as a question to the Prime Minister during European Council statement and a contribution to a debate on the EU Withdrawal Act to also push for the same 106

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resolution of the Brexit chaos.39 This kind of repetition was crucial for the new party to send a clear message to the government – as well as to the media and wider public – that the People’s Vote was part of their core policy platform. Finally, a really important feature of any small party’s parliamentary strategy must be an attitude of realism. This means not assuming that you will automatically be listened to or that the government will necessarily cave in to your demands the first time that you air them in the chamber. It also means redefining what we would typically consider to be ‘success’ as an opposition party. The Westminster culture of government– opposition conflict instils in all of us a sense that for an opposition to ‘win’ at something, the government must ‘lose’, that if the opposition does not agree with what the government is doing, it must either defeat it in the voting lobbies or place a minister in such a difficult position that they announce a change in policy. This type of zero-sum game is easy for us to understand, but it does not represent the true realities of parliamentary dynamics. A small party MP who aligns to this view of how parliament works will find themselves very quickly disappointed. With a (usually) inbuilt parliamentary majority in the Commons and on all key committees, it is very unlikely that the government will lose a vote. The shenanigans over Brexit are an exception to this; here the combination of deep intraparty division and the minority government status created a rare parliamentary climate which saw a succession of government defeats. 107

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For the most part, small parties need to adopt a redefinition of what successful opposition in the Commons means to them. This was summed up by one MP with the word ‘movement’. Pounding out the hours on the green benches of the Commons may be tough work, but if you can get a government minister to change their point of view on something, however slight, it is a sign that you are doing a good job. Ministers are indoctrinated into the idea that policies belong to them, that making concessions is a sign that they are failing in their government duties. One MP describes how ‘you can sometimes almost see the little cogs in the minister’s mind going round and thinking … “you know I should probably do it that way”’.40 Where the seed has been sown, these slight changes can be followed up by the opposition MPs concerned. Meetings with ministers can be requested, letters can be sent, conversations can be had in the division lobbies or tea rooms. The other element of this redefinition of success is the recognition that things do not happen quickly in parliament or in government. Constituents writing to their MP or attending their constituency surgeries may wish to see action being taken on an issue very quickly, but the wheels in the parliamentary and government machines can be very slow to turn. This means that long-term, continuous campaigns often need to be fought by opposition parties. In the case of legislation, this can mean several months of work as a bill makes its way through debates in the Commons chamber, its committee rooms and often through the House of Lords

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as well. The SNP had some success during the scrutiny of the Investigatory Powers Bill in 2016. An amendment moved by the SNP front bench during the bill’s committee stage highlighted an oversight by government drafters in relation to civil liability for wrongful interception. Although the amendment was initially rejected by the government in the committee itself, the government minister had agreed to think about it further. Additional pushes on this by the SNP over the next few weeks and months saw the government introduce the change itself later on, at the report stage scrutiny of the bill in the Commons chamber.41 This process had taken a period of several months. Even when changes are made to government policy as a direct result of opposition party work, these parties may not receive the credit for it. Small parties must therefore play the long game when it comes to their parliamentary work and need to utilise press and social media to highlight every single impact they have been able to make on government policy, however small it may be. Often, this type of work necessitates small parties to work together with like-minded parties and colleagues across the House. SNP MP Alison Thewliss’ work on the tampon tax is a good example of this. A commitment to removing the VAT on sanitary products had been included in the SNP’s election manifesto in 2015 as part of the party’s commitment to ‘ensure a fairer deal for women’.42 Thewliss and her colleagues campaigned on the issue for some time during the 2015 Parliament. Soon an opportunity presented itself when she found herself

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appointed to a committee to scrutinise the government’s Finance Bill. Thewliss was able to table amendments to the bill on the issue of the tampon tax. Describing it as an ‘injustice’ which needed to be corrected,43 she moved a new clause requesting that the government put a report before the House examining the impact of removing the tax. MPs from other opposition parties, also spoke in favour of the amendment, highlighting the huge degree of public support for the issue.44 Once again the amendment itself was rejected by the minister in committee, but the SNP continued to campaign on it. By this time other parties, including the Labour Party, were on board with the idea and joined the campaign to push the government into making a concession. In his response, Treasury Minister David Gauke told the committee that ‘VAT exemptions are set out in EU law and cannot be changed by the UK unilaterally’.45 Thewliss describes how some Conservative MPs also joined the campaign, generating a somewhat unstoppable momentum. When the bill returned to the Commons for its report stage debate MPs again turned their attention to the tax. Thewliss and her colleagues took some enjoyment in watching male MPs, including veteran Conservative backbencher Bill Cash, struggle to use the term ‘tampon tax’, the MP himself referring to ‘these products’ instead.46 After a long debate, with contributions from other opposition MPs such as Stella Creasy, who had also campaigned in parliament on the issue, the change was refused by the minister on the same grounds to that which had been expressed at the bill’s committee stage. In March 2016 following 110

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a European Council meeting, the then Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the controversial tax would be scrapped in what he described as an ‘important breakthrough’.47 Amendments were then tabled to the 2016 Finance Bill that same week. Thewliss described it as ‘a privilege to be able to kick start the debate during the Finance Bill deliberations’,48 though the measure itself would still take several years to be implemented, requiring agreement from the EU. Thewliss’ colleague Kirsty Blackman would push again on this issue shortly after the Prime Minister’s announcement, this time seeking to extend the VAT exemption to women’s incontinence and breastfeeding products.49 Despite the seemingly endless parliamentary hurdles facing small parties in the Commons, it is not a futile position to hold. Just as individual MPs who wish to campaign for particular issues close to their hearts or their constituencies must utilise every parliamentary tool available to them, small party groups must similarly develop coordinated strategies to enable them to both scrutinise and hold government to account effectively at the same time as they campaign proactively for policy changes. For most small parties this takes a period of time after their arrival in the Commons; after an initial rush to react to each and every policy announcement, debate or statement by the government there comes a period of readjustment in which they realise that a total engagement strategy is unlikely to meet their objectives. As their experience of the Commons grows, they develop relationships with key players outside their group and learn to use parliamentary procedure 111

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more proactively. The Change UK MPs may have had considerable prior experience of the Commons, but they still went through this period of adjustment. Hansard records illustrate that very little in the way of oral contributions or written questions was made in the first few weeks following the party’s formation. It took until mid-March or early April for the group’s MPs to begin to get to work again properly. Although they got off to a fairly proactive start, the party had much to learn from the behaviour of the other small parties who shared the green benches with them.

