Having only recently entered the House of Lords, I must tread with caution, but I had always understood that it is chiefly a revising chamber. By strong convention, it does not reject legislation arising from the election manifesto of the party victorious in the House of Commons. Yet on Monday night, faced with the Internal Market Bill (which helps provide for a full Brexit), it attempted no revision at all. The House was sitting in committee, whose very purpose is revision, but the anti-government majority was on such a high horse that it happily let an amendment from critics of the government fall. It refused to engage. A key feature of the Bill is to ensure that Northern Ireland should maintain ‘unfettered access’ to trade with the rest of the United Kingdom. That is the basic right of any customs territory and must be asserted if a foreign power (in this case, the EU) tries to remove it. Yet Lord Judge, the Bill’s leading opponent, declared this clause ‘contaminated’ by another one. Instead of trying to rectify that contamination in committee, he condemned the whole thing. Instead of revising, the House of Lords was opposing, which is dangerous. When the Commons returns the Bill to the Lords, it should ask them to engage with the clauses they failed to discuss in detail — which is a polite way of saying: ‘Do your proper job.’
The scale of the government defeats was huge — 433 to 165 and 407 to 148. Feeling was genuinely running high. But I wonder if the numbers had something to do with the fact that we can all vote virtually through ‘Peer-hub’ and do not, as would usually be the case, have to attend the House to vote.
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