Rishi Sunak’s emergency legislation to ensure the Rwanda scheme is not derailed by legal challenges goes before the Lords tomorrow.
The Rwanda Bill is set to face fierce opposition but peers have been warned against opposing the will of the democratically elected House of Commons.
It comes as exclusive polling shows just 15 per cent of people want the House of Lords to continue in its present form.
Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski said an attempt to sabotage the Rwanda plan would “probably be the straw that breaks the camel’s back”, predicting it would cause parliamentarians and others to “think about the abolition of the House of Lords”.
Tory MP Philip Davies also had stern words for the peers, saying: “If they go out of their way to block something which is hugely important to the British people, they will only bring further into question the legitimacy of the Lords.”
Richard Tice, the leader of Reform UK, hopes there will be a confrontation that will lead to the scrapping of the Lords. He said: “Hopefully the peers will behave terribly, forgetting both that they are unelected and that the people want the boats stopped. Then they will be signing their abolition warrant.”
Alp Mehmet, of Migration Watch UK, said: “The role of peers is to revise and improve legislation, not thwart the will of the elected chamber. This will not serve our democracy well, nor will it help stop illegal Channel crossings.”
The warnings come as polling by WeThink for the Sunday Express shows just 15 per cent of the public support the continuation of the House of Lords in its present form, 42 per cent want it replaced with a democratically elected second chamber, one in five want it to continue but with hereditary peers ousted and nearly one in four want it scrapped altogether.
But a Liberal Democrat peer said he expected to vote against the Bill. He said: “We believe this Bill is so bad in all respects that we will try to stop it at second reading.
“It’s a long time since I’ve seen so many people expressing views so strongly.”