Notes 1 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019. 2 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 3 HC Debates, 1 May 2019, c. 207. 4 HC Debates, 5 June 2019, c. 144. 5 HC Debates, 8 May 2019, c. 550. 6 HC Debates, 19 June 2019, c. 242. 7 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018; interview, Green MP, 22 November 2018. 8 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 9 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 10 Interview, SNP MP, 19 July 2016. 11 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 12 D. Carrington and P. Walker, ‘Greta Thunberg condemns UK’s climate stance in speech to MPs’, Guardian, 23 April 2019. Online at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/23/ vacant-seat-for-may-as-party-leaders-meet-greta-thunberg [accessed 24 June 2019]. 13 HC Debates, 14 September 2011, c. 1140. 14 HC Debates, 24 November 2010, c. 362. 15 HC Debates, 9 April 2019, c. 254. 16 Includes speeches and interventions in the chamber and in the parallel debating chamber of Westminster Hall.

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Making their voice heard 17 Figures drawn from Hansard’s search tool (18 February–3 July 2019). 18 HC Debates, 12 June 2019, c. 690–7. 19 HC Debates, 12 June 2019, c. 712. 20 HC Debates, 6 February 2017, no col. 21 HC Debates, 6 February 2017, no col. 22 P. Gates, ‘Eck of a bust up: Alex Salmond flips in blazing row with Commons Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’, Sun, 7 February 2017. Online at: www.thesun.co.uk/video/news/ alex-salmond-flips-in-blazing-row-with-commons-deputyspeaker-lindsay-hoyle/ [accessed 4 July 2019]. 23 HC Debates, 7 February 2017, no col. 24 HC Debates, 7 February 2017, c. 390. 25 Lucas tabled 138 written questions between 18 February and 3 July 2019 according to Hansard records. The combined total for Change UK MPs in this period was 164 questions. 26 Commons Written Question 269698: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy: Staff, 26 June 2019. Online at: www.parliament.uk/business/publications/writtenquestions-answers-statements/written-question/Commons/ 2019-06-26/269698/ [accessed 7 May 2020]. 27 Commons Written Question 270324, USA: Detention Centres, 27 June 2019. Online at: www.parliament.uk/business/ publications/written-questions-answers-statements/writtenquestion/commons/2019-06-27/270324/ [accessed 7 May 2020]. 28 HC Debates, 27 February 2019, c. 373. 29 HC Debates, 27 February 2019, c. 421–2. 30 HC Debates, 27 February 2019, c. 424. 31 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 32 Theresa May, Statement at Downing Street, 16 January 2019. Online at: www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-statementat-downing-street-16-january-2019 [accessed 8 July 2019]. 33 @CarolineLucas, 16 January 2019. Online at: https:// twitter.com/CarolineLucas/status/1085678847771791361 [accessed 8 July 2019]. 34 Interview, Plaid Cymru MP, 11 July 2018. 35 Interview, SNP MP, 6 July 2016. 36 HC Debates, 8 April 2019, c. 42–4. 37 G. Russell, ‘SNP call for urgent Brexit update as May “loses grip” on warring Cabinet’, National, 10 October 2016. Online

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The end of the small party? at: www.thenational.scot/news/14896435.snp-call-for-urgentbrexit-update-as-may-loses-grip-on-warring-cabinet/ [accessed 24 June 2019]. 38 Interview, SNP MP, 6 July 2019. 39 HC Debates, 25 April 2019, c. 923; HC Debates, 11 April 2019, c. 520; HC Debates, 9 April 2019, c. 254. 40 Interview, SNP MP, 20 July 2016. 41 Interview, SNP MP, 20 July 2016. 42 Scottish National Party, Stronger for Scotland, SNP manifesto (Edinburgh: SNP 2015). 43 Finance (No2) Bill Committee, 17 September 2015, c. 20. Online at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/ cmpublic/finance/150917/am/150917s01.htm [accessed 7 May 2020]. 44 Finance (No2) Bill Committee, 17 September 2015, c. 21. 45 Finance (No2) Bill Committee, 17 September 2015, c. 23. 46 HC Debates, 26 October 2015, c. 99. 47 David Cameron, in HC Debates, 21 March 2016, c. 1246. 48 Graeme Sneddon, ‘SNP hails tampon tax victory’, post on Alison Thewliss website, 17 March 2016. Online at www.alisonthewliss.scot/snp-hails-tampon-tax-victory/ [accessed 24 June 2019]. 49 See Kirsty Blackman, in Finance Bill Committee, 7 July 2016, c. 141. Online at: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/ 2016-07-07/debates/b1fc4327-1eb4-408d-91db-aeaf919f67e0/ FinanceBill(FifthSitting) [accessed 7 May 2020].

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Chapter 5

Whither the two-party system?

