13/03/2026

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1:05Hello, I'm Susan Hume and this is the Todayan Parliament podcast for Friday the 13th of March. Coming up, there is a bid to ensure an assisted dining service in England and Wales is kept separate from the NHS. It means that the patient's care cannot be contaminated and we'll be looking at Hollywood's progress on an assisted dining law too. Also, as the Lords investigate the digital currency stable coins, we get an explainer from the Bank of England. Money's taken many different forms. I actually really fitting with stood in front of this gold bar because at one point that was gold and silver coins and then it moved on to paper notes. Today, actually, there's very little physical money. Most of the money is digital. It's numbers in our bank account. And as the bill to eject the final hereditary peers has passed, some words of advice from a marquise who's already left. As far as those are leaving are concerned, well, you can still have an enjoyable life without privilege of sitting on the red benches.

2:07But first, should an assisted dining service be completely separate to health care? The question was the focus of much of the later stage debate in the Lords on the assisted dining bill. The legislation would allow terminally ill adults and England and Wales to request help to die if they believe to have less than six months to live. A non-party peer lady Finley, who is a palliative care expert, wanted a complete separation of assisted death and health care. She used an example from her own practice. 36 years ago, a GP referred a distraught young man whose prognosis as estimated by him, the surgeon and oncologist was about three months, saying, here's the most clear cut case for you, Venesia, I have ever seen. In total pain, desperate for lethal drugs, with the youngest child only six weeks old, his care was challenging. Yet, since assisted death was not available to him 36 years ago, David was still alive today

3:09and had successfully brought up his three children on his own after his wife died. And Lady Finley argued that was why the possibility of an assisted death should not color someone's medical treatment, but a conservative Lord Markham was puzzled. Surely the people best place to give evidence and understand the situation on the capacity of the person involved, whether there is any coercion involved, their own circumstances are the very people that she's suggesting shouldn't be part of that panel. Lady Finley argued that the panel assessing someone's eligibility for an assisted death would still have access to all the patient's medical notes, but separating the services would be vital. It means that the patient's care cannot be contaminated by pressures of the doctor being burnt out, by financial pressures on the system in which that patient is being treated, or even by administrative pressures,

4:10because the patient's discharge is becoming difficult and because there are beds that are needed and there are patients being treated in corridors. Another non-party peer and doctor Lady Murphy took a different view. She said Lady Finley's proposal would isolate people who were dying from the support of the doctors who'd known them throughout their illness. We should not separate them off. We're there to support them during this process and these little nitpicking bits of change to the bill will just make it worse. But her language incensed an opponent of assisted dying, the Conservative Lord Deben. To talk about the care with which this proposal has been put forward as nitpicking is frankly unacceptable and the noble lady should not have said that because the reason this has been brought forward is because many of us feel that we should take seriously the pressures of the people who are going to have to carry out

5:13these arrangements. Labour's Lady J told him the evidence from abroad was that legalised assisted dying actually led to improved palliative care and with time to debate more than a thousand suggested changes to the bill now running out her frustration was clear. There is so much emphasis in so many of these amendments on the detailed administration. She used the word nitpicking which you didn't like but the very very small print of administration and so much less focus on those people who are actually going to hope to take advantage of this legislation. A non-party peer and doctor Lady Cass wondered whether there'd be enough doctors qualified to provide assisted death no matter what the system used. People will need to opt in to take on that kind of role and have very specific training for it and given the numbers that are predicted to require an assisted death that will be quite a small carder of clinicians.

6:13The non-party peer, Lord Stevens, who used to be the chief of NHS England was worried about the unknown cost to the NHS if assisted dying were not made a separate service. This potentially leaves open not what the noble and murdered Lord described as skeleton provisions. I would regard them as a Trojan horse clause for fundamental change to the National Health Service by the back door. Labour's Lord Faulkner is steering the bill through the House of Lords. He said it was crucial not to force a dying patient into an entirely separate over complex process. Whether it's precisely separate or not is not for me the key question. The key question is that if you are a patient and you want an assisted death there is a practical and safe way of doing it that does not place an undue burden upon the patient. Lord Faulkner did not support Lady Finley's suggestion but there are no votes at this stage and the debate continues next Friday.

