This is an appeal to the Labour front bench: please talk to some constitutional lawyers urgently about my Fatal Motion, or even Gordon Brown, who produced such an expert report on reforming the second chamber. It appears that Emily Thornberry MP, Labour’s Shadow Attorney General hasn’t had the full picture explained to her. In a tweet the other day, she argued:

“Labour doesn’t vote in the House of Lords to kill a bill, that’s the Commons’ job. The constitutional position is the unelected Lords is a revising chamber only. If a precedent was set, the Tories could easily use their majority in the Lords to do the same to a Lab govt’s laws.”

This isn’t a government bill, it’s a statutory instrument that brings back restrictions on protest rights that Parliament rejected only a few months ago.

It’s true that the Lords is a revising chamber and that is what it did. Ministers are now trying to reverse this vote in the Lords, not by bring a short bill or another piece of legislation, but by using Ministerial decree. My Fatal Motion doesn’t ”kill a bill”, it re-asserts parliamentary control over the executive.

A precedent is being set but not by my Fatal Motion. It is the government who are trying to do something which has never been done. If we allow the government to get away with this draconian change to the laws of protest, which parliament has already rejected, then other Ministerial decrees will follow that see major changes to environmental and workplace protections. My Fatal Motion tries to assert the long established, status quo.

The government are changing the rules of how our parliamentary democracy operates by shifting power and decision making to Whitehall. The parliamentary opposition has to unite and do what it can to stop them.

Most of the legislation in recent years has been in the form of so called “skeleton bills” which grant Ministers the discretion to make up new laws while by-passing scrutiny by peers or MPs. This amounts to a transfer of power to the executive and away from parliament. For example, the retained EU Law Bill allows Ministers to delete or change 1,600 environmental laws without consulting MPs or peers. The more this government are allowed to get away with, the more they will push us towards government by diktat.

I urge you to support the long established conventions regarding secondary legislation and support my Fatal Motion.