When we think about the rise and fall of UK political parties in the twentieth century we usually point to the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberals, with the mid-twentieth century seeing the peak of two-party performance with the Labour and Conservative parties regularly achieving 90 per cent of the overall vote in general elections. In reality, the twentieth century saw the creation of a number of smaller parties, many of which have had a presence in the House of Commons. Some, such as Plaid Cymru or the SNP, established themselves in the 1920s and 1930s, battling the majoritarian electoral system but gradually gaining and maintaining elected MPs, while others such as the Scottish Prohibition Party were one-hit wonders in terms of representation in the Commons and soon disbanded. There are also others, like the British National Party, which have remained on the fringes of British politics despite regularly standing candidates for election. This underlying small party trend has continued somewhat through the 2000s, with the first elected 115

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representatives of the Green Party, Alliance Party and UKIP taking their seats on the green benches of the House of Commons, plus the arrival of a number of small party peers in the House of Lords.1 The 2010 General Election demonstrated the ability of smaller political parties to participate in government, with the Liberal Democrats making the transition from parliamentary party to party of government for the first time. In many respects the 2015 General Election marked the growing fragmentation of the once-stable British political party system. Here, the combined vote share for the two main parties fell to 67 per cent and the SNP saw a dramatic rise in support coming directly off the back of Scotland’s failed independence referendum of 2014. The party won almost every constituency in Scotland, increasing its number in the Commons from just six to 56. In addition to the two main parties, a further nine parties gained representation in the 2015 House of Commons, totalling 85 MPs or 13 per cent of the chamber. For UKIP, the SNP and the Greens, it was their best general election performance to date. This election was also significant in that five small parties – the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, SNP and UKIP – were given a joint platform with the main party leaders during the televised general election leaders’ debates for the first time. Over 7 million people watched Natalie Bennett, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage, Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood take part in a two-hour election debate hosted by ITV News on 2 April 2015. Polling by YouGov immediately after the debate saw the SNP and UKIP 116

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performing much more strongly than either the Conservatives or Labour.2 The 2017 General Election may have delivered a minority government, but support for the two main parties increased back to 82 per cent, with the total number of parties achieving representation in the Commons falling to just eight. To some this showed that two-party politics is unstoppable and will always bounce back. However, while the first-past-the-post electoral system continued to insulate the two main parties from any real challenge in government, small party MPs still won over 11 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons chamber.3 The number of parties represented in the Commons may have fallen, but the resulting hung parliament created by the 2017 General Election arguably enhanced the power of the remaining six small parties, particularly that of the DUP. Its MPs’ ability to take Theresa May and her minority government to task in the Commons – having received guarantees of an extra billion pounds of funding for Northern Ireland in return for a confidence-and-supply agreement – and then refusing to cast their votes for a Brexit deal on any occasion throughout 2019, demonstrates the power which small parties can wield in British politics today. The creation of The Independent Group/Change UK in early 2019 was in many respects a natural progression of these longer-term trends in British politics; a sign that the two main political parties could not continue to monopolise the parliamentary and political system for much longer. This was reinforced by the formation 117

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of the Brexit Party and its first parliamentary group in the National Assembly for Wales in May 2019. Both were examples of how small parties can gain a parliamentary presence through defections alone – Change UK in the Commons and the Brexit Party in Wales Regardless of the nature of their formation, they added further fuel to the notion that small parties were now a force to be reckoned with, rather than something to be ignored or overlooked. Change UK and the Brexit Party may both have failed to win any seats in the 2019 General Election, but other small parties made a triumphant re-entry to the Commons. Stephen Farry became the Alliance Party’s second-ever MP at Westminster, following in the footsteps of Naomi Long, who served as MP for Belfast East 2010–15. The SDLP also returned two MPs to the Commons after losing all of its MPs in the 2017 General Election. The rise of smaller parties in recent years is not unique to Westminster. At a sub-national level the UK’s devolved legislatures, aided by their use of less majoritarian, mixed electoral systems, have also seen greater representation of smaller parties. The 2016 Welsh Assembly elections saw UKIP take its place in Cardiff Bay for the first time, with six elected representatives, while in the Northern Ireland Assembly the People Before Profit Alliance gained its first representatives, sending two MLAs to Stormont. In Scotland, the Green Party overtook the Liberal Democrats to become the country’s fourth largest political party.4 We can also identify a growing multi-party politics at the sub-national and supra-national levels. In the 118

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2019 local elections both the main parties suffered big losses. The number of Conservative councillors dropped by over 1,300 and the party lost control of more than 40 councils. For Labour the result was not quite so bad – the party ended the night with 84 fewer councillors and six fewer councils – but it was certainly not a sign that Corbyn’s party was able to capitalise on the chaos within the Conservative Party. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats saw a huge increase of over 700 councillors and the Green Party also enlarged its share of councillors, by 1,094.5 The European elections the following month saw an abysmal performance for the two main parties, with Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party coming almost out of nowhere to win 31.6 per cent of the vote, sending 29 MEPs to the European Parliament. Farage told the press that the Conservatives and Labour ‘could learn a big lesson’ 6 from the results, their combined vote share falling to less than 25 per cent (down from 47 per cent in the 2014 European elections). It was a solid performance for both the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party also, receiving 13 and 4 per cent of the overall vote respectively (and increasing their MEPs by a combined total of 19 in the process).7 The UK’s party system, then, seems to be becoming more and more fragmented. While the Brexit Party failed to win its first seat in the Peterborough by-election (called after a recall petition saw Fiona Onasanya lose her seat), narrowly missing out to Labour’s Lisa Forbes by just 683 votes, Farage was still confident that the party could win the next general election should the government fail to deliver on its Brexit promise. 119

