Their Lordships’ duty

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.