Almost three years of paralysis to come

Posted on August 3 2012

There's almost three years of political paralysis on the cards if the current Coalition sees out its five year term, as it's promised to do. Why? Because, as the Telegraph reports:

David Cameron is to abandon plans to reform the House of Lords after failing to win over Conservative rebels.

LibDems are bound to react by blocking parliamentary seat reform (which was always a terrible idea, anyway). And the consequence will be political paralysis.

The price of that will be enormous. Not least because millions of people will remain unemployed when action should be taken to address the recession we're in. Precisely because the economy and the people who're suffering as a consequence of it haven't been the focus of attention, and Westminster shenanigans have been, we're now in a mess.

This is a victory for the small minded bullies of the right for which we'll all pay an enormous cost - unless you happen to be in the 0.1%.

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6 Responses

  1. Richard says:
    August 3 2012 at 12:32 pm

    “LibDems are bound to react by blocking parliamentary seat reform (which was always a terrible idea, anyway). ”

    Why exactly is parliamentary seat reform a terrible idea?

    If as you constantly say Democracy is so important that tax avoidance cannot be allowed to undermine it then you cannot also endorse the distortion of democracy through the current pro labour setup…..

    • Richard Murphy says:
      August 3 2012 at 1:10 pm

      The current seats represent local communities

      The new ones won’t

      And if we wanted to even out we’d have more seats, not less. The constituency work load of parliamentarians is already absurd

      • Ivan Horrocks says:
        August 3 2012 at 2:18 pm

        ‘And if we wanted to even out we’d have more seats, not less. The constituency work load of parliamentarians is already absurd.’

        Indeed. And we are supposed to live in a representative democracy, after all.

        But let’s be clear about what this proposal was all about anyway. It was another case of using the deficit (broke Britain) argument as cover for a policy that was supposedly about saving money, but actually about something completely different. In this case, gerrymandering.

  2. Ivan Horrocks says:
    August 3 2012 at 2:40 pm

    I mostly agree, Richard, though I still find it hard to accept that the Lib Dems can stay in till the end.

    Obviously the situation is still evolving, but with the latest news of Cameron’s dismissal of Lords reform, there becomes less and less of substance that the Lib Dems can hold up as offsetting the worst excesses of Tory policies – or indeed that the government almost exclusively adopts Tory policies. To this has to be added that there are clearly some policy domains – such as education and welfare reform – where the ministers involved don’t give a fig about what Lib Dems think. In the latter case I think it can be argued that this is being done not to drive the Lib Dems out of the government but as a longer term strategy to damage the Lib Dems at the next election (in that they can be shown to have been complicit in what will turn out to be disasterous policies). The Lib Dems are simply not sharp enough to stop being caught out by this kind of manouvre and I doubt they ever will be.

    I went through a period when I thought the Lib Dems would stay in government because a sufficient number of them knew they’d be offered Tory seats at the next election. But I now doubt this wil happen because Tory strategists will know that: a. every Lib Dem whose been in this government is seriously damaged goods (from the perspective of most Labour and Tory voters) and thus probably unelectable; and b. because the Tory right, which Cameron no longer has any control over, would simply cause such a public fuss.

    In summary, unless the Lib Dems get out with sufficent time left to restablish at least a modicum of independence and credibility they are effectively destroyed as a political party. I cannot believe that there aren’t at least some senior Lib Dems who can’t see this.