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The European parliamentary elections may have been a success for many small parties but they were definitely not a triumph for Change UK. Despite registering as a political party for the primary purpose of contesting these elections, the party received just 3.4 per cent of the vote and failed to elect a single MEP. Anna Soubry tried to put a brave face on the result, telling Sky News that as a ‘genuinely new party’ 8 rather than a ‘re-tread’ like Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, they were pleased that over 600,000 people went out and voted for them. The following week, though, it would become clear that things were not rosy in the Change UK parliamentary group. On Tuesday 4 June six of the party’s MPs (Heidi Allen, Luciana Berger, Angela Smith, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker and Sarah Wollaston) announced that they were leaving the party and would be ‘returning to supporting each other as an independent grouping of MPs’ 9 in the Commons in a format similar to that of The Independent Group in its initial parliamentary formation. Writing in the Spectator’s Coffee House blog shortly after the original February launch, Lloyd Evans proclaimed that the TIG was ‘doomed to follow in the SDP’s footsteps’,10 partly because of the big personalities within the group, but also as a result of the strength of the big political party machines. To some extent this prediction had come true. Following the split, the press spread rumours that the party had been plagued with disagreements,11 something that Chris Leslie also alluded to during an interview in the Guardian.12 Those who left Change UK cited several reasons for doing so. The

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predominant one was the deep disagreements within the group over party strategy. While half of the party (Coffey, Gapes, Leslie, Ryan and Soubry) wanted to push on and ‘form an alternative electoral force’ as a fully established political party, the other half of the party (the six who would eventually leave), were ‘prepared to play the longer game’.13 These MPs thought that by biding their time as a more loosely formed grouping in the Commons, they could let the chaotic events of the 2017 Parliament play out around them, giving the two main parties space to continue the self-destruction which had been so prevalent throughout 2019. They would then be able to strike when the time was right, reaping the dividends of a system in which a large number of voters felt politically homeless. At the beginning of 2019 it had seemed that all of the group’s breakaway MPs had signed up to the slow and steady approach, but the dynamics changed very quickly once their decision to leave their parties had gone public. Those who favoured the measured strategy soon regretted their failure to keep the group on a steady course. They described it as a ‘compound error’ for the group, one which meant that the group became a political party too quickly and was thus judged almost straight away ‘by the standards of a political party’.14 Some of the group’s MPs were very uncomfortable with the detour from their original plans almost from the start and this was exacerbated by the decision to contest the European parliamentary elections. One of these MPs later reflected that they themselves had felt politically

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inexperienced and so ‘let the others do things and make the decisions’.15 With hindsight they admitted that they ‘probably shouldn’t have done’. Several of those who left Change UK also felt that the party should have pushed more heavily for alliances and joint candidates with other small remain-leaning political parties (the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru or the Greens) instead of going it alone. So strongly did she feel about this that Heidi Allen threatened to resign as Change UK leader over the issue, realising as the European elections approached that the party should not be standing candidates, but encouraging its supporters to vote for other parties instead.16 Joint candidature is something that Change UK’s new leader Anna Soubry later pushed for in the lead-up to the by-election in Brecon and Radnorshire in the summer of 2019, suggesting something of a U-turn in the party’s strategic thinking.17 Although Change UK put on a united front wherever possible in the run-up to the European elections, after the split Soubry was quick to admit to these disagreements, telling the press that ‘some people weren’t even in the same book, never mind on the same page’ and criticising her former colleagues for their failure to ‘stop talking and do some frigging campaigning’.18 There were also disagreements over the internal organisation of the party and the way in which MPs in the group would (or would not) work together. For some, insufficient time was invested in cultivating the personal relationships and decision-making mechanisms that were really needed to make the party work. Communication 122

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difficulties were particularly pronounced. Although the group had a WhatsApp-based messaging system to spread key information about parliamentary business, the actual day-to-day communications between MPs were a struggle because of the positions of each member’s parliamentary office. While most small parties locate themselves on the same floor or floors of a building, the nature of Change UK’s creation meant that its MPs were spread right across the parliamentary estate. While several had offices in Portcullis House, they were on different floors, with others based in the Norman Shaw Buildings.19 This may seem irrelevant in the age of email and text communications, but the very ‘narrow strip of land’ between Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna’s offices meant that this became the place ‘where decisions [got] made’.20 These two individuals became the centre of the group’s internal power dynamics, with those in offices further away feeling as though they were on the side-lines. Two MPs in particular explained that they felt excluded from this inner circle of decision-making and that they were not privy to important campaign decisions made by the group in the run-up to the European elections. It is easy to see how, once the initial euphoria of the group’s creation had worn off, relationships between the MPs could have become strained. When Chuka Umunna moved to the Liberal Democrats – a clear sign that he was one of those MPs who did not want to take the softly, softly approach, but rather wanted to operate within a larger infrastructure quickly – his former colleagues did not all speak kindly of him. Soubry tweeted to ask him what he would do if the Liberal 123

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Democrats were asked to ‘prop up’ a Labour government, reminding him of the promise he had made when he left the Labour Party that he would never let Corbyn have the keys to Downing Street.21 There is no doubt that some of the challenges of being a small parliamentary party were also integral to Change UK’s split and, ultimately, to their decision to disband in December 2019. As one Liberal Democrat MP explained when reflecting on his position in the Commons, the life of an MP from a smaller party is ‘so incredibly different to that of most MPs’.22 Indeed, Heidi Allen told the House Magazine in April 2019 that she had ‘never known an intensity like it’.23 We can easily see that this is an accurate representation. In the context of the UK’s majoritarian first-past-the-post electoral system, small parties (and ultimately their successful MPs) have to have gone through a long slog on the campaign trail, battling to win their constituency seat. Entry into the Commons means defying the usual electoral system rules. Once they arrive they have few parliamentary colleagues to draw on and must face the challenge of learning parliamentary procedure and understanding the behavioural conventions of the chamber without the support of any large party machinery or resources. At the same time as they are striving to be effective constituency MPs to secure their hold on their constituency seat they must be the public face of their party, taking on frontbench party roles and handling what can be intense media interest. In several respects, Change UK had everything in its favour in terms of its position as a small parliamentary 124

