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Their Lordships’ duty

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

The Spectator on how the House of Lords can influence the Lisbon Treaty debate

One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of the House of Lords is what political scientists, borrowing the language of biologists, call ‘redundancy’. We have two eyes and two kidneys in case one malfunctions. In the case of the repackaged EU Constitution — now called the Lisbon treaty — the House of Commons has malfunctioned badly.

As a sop to those furious that the government’s unambiguous pledge of a referendum had been broken, we were promised line-by-line scrutiny of the treaty in the Commons, and an exhaustive debate by MPs that would answer the charge that the ratification was a stitch-up by a government frightened of the popular will. But a stitch-up is precisely what it has been. What ministers called ‘a whole-government approach to making a positive case for Europe’ turns out to have been stage-managed and hopelessly bland, with scandalously little time devoted to amendments. Huge areas of policy — transport, defence, social issues, border control — have been more or less ignored.

‘Themed debates’, the parliamentary equivalent of PowerPoint presentations, have supplanted genuine scrutiny, with the (intended) consequence that free and searching examination of this far-reaching treaty has been all but impossible. The government’s strategy is to bore us all into submission: a feeble ploy by a Prime Minister who, accepting the Labour leadership in May 2007, said: ‘The last ten years have taught me that the best preparation for governing is not meetings in Whitehall. The best preparation for governing is listening to the British people.’

In this context, the role of the House of Lords has rarely been more important. The Bill ratifying the treaty is expected to receive its third reading next week and then proceed to the second chamber, with the key votes likely in May and June. Their Lordships should think very carefully about the precise nature of their responsibility in this instance. Initial soundings suggest there is caution even on the Conservative benches in the upper house over taking on the Commons, on the grounds that there is not yet a popular ‘clamour’ for a referendum. If that is so, it is scarcely surprising, given the orchestrated torpor of the Commons debate. But the recent mini-plebiscites mounted by the I Want A Referendum campaign in ten marginal seats should give the Lords pause for thought: the levels of turn-out (36.2 per cent, higher than in most town hall elections) and of support for a referendum (88 per cent) are proof, at the very least, that this is an issue about which the public feel strongly when they are given a voice.

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Herbert Thornton

March 6th, 2008 7:40pm

Gordon Brown appears to be, in many ways, a reincarnation of King George III: but whereas the American colonists accused their King of combined with others "to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation" Gordon Brown is doing the same to the people of Britain itself.

What Britain now needs is a reincarnation, in Britain, of George Washington.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html