Grand plan for Lords reform meanders into age of tit-for-tat

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/aug/06/lords-reform-coalition-clegg-cameron

Version 0 of 1.

Few at Westminster emerge from the ignominious collapse of Lords reform with great credit. The main two parties turned out to be far more split on spreading democracy than the clarion calls in the respective party manifestos pretended to the electorate in 2010.

Nick Clegg, rebuffed by the Conservatives, retaliated by vowing to vote down plans to equalise the electoral size of constituencies, a measure he had hailed in the Commons only in November 2010 as "correcting fundamental injustices in how people elect their MPs".

That the latest attempt to democratise parliament had failed was pretty well inevitable as soon as rebellion of 91 Tory backbenchers defied the whip, and Cameron responded by effectively admitting at the 1922 committee, he did not feel he had the political strength to face them down.

In a last ditch effort, Clegg over the weekend finally proposed a referendum on Lords reform on election day in 2015, with the first elections to the new chamber in 2020. Boundary changes would also be deferred to 2020. Clegg argued such a deal was in keeping with the coalition agreement since neither policy had a set timetable in that agreement. Cameron turned him down. His rebels were opposed to elections, full stop, he explained.

Labour MPs and peers had fought the cut in the number of MPs to 600 tooth and nail through the nights in the Lords because they reckoned the changes could see the Conservatives in majority power for a generation.

Estimates are estimates, but Anthony Wells from YouGov has calculated that if the published boundary reforms had been in place in 2010, and the percentage share of the vote had been as in 2010, the Tories would have been down only 7 seats to 299, Labour down 28 to 230 and the Liberal Democrats down 11 to 46. At the very minimum Cameron's currently remote prospects of securing an overall majority in 2015 would have been enhanced.

This somewhat fuzzy maths represented a standing invitation to Labour MPs to find any avenue possible to persuade the Liberal Democrats to reject the boundary commission proposals when both houses come to vote on the final proposals some time next year.

In truth, the threat posed by the new constituency boundary map also sunk belatedly into Liberal Democrat consciousness. Lewis Baston, one of the psephologists that has studied the review closely, comments: "Some Liberal Democrat MPs will be breathing a secret sigh of relief. They have dodged a bullet. The Lib Dems suffer worst proportionately from the changes because their seats tend on average to have smaller majorities and be surrounded by areas where the Lib Dems did not poll many votes in 2010."

In trying to justify the decision now to vote against the boundary reform Clegg's intellectual difficulty was that boundary review in the coalition agreement had been linked to the referendum on electoral reform, not Lords reform.

He deployed a novel argument first developed by Chris Rennard, the party's former chief executive to justify voting against boundary changes reducing the Commons to 600. Rennard argued: "Fewer MPs means the government 'pay-roll vote' is a bigger proportion of the Commons. Couple this with the continuation of patronage in the Lords, it would be the power of the executive, not parliament, that wins if one reform is blocked and the other passed."

Clegg had in the first flush of office promised to bring about the biggest set of democratic changes to British politics since the Great Reform Act. Yet he has at present only secured the introduction of individual voter registration, and a minor change to the right of MPs to be recalled by their constituents. Rarely can such a grand political project have been reduced to such banalities so quickly. Vague hope is held out for party funding reform, but after this disaster the inner-party trust needed to create consensus on this issue looks elusive.

A raw and subdued Clegg at his press conference insisted that a line could be drawn on the fall-out from Lords reform, and said there need be no wider chain reaction. The coalition had been brought together primarily to rescue, repair and rebalance the economy. That would remain in pre-eminent task.

But it is harder today for Clegg to portray this as a great reforming coalition government. Never glad confident morning again, or as one Tory MP quoting Larkin put it: "Lords reform was a case of a beginning, a muddle and an end."