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party, particularly when compared to the other parties sitting alongside it in the Commons. As a party formed purely from party-switching by existing MPs, it did not have to spend any time, energy or resources as a small party to make it into the Commons in the first place. The combined parliamentary experience of its MPs manifested itself in a great deal of existing positions on powerful select committees which other small parties are not typically entitled to, or which they must battle to receive, but Change UK promptly lost these. The new party also benefited enormously from the parliamentary and political climate generated by the government’s Brexit struggles. During the Brexit debates held in the Commons prior to the party’s formation, the Commons Speaker and his deputies were assiduous in ensuring that all political parties were given a platform to air their views in the chamber and thus Change UK was naturally incorporated into this system. Brexit also provided one clear issue for the party to focus on. Whereas most small parties will need to juggle a mix of parliamentary work and policy areas, there was so little non-Brexit parliamentary business in the first half of 2019 that other legislative work could take a back seat. Change UK did not need to spend many of their evenings worrying about which way to vote on obscure amendments, or about the lack of places for its MPs at a bill’s committee stage. Most of the drama was being played out on the floor of the Commons itself. It did not matter that the MPs were unable to cover each and every policy area with a Change UK spokesperson. So long as Brexit was covered, the party 125

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would not look inactive or suffer from a lack of visibility. It should have proved a much easier task to stay as a cohesive group than would have been the case had the parliamentary climate been different. The difficulty facing the group, though, was at the same time precisely because its presence in the Commons did not arise as the result of a general election. It was essentially a parliamentary party before it was a national political party. The MPs had to learn how to function as a unit and develop political or parliamentary strategy, all while building the basic foundations for being a political party. As one of their MPs pointed out, the development of the party’s constitution, financial arrangements and official positions meant that ‘90 per cent of what you do [in the early days] is areas of conflict’.24 For most parties, these are decisions and documents which have been formulated before any representatives have set foot in elected institutions. For Change UK, it was something that had to be done concurrently with the MPs’ work in parliament. It also had to be done largely by the MPs themselves, directly from the centre, with little support from volunteers or paid staff. The errors made by the party during the selection of candidates for the European parliamentary elections is a vivid indication of this problem. With few party staff and no organised or experienced campaign team, Change UK had to hire an external company to assist with the vetting process for its candidates. The work of this ‘top end vetting company’ 25 seemed to fall below standard, though, with two of the party’s candidates (Joseph Russo and Ali Sadjady) being forced to 126

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step down within a day of their campaign launch after offensive comments were uncovered in their social media accounts. This lack of capacity was also experienced by the SDP when it sought to establish a members’ database in the 1980s. Discussing the major problems caused by the external purchase of computer software to aid the creation and maintenance of a grassroots structure, Ivor Crewe and Anthony King described the reality of building the party as being like something out of Fawlty Towers.26 These two examples are signs of how new political parties can struggle to be professional organisations with the political and campaigning skills necessary when they try to push ahead and end up doing too much, too soon. The MPs and their staff were spinning far too many plates at once. The semi-collapse of Change UK in June 2019 raised questions about its future as a viable political party. Just a few months earlier, the Change UK MPs had spoken frequently of ‘realignment’ – their way of expressing hope that the party system would change to better accommodate voters who felt alienated from the traditional parties and political system, creating space for a new political party. This term is frequently used by new parties. Indeed, the SDP spoke of realignment regularly back in the 1980s and the Liberals well before that. The strong performance by the Liberal Democrats in the 2019 local elections and Umunna’s move into the party indicate that this gap could be filled by existing small parties, rather than prompting the development of new ones. Chris Coghlan, writing in the New Statesman in June 2019, said that Umunna’s defection illustrated that 127

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‘the movement for a new centre party to replace them is dead’.27 This is the burning question facing fledgling small parties in the UK today. Is there actually space in the British political system – and in the Commons – for another party? And if so, can a party beyond Labour and the Conservatives win enough seats to form a majority government? The Change UK MPs obviously felt that there was a big space for a new centre party, with a large number of the electorate feeling politically homeless, and that this space was not currently being occupied by the Lib Dems. But what sort of policies would such a party have? And is there actually space for them in parliament? The development of clear and distinctive policies is a further challenge for small parties in the UK Parliament. For some, like the SNP or Plaid Cymru, there is one core issue around which the party is based and upon which other key policies can be built. Unhappiness with the Prime Minister’s Brexit strategy was the one common thread running through all of the Change UK MPs and, given the emphasis placed on the push for a People’s Vote in their parliamentary work, it came to be the one policy area with which people could identify the party. Yet, as Allen herself explained, ‘Brexit is a massive, massive issue, but it cannot be everything that we’re about’.28 The party desperately needed to broaden its policy platform. Parliamentary business during the first half of 2019 gave it little opportunity to do this. As individuals its MPs made speeches and tabled questions on issues much broader than Brexit, but there was no apparent coordination across the party 128

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on these. Thus, while Mike Gapes’ call for an end to the conflict in Syria played into his own parliamentary strengths, there was no other Change UK parliamentary work on this issue from the party’s other MPs. Forced into the reactive parliamentary stance which lingers behind all small parties and not recognised as a formal parliamentary grouping in the Commons until April 2019, the party’s MPs did not have the capacity to develop a coherent parliamentary strategy based on any other policy issue in such a short space of time. Political and procedural hurdles worked against them. At the same time as they were trying to develop a coherent policy platform, Change UK’s MPs were facing the challenge of trying to create a new type of political party within a traditional party system and institution. The party website promoted it as an ‘alternative to the old, established parties’ 29 at Westminster, one which would be more collaborative and less silo-ed, with policies based on ‘evidence not ideology’.30 Four of the former Change UK MPs (Allen, Berger, Shuker and Smith) initially announced plans to create a more cooperative style of working, in a similar format to the initial creation of The Independent Group back in February 2019. They were keen to incorporate other independent MPs in this model (ex-Labour MP John Woodcock expressed his support for this kind of arrangement). This would involve ‘supporting one another’s work as independently minded independents in parliament, but also providing leadership in a way in which you can do when you’re not a member of a political party’.31 Although they wanted to ‘operate in 129

