Europe - a peer review

The Spectator's excellent Coffee House site wonders aloud whether the Lords might overturn the Commons and insist on a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

I may have this wrong, but that doesn't strike me as likely.

There are quite a few Tories in the Lords who would vote against a referendum, compensating for those Labour peers defecting in the opposite direction. And the Liberals have a number of peers who will vote against rather than abstain.

Usually it requires a pretty solid alliance of Tories, Libs and cross benchers even to have a sniff of Lords victory. This alliance doesn't appear to exist on this question.

The Spectator hints at the one way of solidifying the pro-referendum vote. Those peers unpersuaded by the European constitutional case for a referendum, might be more sympathetic to the argument that what is really at stake is the constitutional impact of promising a referendum and the reneging on the promise.

I can see this. But I somehow doubt that such a consideration will trump European ideology.

Comments

Why does the ideology have to have sway over public opinion? The mother of parliaments has to support the wishes of the people otherwise our democracy has failed us.
If we continue with this costly undemocratic and stupid EU policy we, like a bunch of lemmings, will surely perish.

[Margaret on the Guillotine]

Of course the Lords will not bring in a referendum. The pro-European Tory tradition, thank God, survives in spades in the Lords, as opposed to the Commons where ghastly little estate agents in blazers and moustaches, and housewives in twinsets and pearls, have weeded out anyone who dares not to utter the UKIP - I mean Conservative - line on Europe at selection.

Hence why no Andrew "Monday Club" Rosindell types in the Lords. No Nadine Dorries or Angela Watkinson, no Bill Cash or William Hague with his little "after-dinner speeches". They may be dead, but it is the Elysian Fields.

The Lords do not have elections up and hence do not have to pay attention to the tabloid press or the mindless idiots that read them, or indeed to the blogs and the mindless idiots that write them (your good self excluded, Mr F). In this case hurrah for the undemocratic principle.