Letters November 5: Crisis? What crisis? Lords were simply doing their job

So: the “time-honoured constitutional conventions” which Chris Moncrieff (The Yorkshire Post, October 28) urges us to respect would seem to include the Government’s blatant attempt to circumvent the democratic process by casting a financial measure as a Statutory Instrument, which they imagined the Lords would rubber stamp.

The Lords’ failure to be bullied in this manner amounts in Mr Moncrieff’s eyes to a declaration of war on the constitution. How facile!

Mr Moncrieff’s rant extends to the Liberal Democrats, “given a hefty boot up the backside” by voters.

Journalistic rabble-rousing aside, the Lords, Mr Moncrieff, have as much of a “mandate” 
as a revising chamber for ill-thought out and unfair 
proposed legislation as has a government elected by a minority of voters to use undemocratic measures to force legislation through.

The peers did not overturn “what the Commons has done”. As he concedes in the same paragraph, they did “vote to delay the implementation of cuts to tax credits”, thereby, I would suggest, helping the Chancellor to save face and think again. Why did they need to do this?

Mr Moncrieff hopes there will be “no more sanctimonious talk of democracy” from “those who have brought about this constitutional crisis”.

Who is Mr Moncrieff to denigrate talk of democracy as sanctimonious? Those who talk of democracy might just have a clearer idea than Mr Moncrieff of how undemocratic this government is proving: take cuts to subsidies on renewables favoured by most; take lack of support for indigenous industry as against cheap Chinese imports; take our miserly response to the migrant crisis; take the attempt to override legitimate concern and due planning process in pushing for fracking. And what constitutional crisis, Mr Moncrieff? The Lords has done its job.

To cap it all, Mr Moncrieff calls for fracking, “a process which will enormously benefit Britain’s economy”.

Perhaps he is still unaware that what seems to be a majority of his fellow citizens disputes this claim for very good reasons, and that many of them discern a higher good than what is advocated spuriously as favouring Britain’s economy.