Former chancellor Lord Lamont has issued a warning to peers not to amend Theresa May’s Brexit Bill and blasted those calling for a second referendum as anti-democractic.
The senior Tory’s veiled swipe at the Lib Dems — who want to give people another say on the terms of Brexit — came after another senior Conservative described the party’s 102 peers as “beached whales noisily swimming against the democratic tide”. Lord Lamont said: “Any people who retreat into “we’re going to come back for a second one”, don’t believe in democracy.
I believe in democracy and I believe we should proceed rapidly with this bill without amendment.”
The 74-year-old peer led John Major’s bruising campaign to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, but said he accepted the European project had changed and was quite different to when Britain first joined in 1973.
Speaking on the second day of the Lords debate on the Brexit Bill, the pro-Brexit peer said: “I little dreamt 45-years-later I would actually be advocating the reverse procedure, namely that we should withdraw from the union I advocated joining.
“But it’s not me whose changed, it’s Europe.”
Lib Dem calls for another EU referendum were met with hostility throughout the first day of debate with Labour claiming they have “isolated” themselves.
Labour’s shadow Brexit spokesperson Baroness Hayter said yesterday: “One thing that was really very strange was how isolated the Lib Dems were.
The cross-benchers do not take what the Lib Dems are doing very well.
“Almost none of the Lib Dems used the word “referendum”. They talk about “going back to the people” as if they know the word referendum isn’t good.”
However former Tory Scottish secretary, Lord Forsyth, blasted the party and said the British people had clearly shown they wanted to leave the EU on the June 23 referendum.
He said: “What part of that do those on the Liberal Benches not understand? [The Lib Dems] are opposed to the composition of this House, arguing that it lacks democratic legitimacy.
“Despite being reduced to a rump of nine Members in the House of Commons, more than 100 of them have landed here like beached whales noisily swimming against the democratic tide.”
The Labour and Lib Dems are expected to team up and vote in favour of amendments to the Government’s Brexit Bill.
Both parties would outnumber the Tories 252 peers.
A shameless peer once kept his taxi running while he nipped into Parliament to collect his £300 daily allowance, a former speaker of the House of Lords has said.
Baroness D’Souza told a BBC documentary that many peers “contribute absolutely nothing” to Parliament and attend only to claim their daily attendance allowance.
She suggested the “sense of honour” that used to come with being a member of the House of Lords had been lost.
In the new documentary, titled Inside the Lords, Lady D’Souza said: “There is a core of peers who work incredibly hard, who do that work, and there are, sad to say, many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance.
“I can remember one occasion when I was leaving the House quite late and there was a peer — who shall be utterly nameless — who jumped out of a taxi just outside the peers’ entrance, left the engine running.
“He ran in, presumably to show that he’d attended, and then ran out again while the taxi was still running.
“So I mean that’s not normal, but it is something that does happen and I think that we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain, and that is a great, great shame.”
Also in the documentary, which combines interviews with fly-on-the-wall footage, Lord Blunkett and Lord Tebbit questioned appointments prime ministers had made to the upper house.
Labour former home secretary Lord Blunkett said: “You have got people who may well be, out of the patronage of the government of the day, rewarded for either keeping their mouth shut or opening their mouth or their purse at a particular moment in time.”
Tory peer Lord Tebbit added: “Far too many people have been put in here as a sort of personal reward.”
Liberal Democrat Lord Tyler also gave a withering assessment, describing the House of Lords as “the best day care centre for the elderly in London”. He said: “Families can drop in him or her and make sure that the staff will look after them very well nice meals subsidised by the taxpayer, and they can have a snooze in the afternoon in the chamber or in the library.”
A House of Lords spokesman said: “All members have to certify that they have undertaken parliamentary work when claiming for attending the House.
“Where members are shown to have claimed when they have not undertaken parliamentary work, the House has the power to suspend them — as in the case of Lord Hanningfield.
“The House has a robust Code of Conduct overseen by the independent Lords Commissioner for Standards.”