7:15However, the Scottish Parliament has also been occupied with an assisted dying bill for termly ill adults in Scotland too. Holly Roots held some marathon sessions on the detail of the legislation over the past week. I'm joined by our political correspondent at Holly Root Lindsey Bues and Lindsey, a bit like at Westminster, the debates have just got longer and longer. Yeah, we're into the final stage for legislation with more than 300 amendments being debated and voted on by MSPs. That is a high number, it's not unprecedented but it's taking a very long time to get through these amendments and it has meant that MSPs have been sitting late into the night with the stage three sessions being extended the number of days for these stage three sessions being extended to and we're due to, as things stand at the moment, have a final vote on this legislation next week. It's such a sensitive emotional issue. What's the mood of the debate been like? Yeah, it has been emotional at times.

8:19MSPs, I think, are feeling the weight of responsibility of legislating on what is a very serious sensitive issue where there are strong views that has to be said on both sides, those four assisted dying and those who do not want to see it become law in Scotland. I think they are feeling the weight of responsibility. They have so far been very careful in the way that they have been discussing this issue, very respectful in the way they've been discussing it. I think there is a sense of frustration building now, though, that perhaps some MSPs are taking too long in these debates on the amendments, trying to draw out the process. I think there's a bit of frustration, a bit of nervousness about getting to the final vote because we only have a couple of weeks left here at Holyrood before Parliament rises for the Holyrood elections in May. Thanks to Lindsay Buse there. Now, this week, the Royal Navy Worship, HMS Dragon left Portsmouth heading to the Eastern Mediterranean.

9:19It joins fighter jets, helicopters and counter drone units in the Middle East. US bombers have been seen taking off from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to summise all that looks a lot like war, but the Prime Minister has made a careful distinction that the UK's involvement is strictly defensive, not offensive, and that's why Parliament doesn't need to have a vote in it at this stage. There is no convention for a vote in relation to defensive action, only offensive action, and nor could the be realistically defensive action has to be taken at various with notice. Secure Starmer making the distinction there, but what are the rules around whether MPs get to vote on military action? I spoke to Dr James Strong from Queen Mary University London who told me that votes on going to war are not a modern development. We've seen specific votes before military action in the past. There was one before the Korean War, for example, but what we've also seen is different ways

10:20that governments have tested that they have the support of the House of Commons before going to war. So at the start of the two world wars, for example, the government's vast parliament to approve in advance additional spending to pay for the war effort. And that was seen as a day facto yes or no vote. If we go back into the more distant past in 1775 at the start of what became the American war of independence, the House of Commons moved a humble address to the throne, calling on King George III to take military action against the rebellious conelists. But it seems to be something that there aren't any precise rules for what kind of vote or when you call it. There are no precise rules for what kind of vote or when you call it. It's very much up to the government of the day. The key thing to remember about the United Kingdom is that it is a parliamentary democracy. I don't need to say that on this show. If you are going to do anything as big as getting involved in military action as a parliamentary government, you want to be sure one way or another

11:21that you have the support of the House of Commons. And in an ideal world, you want to get the support of the opposition parties as well. But there are lots of different ways of doing that. So there's no fixed set of rules around whether you have to consult the House of Commons in advance and how you might go about doing that. David Cameron lost the vote on taking action in Syria in 2013. Do you think that is very much at the forefront of Prime Minister's minds after that? I think that there was a sense after 2013 that the whole thing had been a mistake. It was pretty clear that Ed Milvand lead with the opposition at the time hadn't really intended to prevent military action entirely. It should have been possible for the government and the opposition to agree the wording of a motion. Had it not been in the summer recess, the whips would have had a better sense of what was going on. But at the same time, it was also seen as very embarrassing on the international stage.

