Making A Difference

Well, here's a thing: Daveybloke is set to renege on reform of the Lords, partly in order to keep the nepotists and knuckle-scrapers on his back-benches happy, and partly no doubt because the serial humiliation of Nick Clegg is the one political process at which Daveybloke can still claim some measure of competence. It is even possible that Daveybloke will be able to compound Wee Nicky's abjection in the true Bullingdon manner, by forcing him to stand up in Big School and announce that in the second decade of the twenty-first century there is still no immediate prospect of dragging Parliament into the twentieth, even though all three parties claim to be in favour of doing so.

The fourteen days of parliamentary time which were set aside for the legislation will now be used for "jobs, jobs, jobs" or, in Standard English, for bashing the poor and blaming the last Labour government. The Deputy Conservatives have already delegated a damage limitation operative to say that constitutional reform was never terribly important anyway and that what voters want is more benefit cuts and more privatisation. Hence, assuming that the briefings from Conservative sources are not some sort of spin exercise (a possibility which cannot be discounted, even with a government as inept as this one), the Deputy Conservatives' great reform programme will end with Parliament in 2015 looking very much as it did in 2010, except of course that it will contain even fewer Liberal Democrats.