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a different way to traditional political parties’,32 they were seemingly building a political party in all but name; with an official group name (the Independents), website and call for donations.33 This expression of a new type of politics is a standard refrain for new parliamentary groups in the Commons. Indeed, the SNP began the 2015 Parliament by denouncing the culture of the large political parties and expressing scepticism about the traditional ‘Westminster’ way of doing politics. Martyn Day, elected for the SNP in Linlithgow and East Falkirk, described in his maiden speech how he saw his day job as a ‘stint behind enemy lines’.34 If we go back to the 1980s we can see how the SDP also strove to be a ‘new’ type of political party and to destroy the two-party system.35 However much new political parties express frustration with the traditional party or parliamentary system, they inevitably must find ways to work within it. The SNP may hate bobbing up and down in the chamber in order to speak, or the hours seemingly wasted standing around in Commons division lobbies, but it has come to accept that it must engage in these institutional norms in order to be an effective Commons party. Its MPs still put forward a reform agenda and can be seen regularly pushing for electronic voting to be introduced in the chamber, but they must do so by utilising the very procedures they strive to get rid of. A new type of political party or parliamentary group in the Commons needs to do the same, making compromises in order to make progress. The difficulties experienced by Change UK may also help explain the rapid success of Nigel Farage’s Brexit 130

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Party, which seemed to have leap-frogged the group in summer 2019 as the emerging small party in British politics. Unlike Change UK, the Brexit Party managed very quickly to publicise its core (and for many, only) message of a ‘clean break Brexit’.36 This enabled it to amass significant support in the run-up to the European elections and beyond; a YouGov poll in July 2019 showed that 21 per cent of respondents would vote for the party in a general election.37 Yet, like Change UK, the party lacked any solid infrastructure. It too has used the language of doing politics differently and of challenging a two-party system which it describes as ‘self serving’,38 but its single-issue stance has enabled it to encapsulate all of this within a neat political message, overcoming its lack of members and very basic party infrastructure. Its attitude of disengagement towards the European Parliament and the way in which its MEPs displayed their discontent for it – for instance, turning their backs while the EU’s ‘Ode to Joy’ anthem played in the chamber – sat well with this core message. Unlike parliamentary parties in the Commons, they could be ‘cheerfully defiant’, as their leader Nigel Farage described them,39 because they had absolutely no intention or need to work within the existing norms and procedures of the European Parliament. The 2019 General Election saw the complete collapse of Change UK. Standing under the name ‘Independent Group for Change’, the party fielded just three candidates (Gapes, Leslie and Soubry). Their cumulative vote was exceedingly low. The 10,000 votes they received across their three constituencies was only a couple of hundred 131

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more than the Monster Raving Loony Party. All three were defeated by a candidate standing for the political parties under which they had originally been elected to parliament. It was an election that none of the three realistically expected to win. Less than half an hour after losing his Nottingham East seat, Chris Leslie had posted a video message to Twitter, saying that rather than being about winning, the decision of the Change UK MPs to stand at the General Election ‘was about standing up and flying the flag for decent centre-ground values that needed championing by somebody, somewhere’.40 The other former Change UK MPs who had chosen to stand as independents (Shuker and Smith) or as Liberal Democrats (Berger, Umunna and Wollaston) also failed to win their seats. Also taking to Twitter within just a few minutes of losing his seat, Shuker confirmed that he still had ‘no regrets’ about leaving the Labour Party.41 Luciana Berger’s was the narrowest loss, coming second with 17,600 votes to incumbent Mike Freer’s 24,000. On 18 February 2020, the first anniversary of the press conference in which Berger and her colleagues had announced their departure from the Labour Party, several former Change UK MPs marked the occasion on social media. Gavin Shuker tweeted a solitary picture of the press conference without comment, while Chris Leslie shared a piece written by his wife, Nicola Murphy, the party’s former director, which asserted that ‘taking a stand’ like the seven Labour MPs had done ‘is not failure’.42 In many respects she was right. The 2017 Parliament was one of the most unpredictable and 132

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tumultuous in living memory, weakening the two main parties like never before and opening up opportunities that the smaller ones could capitalise on. In the words of one of the former Change UK MPs, ‘it will be a long time before anyone will be brave enough to try a new party again’.43 In the meantime there remains a sizeable group of small political parties at Westminster who are all striving to make their mark. It is difficult to predict if the 2019 Parliament will be any less volatile than the last, but at the time of writing the Labour Party continues to be internally divided as it establishes itself after Jeremy Corbyn and tries to find the right ideological route to electoral success. The challenge for small parties will be in deciding whether their aspirations can be best achieved by acting alone in the Commons, as a single parliamentary group, or by joining forces with other parties, whether formally or informally. One thing is for sure, though. The political, electoral and parliamentary landscape may be a hostile one for small parties and they may come and go, but they will never disappear completely from the green benches of the House of Commons.

Notes 1 These include Jenny Jones, the Green Party’s first appointed peer. 2 P. Dominiczak, S. Swinford and C. Hope, ‘Election debate 2015: Miliband flops as SNP and UKIP secure shock victory’, Telegraph, 2 April 2015. Online at: www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/general-election-2015/11512267/Election-debate-2015Winners-and-losers.html [accessed 25 June 2019].

