pete wishart.ome of the issues which are going to shape this parliament over the months to come. and to discuss all of this, i am joined in the studio byjill rutter of the institute for government, professor ian begg of the london school of economics, and by the constitutional expert professor vernon bogdanor. vernon bogdanor, is pete wishart right? is it a zombie parliament? from one point of view, it is a zombie parliament in that it is deadlocked. there is really no majority for any controversial legislation at all. and both of the major parties are internally deeply divided on the major piece of legislation, which is, of course, the european union withdrawal bill. but from another point of view, you might call it the backbencher‘s parliament, because any backbenchers with proposals which achieve consensus can get their measures through. we have already seen an example of that in the proposal by stella creasey that women who come from northern ireland to secure abortions on this side of the iris

pete wishart. mps will hold their first big debate on that bill in the autumn.not going to be straightforward. the government faces opposition on all sides at westminster, including from some of its own mps — meanwhile the first ministers of scotland and wales, nicola sturgeon and carwynjones, are threatening to make life very difficult. well, to discuss all this i'm joined by our political correspondent chris mason. welcome to the programme. on the face of it, this all sounds very technical. you're turning eu law into uk law. so why is it so controversial? the fact that it's so technical is what makes it controversial because the government is very aware that it's got a tight timetable for doing what it's doing. one element of this cut and paste job, of laws coming from brussels back to the uk, involves the government examining the detail of those laws and where they need to tweak, for instance if a particular sector is being governed by a european regulator and will in future be governed by a uk regulator, there has to be that change in legislation to make sur