eurealist.co.uk

I was wondering if the MSM would pick up on Charlie Falconer’s interview in the Telegraph last week-end. When he suggested that “The right position for the Lords is that it should amend legislation to give the Commons the opportunity to think again but… then it should give way.”

Simon Heffer has done so today again the Telegraph “We’re teetering on the brink of an elective dictatorship” I don’t know about teetering I would have thought that we already had and elected dictatorship.

Heffer ends his article with a plea to Labour MPs to stop this nonsense, and asks for a strait answer to a strait question: what is so wrong with our democracy that Labour wishes so ruthlessly to end it?

“In 1968, when the last serious attempt was made to reform the Lords, Labour and Tory backbenchers united to stop proposals that would have put the Lords under the control of the Commons’ whips. Parliament must think very carefully and urgently about mounting a similar mission to prevent Britain from sliding to dictatorship. So far, Labour backbenchers have been quiet about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. They must ask themselves: do they really want to hand to Mr Blair and his friends the power to make laws that have the status of despotic fiats? Would they be happy for a Conservative administration, if we ever have one again, to legislate in this way?

Would they be happy for the House of Lords to have an entirely ornamental function, whether or not its members are partially or wholly elected? Or do they trust a combination of their own loyalists and the Prime Minister himself to make laws that not only bypass the Lords, but can, if necessary, bypass the Commons, too?

I address this question to Labour backbenchers, because it will be they who have the power to stop such nonsense. The Lords wisely decided not to die in the last ditch in 1911: but they might as well die there now, in the cause not of partisan self-interest (as was the case 95 years ago), but of defending liberty and our constitution. Frankly, these plans are so absolutist that one could make a strong case that the Queen should abdicate rather than give her assent to either of them.

To obviate that horror she, Parliament and the British public must demand a straight answer to a straight and vital question: what is so wrong with our democracy that Labour wishes so ruthlessly to end it?”

Technorati Tags: House of Lords, british-constitution, british-democracy
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