Could the Lords give the people the right to vote on Brexit deal?
No one really knows what the EU or the UK will look like in two years. We must be able to make a judgment then
ity, democracy” in protests against their authoritarian, Right-wing government; and a month earlier, plucky protesters even marched in favour of closer ties with the EU in the tiny country of Moldova.
None of these protests, on its own, changes the political weather of our continent. But they show that the traffic isn’t all one-way, the populists are not winning outright. Geert Wilders, the Islamophobic Dutch politician with an unnervingly similar hairstyle to Trump, is losing ground as the general election in the Netherlands approaches. In Germany, the next Chancellor will either be Angela Merkel or Martin Schulz — both committed pro-Europeans.
So no one really knows what the EU will look like by the time Mrs May’s twoyear Article 50 deadline is due. The assumption that the eurozone will collapse, or the EU will disintegrate, is the stuff of fantasy among Brexiteers, rather than reality. For a lot of last year, growth rates in the eurozone were actually higher than in the UK. And what if the UK economy splutters badly in the next 24 months as the turbulence of Brexit hits, and higher supermarket prices inflict an unwelcome Brexit squeeze on household budgets? In those circumstances, are voters going to thank MrsMay if she comes back with a bad deal or no deal at all?
Voters in Middle England will start to harbour serious doubts if they see the Government tie itself up in knots over Brexit while their local schools, social care centres and NHS hospitals gasp for desperately needed resources. Tony Blair was right when he declared last week that “this Government has bandwidth for only one thing: Brexit”. Yet the British people will expect a whole lot more from Mrs May and her ministers over the next few years.
Which brings us back to the Lords. Eccentric though it is, our unelected chamber is a kind of constitutional watchdog in Westminster, empowered to get the Government and MPs to think again when peers feel that basic constitutional checks and balances are being ignored. The Lords have every right to insist that a meaningful vote is guaranteed in Parliament when the two-year Article 50 period expires. No one has any idea what kind of Brexit deal will emerge, what the state of public opinion will be, what the rest of the EU will be up to, and how the UK economy will be faring. Why should Mrs May have the sole, almost regal, prerogative to decide what is right for the country then?
In fact, peers should go even further: when, and if, a deal finally emerges, someone needs to approve it. Should that be the PM? Or politicians in Westminster? Or the people? Now there’s a novel idea — unelected Lords giving the people their rightful say about their own future. Who could object to that?