IT WAS clear from Day One, back in May 2010, that Tory backbenchers’ buy-in to the whole coalition deal was half-hearted. It was a David Cameron project, born out of necessity, tolerated at best, a bit like Fianna Fáil before it got used to the idea that it would never rule alone again. And as for any implied mutual obligation between the parties to hold it all together and to help each other’s respective Big Projects through, 91 Tory backbench votes against House of Lords reform last month will have disabused even the most gullible.
Now, chastened Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, bowing to the inevitable, has called it a day on his cherished Lords reform, announcing his own tit-for-tat retaliation. Lib Dem MPs will almost certainly be joined by their ministers, in breach of cabinet collective responsibility, to block a Tory-championed measure to reduce the size of the Commons from 650 to 600 and to equalise constituencies. It was to give the Tories an extra 20 seats and make it considerably easier to win an overall majority at the next election. Not, of course, that such considerations would play a part in their calculations, at least according to Lord Tebbit. Not a bit...
The Tory sabotage of Lords reform is a crippling blow to Clegg’s credibility, inside and outside his party. His rationale for coalition, and the radical reforming spirit which garnered many Labour voters to his banner, had seen Clegg promise the most sweeping democratic reform of British politics since the Great Reform Act. To date, having seen his PR referendum trounced with the help of Tory footdragging, only minor changes to individual voter registration and to the rules under which MPs may be recalled by voters have been enacted. It’s as if a great constitutional reform project, his raison d’etre, was reduced to tinkering with voting ages or presidential terms in a toothless convention.
Clegg insists that the coalition will go on, is still anchored in the centre ground, its purpose, the revival of the economy, still its main task and one demanding his party’s continued engagement. And the Lib Dem rejection of the boundary changes will in fact come as a relief to some of their members who stood little chance of surviving them. But his means of retaliation smacks of a retreat from the high moral ground of political reform, justified in terms of fairness and democratic rights, to a rather grubbier ground of old-fashioned politics – hurt your enemy when you can and never mind the consequences.
For a party that has made “fairness in voting” the central demand on its banner – to a great extent the party has been defined in recent decades by its campaigning for PR – now to reject boundary changes which would have equalised constituencies and more accurately reflected vote-share in actual representation, and for what will appear to voters to be pique, can only damage the party in the long run. And both Clegg and his party will understand that Tory backsliding will not stop here – the backbenchers have Cameron on the run and will demand, and get, more blood, possibly on Europe. This is divorce by a thousand cuts.