Tim Newark
presented to us as something supposedly honourable, as supporting the very process of democracy by insisting on the rights of Parliament to settle the negotiation. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn argues: “The principle has to be that Parliament must be sovereign on this matter and must make the final decision.”
No, no, no! That boat sailed long ago when Parliament decided by a substantial majority to give the final say on this matter to the British people in a referendum. We did not vote to have our decision overturned or watered down by an unelected body of peers out of touch with contemporary politics.
Because let us remind ourselves who is actually sitting in the Lords. Out of a total of 757 peers the openly pro-EU Lib Dems have 98 peers. Recent polls have the Lib Dems on seven per cent and they have just eight MPs out of 650 in the House of Commons, that is 1.2 per cent, but in the Lords they rocket up to 13 per cent. It’s as if the general election of 2015 never happened.
Add to that 189 Labour peers and a substantial number of pro-EU Tories, including the usual trouble-making suspects such as Lord Heseltine, and you get an overwhelming majority that can endlessly undermine Brexit legislation. This violates the unwritten convention that legislation already scrutinised and approved by the elected body in the House of Commons should not be rejected.
This is the result of Tony Blair’s reform of the Lords in 1999 with New Labour proceeding to stuff it full of Labour peers and then David Cameron allowing his Lib Dem coalition partners to inflate it with their peers too, thus distorting the political make-up of the Lords for years to come.
If not being abolished as a result of their undemocratic approach to Brexit, the Lords should certainly be forced to rebalance its number of party political peers every five years.
Not only did the Lords damage the ability of the PM to strike a fair deal for the UK on Monday but they also passed an amendment requiring ministers to get approval from a majority of MPs for their aims in our future relationship with the EU. All this designed to drag out our already overlong exit.
FINALLY, in a further slap in the face to Brexiteers, they voted to add an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill ensuring families of asylum seekers have the right to join them after Brexit.
With this and the fallout from the Windrush fiasco it seems very unlikely that we will be seeing any meaningful control of mass migration into this country. All a source of delight to the liberal elite that wants to reverse what they still consider was a mistaken decision in 2016.
In his recent book, Democracy And Its Crisis, philosopher and Remainer AC Grayling argued that Brexit happened because direct democracy gives too much power to the wrong sort of people. Representative democracy is better, he says, because it allows government institutions to make up for the ignorance of the common voter.
On Monday, by championing the rights of Parliament over the will of the people, the Lords delivered just such an arrogant judgment.
Shame on them!
‘Their latest decision approaches treachery’