House of Lords peers are sneering at the British people and supporting people traffickers, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

The House of Lords has been voting against the government today in the ping pong of the Rwanda plan.

Peers vs the people is never successful for the peers. In 1909, Lloyd George attacked the Dukes when he said that “a fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer.”

Now we can attack the puffed up panjandrums of the quangocracy who sneer at the British people and support the people traffickers by their actions.

The Lords by insisting on their amendments which have been decisively rejected by the House of Commons, challenge democracy and cause delay.

The Rwanda plan’s debut flight was meant to take off nearly two years ago in June 2022 but it has been obstructed by the bien pensants. Those who think they know better than the democratic will of an elected government.

The original source of the delay was the European Court of Human Rights which issued a Section 39 order, that effectively blocked deportations.

Then the UK Supreme Court found that Rwanda isn’t a safe country, making the Rwanda plan unlawful, although bizarrely, it used research from the United Nations which itself has sent refugees to Rwanda in the past.

It is noticeable that Baroness Hale of Richmond, the former President of the Supreme Court, who regularly ruled against the government in that role, is now showing her true political colours by voting against the Rwanda plan and helping to obstruct democracy.

There is a recurring theme here.

All sources of resistance to the Rwanda plan are unelected.

The Rwanda policy has become a microcosm of a much broader problem of the erosion of democracy.

The most important of the Lords’ amendments is to say there is a higher authority than parliament. Yet our constitution is based on the idea of the sovereignty of the British people exercised through parliament.

The unelected officials in the Lords prefer decisions to be made by their unelected chums in the ECHR, not all of whom are judges in a sense that the British understand, rather than trusting it to the British people.

Democracy must assert itself.

I would like the chief whip to change Commons business so that we send these proposals back to the House of Lords tomorrow and that we sit if necessary through Easter until the House of Lords backs down.

It might teach the bishops a lesson if they have to come and vote against the government on Good Friday.

It would be suitably penitential for them.