Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, August 10, 2012

Tradition...

It looks like the House of Lords is safe from drastic change for now. Is the coalition safe as well?

Cracks in British Governing Coalition as House of Lords Overhaul Falls Apart

Britain’s two governing parties, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, announced on Monday that they had abandoned attempts to overhaul the House of Lords, a development that many on both sides of the coalition government saw as evidence of its growing fragility.

Reform of the House of Lords, by replacing its appointed and hereditary membership with a mostly elected chamber, was one of the principal aims of the Liberal Democrats in joining the coalition in May 2010…

As the perennial third party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats have long regarded an elected upper chamber as a potential steppingstone beyond the marginal role the party [has]… played in British politics since the 1930s.

By confirming that a bloc of Conservatives had scuttled the reform effort for at least this Parliament… Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ leader, threw a wrench into the already creaking machinery of the coalition. In doing so, political analysts said, he thrust the coalition deeper into impasse on broad aspects of its legislative program, and raised the prospects of a collapse even before 2015.

Nick Clegg

In return for the Conservatives not fulfilling their pledge to support the House of Lords reform, Mr. Clegg said, the Liberal Democrats would no longer back the Conservatives’ push to change the electoral rules to bring parliamentary constituencies closer to a nationwide norm [reapportionment] in terms of overall voter numbers…

The overhaul ran afoul of a revolt by a group of nearly 100 Conservative backbenchers, supported quietly by at least some Conservative ministers in the coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Their principal objection was that an elected House of Lords would challenge the supremacy of the House of Commons, Parliament’s elected lower chamber, and that it would move the Lords away from the subsidiary role it has traditionally played, as a forum for detailed examination and revision of legislation approved by the Commons.

The abandonment of the reform package has been a deep personal blow to Mr. Clegg, exposing him ever more starkly as a man caught between a strong commitment to sustaining the coalition until the election and a gathering revolt among a powerful bloc of Liberal Democrats…

When the Conservative backbench revolt became clear in a parliamentary vote on the House of Lords bill last month, Mr. Clegg joined Mr. Cameron in pledging continuing support for the coalition…

Increasingly, though, the two leaders’ resolve has seemed to rest on personal chemistry more than any sound political foundation…

In its place is what some British commentators have likened to a failing marriage, held together by necessity rather than conviction, with both sides sensing that calling it off and forcing an early election — with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats both low in the opinion polls and Labour with a substantial lead — would be disastrous.