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The end of the small party? 3 This figure is correct as of the 2017 General Election and includes the seven Sinn Féin MPs who do not take their seats. Excluding Sinn Féin would make this 10 per cent. 4 BBC News, ‘Wales election 2016: results’, 19 May 2016. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2016/wales/results [accessed 7 May 2020]. 5 BBC News, ‘England local elections 2019’, 3 May 2019. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/ceeqy0e9894t/england-localelections-2019 [accessed 26 June 2019]. 6 J. Roberts, ‘Nigel Farage warns Brexit Party can win next general election, Metro, 27 May 2019. Online at: https:// metro.co.uk/2019/05/27/nigel-farage-warns-brexit-partygetting-ready-general-election-9695126/ [accessed 25 June 2019]. 7 The Liberal Democrats increased their MEPs from 15 to 16, while the Greens rose from 3 to 7. 8 Anna Soubry, Sky News, 27 May 2019. 9 BBC News, ‘Change UK splits as six of 11 MPs become independents’, 4 June 2019. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-politics-48515505 [accessed 5 June 2019]. 10 Lloyd Evans, ‘The Independent Group is doomed to follow in the SDP’s footsteps’, Spectator, Coffee House blog, 20 February 2019, https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/02/the-independentgroup-is-doomed-to-follow-in-the-sdps-footsteps/ [accessed 24 April 2020]. 11 See, for instance, I. Hardman, ‘The biggest mistake Change UK made was to become Change UK’, New Statesman, 4 June 2019. Online at: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/ the-biggest-mistake-change-uk-made-was-to-become-changeuk/ [accessed 26 June 2019]. 12 H. Stewart, ‘Change UK: How not to set up a political party, Guardian podcast, 12 June 2019. Online at: www. theguardian.com/politics/audio/2019/jun/12/change-uk-hownot-to-set-up-a-political-party-podcast [accessed 9 July 2019]. 13 Interview, Independent MP, 19 June 2019. 14 Interview, Independent MP, 19 June 2019. 15 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020. 16 Stewart, ‘Change UK: How not to set up a political party’. 17 Change UK, ‘Anna Soubry MP writes to remain parties calling for joint candidate in Brecon and Radnorshire by-election’, 21

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Whither the two-party system? June 2019. Online at: https://voteforchange.uk/anna-soubrymp-writes-to-remain-parties-calling-for-joint-candidate-inbrecon-and-radnorshire-by-election/ [accessed 25 June 2019]. 18 Walker, P. (2019) ‘Anna Soubry: Umunna made “serious mistake” leaving Change UK’, Guardian, 9 June 2019. Online at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/anna-soubryumunna-made-serious-mistake-leaving-change-uk [accessed 24 April 2020]. 19 Interview, Change UK MP, 10 April 2019. 20 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 21 @Anna_Soubry, 18 June 2019. Online at: https://twitter.com/ Anna_Soubry/status/1140956255789494277 [accessed 18 June 2019]. 22 Interview, Liberal Democrat MP, 9 January 2019. 23 S. Whale, ‘Heidi Allen: The fact people are trying to pick holes shows we must be a bit of a threat’, House Magazine, 26 April 2019. Online at: www.politicshome.com/news/uk/ foreign-affairs/brexit/house/house-magazine/103461/heidiallen-”-fact-people-are-trying-pick [accessed 9 July 2019]. 24 Interview, Change UK MP, 4 June 2019. 25 Whale, ‘Heidi Allen: The fact people are trying to pick holes’. 26 I. Crewe and A. King, The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 242. 27 C. Coghlan, ‘The death of Change UK has brought life to the Lib Dems’, New Statesman, 14 June 2019. Online at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/06/deathchange-uk-has-bought-life-lib-dems [accessed 24 April 2020]. 28 Whale, ‘Heidi Allen: The fact people are trying to pick holes’. 29 https://voteforchange.uk/ [accessed 9 July 2019]. 3 0 https://voteforchange.uk/a-better-democracy-is-vital-and-theold-parties-are-not-the-answer/ [accessed 9 July 2019]. 31 Interview, Independent MP, 19 June 2019. 32 Independents, ‘The Independents working together to bridge the political divide’, press release, 10 July 2019. Online at: www.theindependents.org.uk/press/the-independents-workingtogether-to-bridge-the-political-divide [accessed 11 July 2019]. 33 See www.theindependents.org.uk/ [accessed 11 July 2019]. 34 HC Debates, 14 July 2015, c. 806. 35 Crewe and King, The Birth, Life and Death, p. 309.

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The end of the small party? 6 www.thebrexitparty.org/about [accessed 9 July 2019]. 3 37 YouGov, ‘Westminster voting intention figures’, 12 July 2019. Online at: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articlesreports/2019/07/12/voting-intention-con-24-brex-21-lab-20lib-dem-19- [accessed 15 July 2019]. 38 www.thebrexitparty.org/about [accessed 9 July 2019]. 39 BBC News, ‘Brexit Party MEPS turn backs in EU Parliament, 2 July 2019. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics48839829 [accessed 11 July 2019]. 40 @ChrisLeslieUK, 13 December 2019, https://twitter.com/ ChrisLeslieUK/status/1205329746646704128 [accessed 20 February 2020]. 41 @GavinShuker, 13 December 2019. Online at: https://twitter. com/gavinshuker/status/1205320005384056833 [accessed 25 February 2020]. 42 @GavinShuker, 18 February 2020. Online at: https://twitter. com/gavinshuker/status/1229778146398015488 [accessed 20 February 2020]; N. Murphy, ‘The Independent Group wasn’t a failure – it was about putting country before party’, Huffington Post, 18 February 2020. 43 Interview, former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020.

