The UK’s Mother of All Constitutional Crises

The Coming Clash Between Farage and the House of Lords

With Reform still riding high in the polls, the UK could well be sleep-walking into a gigantic constitutional crisis. Strange as it may seem, Shabana Mahmood’s attempt to out-BNP Nigel Farage may even be the last chance for the House of Lords.

The Home Secretary’s proposals to clamp down on asylum may be patchy, encountering fierce resistance in the institutionally anti-white Labour party, and smack of dozens of earlier (mainly Tory) empty promises on immigration. But if some of them are put into effect they might just keep Nigel out of Number 10.

And it’s the advent of a Reform government which would very likely trigger the constitutional mayhem. A House of Commons dominated by an overall Reform majority would be on a collision course with the House of Lords, the second chamber, from which Farage’s party is almost competely absent.

Farage at War With the House of Lords

The Commons, representing the will of the People, would find every scrap of its proposed legislation blocked by the Lords, representing the liberal elite Blob. You can get jsut a hint of how this would work (or, rather, wouldn’t work, at least as far as millions of voters would see it) by looking at the trouble facing the effort to push Assisted Suicide through the Lords and into law right now.

The effort to force state-sanctioned murder into UK law is facing serious resistance in the House of Lords. An unprecedented number of changes for a Private Member’s Bill have been tabled by Peers seeking to amend Kim Leadbeater’s seriously flawed assisted suicide Bill.

Supporters of the Bill criticised the interventions as a delaying tactic. Its critics, however, insist the amendments are necessary given the unworkability of the Bill and that the Bill has not undergone “due diligence and proper pre-legislative scrutiny”. Only four days have currently been scheduled for the Committee of the Whole House to consider the more than 950 amendments put forward so far. On the first day, just seven were debated.

Imagine MPs voting through bills to deport criminal illegals, defund the BBC, restrict the right of LGBTQ activists to indoctrinate and groom children. With the Tory rump forced by public opinion to vote for populist measures, they sail through the Commons. Then imagine the massed ranks of Labour, LibDem, SNP and liberal Tory Lords mounting relentless campaigns to block and sabotage the legislation.

Political paralysis ensues. What happens next? Either the populists admit defeat, complaining to the public that the old parties’ grip on the Lords prevents them carrying out key election pledges, or they take on – and break – the Lords.

Back to 1911

The potential situation is eerily similar to the constitutional crisis of 1911, when the Tory-dominated House of Lords refused to accept the law introducing old age pensions, which was pushed through the Commons by Lloyd George’s Liberals.

Public anger grew rapidly, with the Liberals warning that failure to pass the reform would lead either to victory of the young :Labour Party, or even to revolution against the rich. Suggested remedies ranged from swamping the Lords with hundreds of newly created peers to a law decreeing that any law passed three times by the Commons would receive Royal Assent without even being debated in the upper chamber.

In the end, the Liberal threat to ennoble 249 new Lords persuaded the Tory Lords to accept the Parliament Bill, which removed the peers’ right to amend or defeat finance bills and reduced their powers from the rejecting to merely delaying other legislation.

These days, the Commons must pass the same bill in two successive parliamentary sessions, with at least one year between the second-reading in the first session and the third-reading in the second session. After this. the laws involved would pass direct for Royal Assent.

Before this extreme remedy were to kick in, however, there would already have been mamy months of delays as old party MPs and Lords used filibustering tactics and endless streams of amendments. Add in the legal challenges which will be upheld by left-wing activist judges and it would be literally years before anything remotely controversial could become law, let alone be enforced.

All this political and legal wrangling would likely take place against the backdrop of violent and largescale disorder by the far-left and certain minority groups. The financial crisis inherited from Labour would add huge fiscal pressure onto the political weight and angry public opinion pressing the new government for far more rapid action.

After decades of being ignored by the old parties, the public would not be in the mood to allow them to continue to block their clear mandate for radical change by Reform. This would bring Westminster right back to 1911, except that Reform will be hard-pressed enough to find enough trustworthy and half-competent candidates to fill winnable seats for the Commons, let alone drag up hundreds more to pack into the Lords.

So either Reform would be unable to deliver even those electoral promises which Farage and Co. intend to keep, or they must begin their term with laws to castrate not only the activist judges but also the Lords. Westminster would automatically be in a state of political civil war between the two chambers of the Mother of Parliaments.

Beyond even that, there lurks the question which the instinctive royalists of the ‘right’ daren’t even contemplate: If they move to tear up the constitutional rules protecting the judiciary from the legislature, and the Upper House from the Lower, then what happens if the King refuses to give Royal Assent?

Britain’s Coming Civil War?

He has no power to withold it, of course. But he could argue that, since the Commons are acting outside and above their own legal powers (as they would be), he has no choice but to follow suit. At which point we wouldn’t so much be back in 1911, as in 1642.

Now, for me at least, this brings a brief and enjoyable vision of Charles III eating a last breakfast of foie gras-topped muesli, before being led out onto a scaffolding in Whitehall to meet a newly retrained lumberjack armed with a sharp and heavy axe. But, on the face of it, that’s going a bit too far as fantasy political crises go.

Yet the crisis we’ve just considered isn’t going to end that way, it is potentially very, very real. The Blob will never give up its power unless and until it is prised from its clammy, greedy, liberal grip. If a populist party is elected therefore, it must either accept defeat and complete impotence, or be prepared for a political civil war.

The constitutional time-bomb is ticking, with Shabana Mahmood and Rachel Reeves being the two figures who might just be able to disconnect the timer from the detonator. If they were honest and competent, that would still be possible. Enjoy!