Business of the House

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley]

I have taken five minutes so I do not quite understand his point, but there we are.

I am always conscious that the House of Lords should not exceed its powers. It is not an elected Chamber and it does not have the democratic legitimacy of the Commons. That applies to life Peers as well as to hereditary Peers. Our job is not to force through legislation but to tidy up, revise, gently question, and sometimes to ask the Commons to think again. This is surely a case where we should be doing that. We should ask the Commons to think again about shoving legislation through in this unprecedented fashion. I am equally clear that if there is ever a time when the House of Lords suddenly needs to discover its constitutional teeth, it is when the Commons is doing something unconstitutional, egregious, hurried and potentially worrying. This is not an argument about Brexit but about doing things properly.

If there ever was a justification for the constitutional monstrosities of hereditary Peers being still here, it is that we can occasionally cry foul when a despotic majority tries to ride roughshod over the carefully balanced but fragile device that is the British constitution and—if noble Lords will excuse the mixed metaphor—to stand against the sudden and dangerous enthusiasm of a temporary, 50.08%, majority that does not want to do things in the proper way. What is more temporary than the majority exercised by Sir Oliver Letwin? In this case, the despotic majority is the Motion passed by a single vote in the other place at something like the third attempt. A majority is no less despotic for being small if it is allowed to be unconstitutional.

The purpose of the Commons passing that measure was to take control of the House of Commons and force a Bill on to the Order Paper to defy the clear wishes of a huge popular vote of 17.4 million people and deny them what they have voted for—namely, Brexit, if necessary without a deal, on the date they had been repeatedly promised. You can be in favour of that or against it—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

Respectfully, can the noble Viscount supply the evidence to show that the 17.4 million British people who voted to leave voted to leave without a deal? They were given many options, and many promises were made to the effect that that would not happen. What evidence does he have that they would prefer no deal to any other outcome?

[Viscount Ridley]

Those 17.4 million people voted for Brexit, and it is abundantly clear from what both Houses of Parliament have done since—passing Article 50, setting a date, and the Prime Minister saying hundreds of times that no deal is better than a bad deal—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

Can the noble Viscount explain why—when we have been telling ourselves for a long time that Parliament and the people no longer speak with the same voice—Parliament having made that decision and said those things is the same as the people having done so?

[Viscount Ridley]

We are here because there is a difference between a remainer Parliament and a leaver majority in the country. That is why we are here; that is the problem we are trying to resolve. My argument is that this Bill does not resolve it because it denies them the clearest form of Brexit, which all the polls suggest an awful lot of people want.