12:22Keir Stormer seems to have come up with a new set of rules. He says that it's fine to take military action for defensive purposes without a vote. It would only be needed for offensive purposes. But that's a very grey area, isn't it? There's a lot of grey areas here. When you're dealing with what is an emergent convention and that's what I would describe what we currently have. An emergent convention that the government should consult the House of Commons in advance of certain types of military action. There are some areas where it's pretty straightforward to say, yes, there should be a prior vote, large-scale deployment of ground troops in a combat role. I think it's widely accepted that that would count. Equally, it's widely accepted that the use of special forces or unmanned aerial vehicles drones. These things, it's widely accepted, do not count. Things get more murky when you get into the use of airstrikes and when you get into questions about, is it self-defense? And is it an emergency?

13:23That's the other exception that has been repeatedly used by governments going back to Tony Blair. If it's an emergency, we won't wait. So arguing that there's a difference between defense and offense, that is a new one. We've not had that previously. But again, as a parliamentary government, you don't want to get into anything as complex or challenging as a war without having a clear sense of whether you've got the support of the House of Commons behind you. Dr. James Strong there. Work moves fast. Every email, report, and proposal counts. That's where Grammarly comes in. It's your one place to think, write, and finish. Grammarly's AI agents help you find natural phrasing. Fine-tune tone and confidently write wherever you work. It's the premier writing tool that 93% of users trust to get more work done. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com.

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15:25You're listening to Today in Parliament with me, Susan Hume. Still to come, getting women into Parliament's globally has slowed, but the House of Commons, at least, has moved on from Nancy Astor's day. So I'd stay in the house, and I wouldn't hang around the lobby. I didn't go into the right room. I had a little room of my own, and I stayed in the house, and then I went down into my room. Now, a House of Lords Committee is holding an inquiry into stable coins, not a way of paying for accommodation for your pony, but a digital asset. I akin to that not the same as Bitcoin. To find out what they are and why they matter, I've come to the venerable bank of England, which is looking at how to regulate stable coins. I'm joined by the bank's expert on the issue, Emma Butterworth. And Emma, we're standing next to a case holding a rather beautiful, gleaming gold ingot, and a digital asset seems a long way from something as tangible and as shiny as that. Are they very different, or are there some similarities there?

16:25So there's definitely some similarities. I think it's good to step back and start from the fact that when we pay for anything, so whether that's you or me buying our groceries in the supermarket or an investor buying a bond, we need money to do that. And over time, money's taken many different forms. And I think as you say, it's really fitting with stood in front of this gold bar, because at one point that was gold and silver coins, and then it moved on to paper notes. Today, actually, there's very little physical money. Most of the money is digital. It's numbers in our bank account today. But the one thing about money that's really important is you need to trust it, and it needs to be commonly accepted. And a really key anchor to that is that it's got a stable value. You need to know that £10 in your bank account is the same as a £10 note in your pocket. So I pay for things digitally now. How are things like stable coins or digital assets digital money different? So a stable coin, you can think of it as just a new form of digital money that can be used to make payments

17:28like the money in your bank account today. But it doesn't live in a bank account like most money does. It lives on what we call a blockchain. And that blockchain is a digital record that anyone can see. Stable coins are called stable because they're designed so that one digital coin should always equal £1. To make that promise believable, stable coins are backed with real assets. So when you give the issuer of a stable coin £1, they create one digital coin and give it to you. And they hold safe assets equal to £1 to back that coin. And they hold it in safe assets like cash or government bonds. If you want to then swap that digital coin and get your £1 back, the issuer will sell some of those safe assets and give you back your pound. It's that stable value that makes stable coins possible to be used for payments today just like the money in your bank account. And that makes them different from other sorts of cryptocurrencies. Exactly. It's very different to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin

18:30which are unbacked so they're not backed by any real assets. And because of that, their value goes up and down. And as we've seen, often by quite a lot. Emma Butterworth talking to me at the Bank of England. Well, Beckett Westminster, the House of Lords Committee certainly had a lot of questions about stable coins and how we might use them. The Lib Dem Lord Sharky got down to basics. How important is it likely to be? Why are we bothered about this? Who is going to make money out of it? And who is going to benefit from it? And where are the risks going to be located? And what happens if we don't do any of this? While attempting to answer his long list of queries was the Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Briden. This technology has got the ability to improve payments. It can be available. Payments can be made 24-7. They can be made instantly. They can be made at cheaper costs. They can have fewer intermediaries involved.