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Parliamentary material Parliamentary debates HC Debates are cited throughout the book. This refers to the official record of debates in the House of Commons, also known as Hansard. They can be found on parliament’s website (https:// hansard.parliament.uk/), where they are listed by date. The search tool on this page is excellent and can demonstrate the changing use of words or phrases over time.

Bill committee debates These can be found through the same Hansard link above. They are also attached to the bills and legislation pages for each parliamentary session (www.parliament.uk/business/bills-andlegislation/current-bills/previous-bills/). The bill committees cited here are as follows:

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Written parliamentary questions Commons Written Question 269698: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy: Staff, 26 June 2019. Online at: www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questionsanswers-statements/written-question/Commons/2019-06-26/ 269698/ [accessed 7 May 2020]. Commons Written Question 270324, USA: Detention Centres, 27 June 2019. Online at: https://www.parliament.uk/business/ publications/written-questions-answers-statements/writtenquestion/commons/2019-06-27/270324/ [accessed 7 May 2020].

Interviews This research draws on over 50 interviews with current and former Members of the UK Parliament as well as the devolved legislatures. Those cited directly are listed by party affiliation. In all cases I have been guided by them as to the appropriate affiliation to use, particularly where interviewees have changed party affiliation during their time as elected representatives. Change UK MP, 10 April 2019 Change UK MP, 4 June 2019 Former Liberal Democrat MP, 30 January 2020 Green MP, 22 November 2018 Green MP, 19 March 2019 Independent MP, 19 June 2019 Liberal Democrat, 19 February 2019 Liberal Democrat MP, 30 October 2018 Liberal Democrat MP, 1 November 2018

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Index

Allen, Heidi 9–10, 18, 46, 51, 65, 67, 120, 122, 132 Alliance Party 74–5, 116, 118 Bercow, John 36, 89–90, 36, 89, 104–5 Berger, Luciana 4, 5, 8, 13, 48, 81, 120, 132 Brexit Party 22–3, 49, 118–19, 130–1 see also Farage, Nigel Cable, Vince 14, 33 Carswell, Douglas 6, 20 Change UK change of name 22–4 committee memberships 48–53 disbanding of 131–2 donations to 82–3 election performance 22–3, 120, 122, 126–8 formation 3, 117–18 Nando’s meal 15, 57–8 organisation 43, 81–2, 131

parliamentary activity 27–8, 31–5, 39–40, 100, 106–7, 125–6, 128–9 policy portfolios 43, 59, 66–8 Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) 31–2, 90 seating in Commons 28–34, 90 split 1–2, 23–4, 58, 120–4, 127 staff 80–2 see also Independent Group, The Coffey, Ann 4, 8, 9, 68 Committee of Selection 45–6 see also whips Conservative Party 7, 10, 15–16, 24, 51, 59, 69–70, 72 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 32–3, 34, 46–7, 72, 74, 83, 102, 117 elections 2015 General Election 116 2017 General Election 15, 35, 117

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Index 2019 European parliamentary election 22–3, 58, 119–20, 126–7, 131 2019 General Election 1–2, 131–2 Farage, Nigel 20, 22, 119, 130–1 Gapes, Mike 4, 8, 32–3, 48–50, 67, 80, 129 Gethins, Stephen 50, 98, 104–5 Grady, Patrick 33, 99–100 Green Party 18–19, 20, 47, 72, 74–5, 78–9, 92–6, 97, 100–2, 103, 116, 118, 119 see also Lucas, Caroline Hoyle, Sir Lindsay 41, 98 Independent Group, The 3–5, 14, 18 see also Change UK Independent Group for Change 131–2 see also Change UK independent MPs 5–7, 15, 32, 41, 49, 129 Labour Party 3, 4, 15–16, 49, 59, 70, 72, 77 Leslie, Chris 1, 4, 11, 24, 28, 40, 45–6, 48, 50, 66, 67, 120, 123, 132 Liberal Democrats 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 30–1, 33, 35–6, 46–7, 50, 60–1,

63–4, 72, 75–6, 89, 103, 104, 119 Lucas, Caroline 19–20, 44, 63, 92–7, 100–2, 103 May, Theresa 2, 9, 11, 103 People’s Vote 11–12, 95, 106, 128 Plaid Cymru 41, 44–5, 47, 50, 60, 62, 64, 72, 74, 77, 83, 89, 91, 96–7 Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) 16–17, 30–1, 36–7, 41, 89–90, 105 Ryan, Joan 9, 24, 43, 50, 67–8, 90 Scottish National Party (SNP) 17, 19, 20, 30–2, 36–8, 46–7, 57, 59–60, 63, 69, 72, 74, 76, 80–1, 91, 97–100, 104, 109–11, 116, 130 Short Money 73, 75, 78–9 Shuker, Gavin 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 40, 48, 50, 66, 67, 80, 120, 132 Smith, Angela 4, 9, 28, 40, 48, 68, 120, 132 Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) 118 Social Democratic Party (SDP) 11, 21, 27, 39, 49, 58, 120, 127 Soubry, Anna 2, 9–10, 11, 23, 24, 34, 48, 66, 68, 90, 95, 106, 120, 122, 123

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Index Speaker of the House of Commons 16, 36–7, 38, 39, 62, 96, 97, 101, 103–4, 106, 125 see also Bercow, John; Hoyle, Sir Lindsay Thewliss, Alison 109–10 UK Independence Party (UKIP) 6, 20, 49, 65, 79, 116, 118 see also Farage, Nigel

Umunna, Chuka 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 23, 57, 61, 67, 80, 81, 120, 123, 132 urgent questions 103–4 usual channels see whips Watson, Tom 14 whips 13, 41–5, 49, 51–2, 88, 90–1, 92 Wishart, Pete 33, 40 Wollaston, Sarah 9–10, 13, 48, 51, 52, 68, 132

146