Britain’s Lords Savage Brexit Plan, Enraging Euroskeptics

Unelected, and with an average age of 69, members of Britain’s House of Lords rarely dominate news headlines, except when the occasional scandal spurs talk of cutting numbers in what is now the world’s largest legislature outside China.

But after inflicting its 14th defeat on the government’s legislative preparations for leaving the European Union, or Brexit, the low-key second chamber of Britain’s Parliament has put itself at the heart of a fraught debate and become something unfamiliar: a big political stage.

In vote after vote, this holdover from Britain’s aristocratic history has acted as a brake on the government’s Brexit plans, sending them back to the House of Commons where they could face uncertain, knife-edge votes.

Defenders say the House of Lords is merely fulfilling its constitutional duty by asking lawmakers to think again, and by making sure they have the details right about how, precisely, Britain will untangle itself from the European Union.

Hard-line critics, however, accuse the House of Lords of seeking to sabotage Brexit, which a majority of its members did not support in the first place. A majority in the Commons did not want Brexit either, for that matter, but the lawmakers there are beholden to their voters, and live in fear of the tabloid press.

The lords, having no constituents to answer to, are more at liberty to oppose the plans now, or at least to make sure that Brexit does not invite chaos.

All of this is significantly complicating life for the already embattled Prime Minister Theresa May, and has made the House of Lords the object of fury from euroskeptics. On Thursday the main front-page headline of the pro-Brexit Daily Mail read: “It’s time to pull the plug on the Lords.” The Daily Express has lamented that one Brexit critic was none other than the Duke of Wellington, a descendant of a British military hero, “the Iron Duke who helped defeat Napoleon and his French army.”

By contrast, the current, ninth, Duke of Wellington,Charles Wellesley, was siding with “France, Germany and the rest of the European Union,” wrote the Express, which accused him of seeking to “thwart the British electorate and stop Brexit,” in defiance of the 2016 referendum in which Britons voted by 52 to 48 percent to quit the bloc.

Nowadays, most of the 781 members of the upper chamber, known as peers, are political appointees, rewarded for a career in politics or public service with a lifetime place in the Lords that brings status and influence — as well as a desk and parking space in central London, and a daily attendance allowance of 300 pounds, about $400.

Over the years the numbers grew (before falling back a little recently), as prime ministers secured seats for allies who have mostly done low-key work, revising legislation or sitting on expert committees.

But with Britain still bitterly divided over the merits of Brexit, the House of Lords has focused attention on political weak spots in Brexit plans, particularly over moves to abandon a customs union with the European Union, an issue so contentious that it has divided and paralyzed the Cabinet.

Lords have proposed numerous amendments to the Brexit bill. But experts believe that, if the Commons overturns those amendments — as the government hopes it will — the Lords will in any case back down, as custom dictates, even before reaching the legal limits of its delaying power.

“I don’t think they are doing anything constitutionally dubious,” said Meg Russell, director of the Constitution Unit at University College London. “There is nothing that the Lords has done that is a direct challenge to the principle of Brexit.”

“All the House of Lords ever — or nearly ever — does is essentially to throw the question back to the House of Commons and say: ‘Are you sure about this?'” she added.

The 2016 referendum approved withdrawal in principle but left the details to the government and Parliament, and the amendments proposed by the House of Lords have stayed within its powers by focusing on these, Russell said. Whatever the constitutional niceties, around 150 hours of discussion over Brexit has strained the subdued civility that usually envelopes debates in the ornate gold-and-red decorated chamber of the House of Lords.

During one speech, Roger Roberts, a Liberal Democrat member, argued that the powers that could be handed to the government in the bill were comparable to legislation in 1933 that helped Hitler’s rise to power.

A Conservative, Nicholas Fairfax, accused pro-European members of the chamber of being “a fifth column for Brussels,” a reference to traitors who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

For her part, May presides over a bitterly divided Conservative Party and lost her Commons majority in a general election last year. She is by no means guaranteed to win key votes when the legislation returns to the more powerful lower chamber.

One particularly tricky amendment for May would press the government to pursue a customs union with the European Union. That would ensure tariff-free passage of goods to and from continental Europe.

It would also help avoid controls at the border between Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which will remain in the European Union. The return of a hard border, many fear, would destabilize a settlement that has brought years of peace.

May has failed to get her Cabinet to agree on a British negotiating position over customs arrangements. Indeed, her own foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, has described her preferred scheme, a complex plan she calls a customs partnership, as “crazy.”

So fractured is the Cabinet that, according to the BBC, May has split her top team into two working groups to try to improve both the customs partnership and an alternative option that would use technology to track goods and reduce the need for border checks.

The intervention of the Lords is sensitive because, in the Commons, there may not be a majority for either of May’s plans. Elected lawmakers might prefer to keep the changes inserted by the Lords that suggest retaining something like the status quo.

“Governments tend to get hot under the collar about the House of Lords when they know they are on shaky grounds in the Commons,” Russell said. Another key amendment would ensure that were Parliament to reject the agreement May hopes to strike on a Brexit trade deal later this year lawmakers — not the government — would decide what happens next.

That would prevent May from threatening that, unless her plan is rubber-stamped by Parliament, Britain would be forced to leave without any deal. Lawmakers could instead vote against, then ask her to go back and renegotiate, for example.

May should have known trouble was brewing in the upper chamber, where Conservatives are outnumbered, partly because of changes around the turn of the century that reduced the number of hereditary peers, who often tended to side with the Conservatives.

Historically, there have been frequent clashes between the Lords and the government, but until recently this normally affected center-left administrations, Russell said.

Now many peers are politicians and former diplomats who have devoted decades to building Britain’s presence in Brussels, and who see their life’s work crumbling beneath them.

But the chamber also has prominent Brexit supporters who spent years criticizing the European Union, such as Norman Lamont, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister, who wrote earlier this month that “if peers continue their present reckless approach the only solution will be the replacement of the present House by a properly elected one.”

His article was published by The Daily Mail, which on Thursday devoted two critical pages to the behavior of the Lords, in addition to most of its front page.

Yet, as The Daily Mail’s critics pointed out, in 2012 — well before the Brexit referendum — the newspaper described the idea of reforming the second chamber as “an utterly irrelevant distraction,” while in 2003 it praised “the robustly independent Lords, which has proved a more effective check on an over-mighty executive than the Commons.”