19:32She stressed the flexibility. It can be programmed so that the money only moves if an event happens. They can be made for very small amounts. And all of those are real world use cases for this technology. But a non-party peer Lord Vox wondered whether it was all as good as it sounded. He questioned whether you could really make such speedy transactions without sacrificing security. So to what extent does the bank actually has actually looked into the technology and whether these advantages that we're always told about are really genuine? Sarah Briden said the Bank of England had its own lab for investigating the technology. Where we experiment where financial companies can come an experiment. She said the technology was advancing fast. What was difficult to do six months ago? It becomes easier now and in six months time we may find that the issues are fixed.

20:33But if you're asking could you on a decentralized technology do millions of transactions in millions of seconds for tiny amounts of cost right now? That is not possible. What we are trying to do is ensure that we have a regime in place that as those technological improvements happen we are able to support that. The Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Sarah Briden on the latest technology for buttering goods. Now after years of gains there are concerns that progress in women's representation in politics and parliaments across the world has slowed down. According to the Inter-parliamentary Union, the number of women with seats in national parliaments has gone up by a tiny amount, just 0.3%. It's the slowest growth for nearly a decade. And it may be that some of the barriers to women now are not so different from 1919

21:34when Nancy Aster was the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons as she described in a BBC interview 40 years later. It's like going into a Memphis club, I mean an all-male club. All-male club. And I was very conscious of that. So I'd stay in the House and I wouldn't hang around the lobby. I didn't go into the right room. I had a little room of my own and I stayed in the House and then I went down into my room. Did you try to exploit the fact that you were a woman? For him to say no. That was so obvious. No, that was so obvious. But I really felt and this is important. Women had died for the vote. Mrs. Pancus and that woman who threw herself before me. And I realized that I was there because of what they had done. And that gave me great courage and a great feeling of sort of dedication to the woman's cause. Nancy Astor speaking in 1959.

22:36Martin Chungong is the director general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union that collected the data on women in national parliaments. And he told me he was worried that the number had gone up so little over the last year. Even those countries that have been gender friendly, are facing difficulties. Iceland used to be top, top, top when it came to a women's representation. But they were witnessing a slowdown. So what do you think is behind this? I think that the number of factors, I think the anti-right movement is very strong. In recent years we have had strong populist movements that have been preaching the narrative that gender equality should slow down. And so this is having consequences regarding women's political representation. And of course we do have the phenomenon that is fueled by the emergence of new technologies, the social media, where women increasingly face abuse on other forms of violence, on account of having ventured into what is considered to be a male domain,

23:41to the extent that many of them are stepping down. And do you think that is because there is a kind of a feeling, a move globally back to the idea of it should be a strong man in charge who does what he thinks? Unfortunately, I think so. I think that, yes, in the popular mind, the politics is something that needs to be driven by strong men, as you see. But you cannot imagine ruling this world with only one segment of the population represented in decision-making. I'm struck, though, by the contrast between you making the argument for it. And these global forces, these strong people in charge, the social media that you mentioned earlier, you're fighting against an awful lot there. The thing is, we are engaged in a noble cause. I don't think that those who are pushing back on gender rights hold a majority view, think they're still on the fringe of society and they do it for populist policies to gain favor with certain segments of society.

24:42But generally, I do think that the campaign for gender equality is a noble one that is supported by the cross-section of the world's populations. And we see some progress that is being made in certain countries and that we need to celebrate. There are good stories in Latin America, for instance, that is home to four of the summer countries that have achieved gender parity. So the message is that it is possible to make progress on gender equality. We just have to set our minds to hate. But there are still some countries with absolutely no women in politics at all. Yeah, certainly, it was very describing this year to discover that we have three countries in the world that have no women in parliament. Yemen, Voman and Tuvalu. Just two, three years ago, we are celebrating the fact that all parliaments in the world had women. So those countries had women MPs and now they don't, is that right? That's right. Until 2023, they all had women in parliament.

