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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

It should use all its majesty to compel the Commons to enact the manifesto pledges its members were elected to implement. Labour promised: ‘It is a good treaty for Britain and for the new Europe. We will put it to the British people in a referendum and campaign whole-heartedly for a “Yes” vote to keep Britain a leading nation in Europe.’ The Lib Dem manifesto declared: ‘We are therefore clear in our support for the constitution, which we believe is in Britain’s interest — but ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people.’

The upper house has a historic opportunity to expose a monstrous con trick and rectify its consequences. The government can claim otherwise as often as it likes, but the Lisbon treaty is self-evidently a reheated version of the EU Constitution, on which the British people were promised a referendum by all three parties at the 2005 election. Parliament does indeed have a clear mandate, and the Lords, as (in the words of the third Marquess) ‘the last representative of the people in this country’, has a responsibility to see that this mandate is not shirked. In democracy as in biology, when one eye fails the other must do all the work.

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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