The Reform.

So... Clegg set out his great reform plan on Monday, and I haven't yet had a little ramble about it... so now's as good a time as any. I found an analysis on the proposed changes over at politics.co.uk, which should help to give this post some sort of structure. You can find it here: http://www.politics.co.uk/analysis/legal-and-constitutional/analysis-who-benefits-from-clegg-s-reforms--$21381249.htm

Labour are against equalizing the constituency sizes because they help the Tories and hinder them. It's natural that a party would be against a proposal that would lead it to doing worse than it is now, but are equal-sized constituencies really unfair because they favour a particular party, or is "fair" where you fiddle with the boundaries so that all major parties get roughly the same number of seats, even if that means having great differences between the number of electors in different constituencies?

Plaid Cymru are against it as well, as at means Wales loses a quarter of it's seats. Again, it's probably fair, but it's a bit of a bitter pill to swallow. There is a referendum for more Assembly powers on the same day as the AV referendum though, and if Wales can get law-making powers, having fewer seats in Westminster won't matter too much.

I suspect that the reforms will further highlight the political differences between England, Scotland and Wales. I don't expect we'd see that much change in Scotland or Wales, but England will probably get a higher proportion of Tory MPs. People in Scotland and Wales will take note of the contrast. It would probably lead to more support for independence, or at least yet further devolution.

Some analysts have suggested that AV might actually hurt the Lib Dems in some places, as they gain from tactical votes from people trying to keep one of the two biggest parties out. This is quite a contrast to the prevailing opinion that "AV helps the Lib Dems."

The question is: how much might AV help or hinder Labour. Labour, I assume, would stand to lose seats, as it's one of the two biggest parties. However, I don't think it would lose as many seats for Labour as it would for the Tories. In that sense, AV might help to counter the increase in Tory seats brought about by boundary changes, whilst possibly increasing the number of Lib Dem MPs and keeping Labour with a respectable number of MPs in comparison to their rivals.

Labour are also against the date, as they note that turnout will be higher in places where other elections are being held. This is true. So what? The referendum isn't somehow less valid because some people can't be bothered to vote, and if some people aren't going to vote because they're not interested in the matter, then surely they won't be that bothered about the result.

Scottish and Welsh politicians do have a better argument: the referendum will get in the way of the debates around their own elections.

Apparently, there are plans to give the sitting Prime Minister two weeks to form a new government if the current one falls. This, I assume, is a way of dealing with the problem which would arise when Parliament votes to bring down the Government but does not vote to dissolve parliament.

Speaking on the topic of no confidence votes and votes to dissolve parliament... I have to wonder why Labour was so against the 55% rule on the basis that no confidence motions should be carried by a simple majority. I myself didn't understand that a motion to dissolve parliament wasn't the same thing as a no confidence motion at first, but then I'm not an MP. The Shadow Cabinet SHOULD know the difference. Did they really get confused or were they deliberately muddling the two motions up?

Jack Straw has called the increase in the dissolution threshold "the first major U-turn of this government", as is reported here:

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/legal-and-constitutional/labour-fumes-over-av-referendum-$21381235.htm

He's also called for making the Assembly and Scottish Parliament elections "a proper referendum on this ConDem government", which is just the wrong thing to do. Senedd and Holyrood are NOT Westminster, and elections to the former bodies should NOT be treated as "General-Election-Lite".

Back to the original article:

It raises what would happen if the AV referendum were to fall: some suggesting that if it did there would be no incentive for Clegg to stay in the coalition. I'm not sure that's true. The agreement was that the referendum would be held, not that AV would be introduced, and there are other things that Clegg wants to do while in office. It seems the people who wrote the article also think that a failed referendum won't necessarily mean that the coalition will collapse. It is possible, though, that even if Clegg wants to stay in the coalition in the event that AV falls, Lib Dem backbenchers won't let him.

The arcticle brings up another interesting idea that I'll comment on here even though it's not directly related to reform. It suggest that the coalition might break up a year before the next election in order to give the Lib Dems time to cement their identitity. It would be interesting to see how things would work out if this did happen: it would basically mean that the Tories would be a minority government for a year. They could at least rely on the Lib Dems to vote against a dissolution motion if it was made before they felt they were ready to fight an election.