Their Lordships’ duty

One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of the House of Lords is what political scientists, borrowing the language of biologists, call ‘redundancy’. We have two eyes and two kidneys in case one malfunctions. In the case of the repackaged EU Constitution — now called the Lisbon treaty — the House of Commons has malfunctioned badly.

As a sop to those furious that the government’s unambiguous pledge of a referendum had been broken, we were promised line-by-line scrutiny of the treaty in the Commons, and an exhaustive debate by MPs that would answer the charge that the ratification was a stitch-up by a government frightened of the popular will. But a stitch-up is precisely what it has been. What ministers called ‘a whole-government approach to making a positive case for Europe’ turns out to have been stage-managed and hopelessly bland, with scandalously little time devoted to amendments. Huge areas of policy — transport, defence, social issues, border control — have been more or less ignored.