25:42And today they don't. How does the UK fit into this scheme? Are we doing well or badly here? The UK is doing well. You last had parliamentary elections in 2024. And we saw a historic high of women into parliament. 40% of the seats in the House of Commons are now held by women. But I also want to mention that when it comes to violence against women, politicians, when it comes to intimidation of politicians, we are witnessing a worrying trend where we see that women, modern men coming for violence and intimidation. That is, I would say, a major obstacle to women's political empowerment. Martin Chungong of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Well, there are no women hereditary peers in the Lords. And within a few weeks, most of the male ones will have gone too. On Tuesday night, the House of Lords finally agreed to pass the law ending the right of anyone to sit in parliament by dint of their birth.

26:44A conservative hereditary Lord Strathclyde regretted it. I hope, like many others have done tonight, will pause for a moment at this extraordinary moment, where for 800 years or nearly 800 years, hereditary peers have served in this House that that process today comes to an end. A few of the existing marquisies, via counts or urls, will be given life peerages, allowing them to stay on, but their sons won't be eligible for a seat. There was a lot more fanfare in 1999 when Tony Blair's original legislation, ejecting the majority of hereditary peers, was made law. There were about 750 of them back then, mostly conservatives. But 92 were allowed to stay on, with their numbers kept topped up. That deal was struck in order to get Tony Blair's bill into law at all, because the conservatives had been blocking it in the House of Lords, and it's that rump of hereditary peers which, more than a quarter of a century later,

27:44is finally going. I've been speaking to Lord Solsbury, who, along with Tony Blair's friend and Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvin, struck that deal, and I asked Lord Solsbury if it expected those remaining hereditries to stay on so long. No, absolutely not. I used to have a bet with Derry Irvin, who became a great friend during the course of the negotiations. He thought it would last about six months. I said, well, we could probably stretch it out for by 18, but the idea of it lasting more than a quarter of a century was, I think, very far from what we expected. What did you expect to happen? The idea, really, was to keep a number of hereditries there, as a constant reminder that this was unfinished business, and the deal was that they would stay there until a more thoroughgoing reform of their lordships would happen. Everybody thought, of course, I just wanted to keep the hereditries there for the sake of it, which was not actually true, but you couldn't expect them to believe otherwise.

28:47I also couldn't expect them to keep their word. All that's happened now, of course, is that we have the abolition of the hereditries, which I'm sorry about, but we also have an enormous increase in the Prime Minister's power of patronage. I'm not sure that that is a good exchange. I wonder why that more widespread reform of the House of Lords didn't happen then, hasn't happened since. It's just all in the two difficult box. Nobody can agree. Yeah, I think it's partly that. You put three people in a room who don't know nothing about their lordships, and then about 20 minutes, they held about five different passionately held opinions of how to reform their lordships. So getting agreement is difficult. I was particularly interested, though, about the President's speakers' views about the dangers of a directly elected House. But it would be odd to have hereditry peers in this day and age, no? Yes, and I agree with that. I mean, I might feel sentimental about it, and like a few to remain, but much more important is the thoroughgoing reform of the membership

29:50and how they're selected. I personally think that a sensible thing would be to make the second House consist of indirectly elected people from local government. You opted to retire step down from the House of Lords when you didn't need to. Do you have a message for anyone who's leaving with a bit of sadness in the week's months to come? Yes, as far as those who are leaving are concerned, well, you can still have an enjoyable life without privilege of sitting on the red benches. I'm not a great one for looking back. Lord Salisbury, and by the way, his great-great-grandfather was the last Prime Minister to do that job from a seat in the House of Lords stepping down in 1902. That's it for now. I'm Susan Hume. The studio manager was Paul Mason, the editor, Mandy Baker, and that was the Today in Parliament podcast. Thanks for listening. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person

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