The House of Lords has just signed its own death warrant – again. By voting down key clauses of the government’s Internal Market Bill, the Lords confirmed that it is an archaic excrescence which has no place in a 21st-century democracy.
But then, the House of Lords had no place even in a 17th-century pre-democracy – which was why Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary House of Commons abolished it in 1649. Yet now, 371 years later, hundreds of unelected peers still sit in Westminster seeking to thwart, not only a government elected with an 80-seat majority in the Commons, but also the Brexit demanded by 17.4million Leave voters.
The Internal Market Bill’s clause 42 would give the government power to alter the EU Withdrawal Agreement provisions on the Northern Ireland protocol. On Monday, the Lords voted to remove it by 433 votes to 165, a vote described as a ‘crushing’ defeat in the media and celebrated by Remainers and deluded leftists across social media. But what other outcome would they expect from a collection of more than 800 unelected peers, with an inbuilt anti-Tory, anti-Brexit majority? The ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ party, aka the Liberal Democrats, might have only 11 elected MPs, but why worry when they have no fewer than 89 appointed peers swanning about in the Lords?
A Labour frontbencher called Lord Stevenson (no, me neither) denounced the bill’s ‘egregious clauses’. If anything is egregious about this affair, it is the spectacle of somebody like Lord Stevenson, who was apparently an adviser to failed Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and has never been elected in his life, having the power to stop an elected government.
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
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(5) ‘Get rid of it!’ Boris told to ABOLISH House of Lords after latest Brexit-blocking vote
