A good day for democracy

Nick Clegg announced on Monday that the Prime Minister has decided to abandon the Lib Dems’ House of Lords Reform Bill, and that in retaliation (not Mr Clegg’s word, but that’s what it amounts to) the LibDems will vote against the Tories’ plan to reduce the size of the house of commons and have the constituency boundaries re-drawn to the advantage of the Conservative Party by a speeded-up process in time for the election scheduled for 2015.

This is very bad news for the Coalition, marking a stinging humiliation of its junior partner by the Tory right-wing Neanderthal tendency, but very good news indeed for the country.

With luck it will allow time for a fundamental re-think about the place of the second chamber at Westminster in the context of devolution, the Scottish independence/devo max referendum in 2014, and the constitutional future of the UK as a whole.  And with a bit more luck it should spell the end of a shameless attempt by the Tories to gerrymander the House of Commons to their own advantage in time for the next election — something the Lib Dems were prepared to go along with, to their everlasting shame, in exchange for Tory support for their ideas about reform of the House of Lords (the kind of cynical horse-trading that makes the wheels of coalition government in a hung parliament go round).

So: a good day for democracy, for once!

If Labour has its wits about it, now is the time for an offer of collaboration with the LibDems on a completely new approach to reform of the second chamber in the context of the whole constitutional future of the United Kingdom.  Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan have a golden opportunity to seize the initiative by offering a national constitutional convention to be set up immediately after the next general election to consider the next steps on constitutional reform, including the replacement of the House of Lords by a wholly elected second chamber, on the basis of proposals to be drawn up jointly by the Labour and LibDem parties between now and the next election.