Toby on Tuesday

'Welcome to the house of fun'

Peter Kellner is a former BBC Newsnight reporter who went on to found the YouGov opinion polling organisation of which he is now President. His wife, Cathy Ashton, also known as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, is a Labour politician who from 2009 to 2014 was the EU’s “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and First Vice-President of the European Commission.” You couldn’t make up a job title like that but in the La-La Land that is the EU it all means something. Indeed Mr. and Mrs. Kellner as they are otherwise known are among the most favoured of the EU’s Nomenklatura, to use an old Soviet expression. And where all this is significant is that for the very first time a YouGov poll last week revealed that more Britons now want to leave the EU (40 per cent.) than to remain (38 per cent.) Despite the best efforts of those who govern us, including the pollsters, the determination that Britain should bid farewell to the whole toxic project has gone mainstream and the “Leave” campaign is about to hot up.

Now, the European Union Referendum Bill is working its way through Parliament. It went through the House of Commons before the recess and is now before the members of the House of Lords, including Baroness Ashton of Upholland. The formal first reading took place last month but this will be the critical month for the legislation. Next Tuesday 13th October the second reading and debate will take place and this is where the fun will start. All those Eurofanatics, with whom the House of Lords has been packed in the years of Blair and Brown, Clegg and Cameron, will do their utmost to rig the Referendum in favour of a “Remain” outcome, irrespective of the wishes of the British people. To start with, they will press for 16 and 17-year olds to be able to vote in the Referendum, even though they cannot do so in Parliamentary elections. Whether or not the voting age should be lowered is a separate matter, but you can just see the swarms of Eurozealots, all funded by the EU, buzzing round our schools agitating that the sky will fall in if Britain were to leave the EU as the majority now want. Students have better things to do than be subjected to this kind of propaganda, which will almost certainly be counter-productive anyway.

There will be all kinds of other shameless attempts, too, to tamper with the Bill in the House of Lords. All of which will of course only increase pressure for wholesale reform of the so-called ‘Upper House’. This is a wider issue, but the reality is that it now speaks only for a redundant political class, with just a few notable exceptions the random leftovers from the past generation who should have long departed the political stage. A reformed and elected House of Lords, drawn from the four nations that constitute the United Kingdom and constituted to reconcile the differences between them, must be the way ahead. But that’s for another day. In this post, all that I can say is “Watch out for fun and games in the House of Lords” – there’ll be plenty of those before the Referendum Bill finally becomes law. The Electoral Commission, which has behaved impeccably so far in ensuring that the Eurozealots from the three old parties do not fix the outcome, will have a busy time ahead, as indeed we all will!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby