The House of Lords has something of a Mad Hatters' tea party about it this week. Everyone is agitated. Everyone is angry. Everyone is in a hurry. No one knows what is going on. Flustered peers are threatening to stay up all night, and perhaps for several nights to come, as they debate government plans to hold a referendum on the alternative vote and reshape constituency boundaries. If nothing else, this is a bad way to make a good constitution.
The standoff involves one of those dilemmas in which there is merit in the arguments from both sides, but over which neither wants to compromise. The government is doing what it promised in the coalition agreement, passing legislation to hold an early referendum on electoral change and reduce the number of MPs (though the cut is smaller than either the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives offered in their manifestos). The opposition makes the reasonable point that these changes have huge consequences, were barely debated in the Commons, and do not – apart from reasons of internal coalition balance – have to be in the same bill. All sides have some party interest in the outcome, but are pretending otherwise. The Conservatives want more equally sized seats so that Labour, whose seats tend to contain fewer voters, loses some of its electoral advantage. Labour, which has mistaken fair distribution for gerrymandering, wants the opposite.
In the middle of this, it is worth clinging to a few fixed points. First, the AV referendum must take place, and soon. It would be a great loss if the vote was derailed by serious dispute over other parts of the bill. The Electoral Commission needs an act by the middle of next month in order to hold the vote on 5 May as planned, and this should be allowed.
Second, it should be accepted that there is a good case for fairer boundaries: there is nothing particularly just or constitutionally necessary about the present setup. It does not matter very much whether this change is in the same bill as the AV referendum – they could have been split – but it is important that the two things should not be seen as alternatives. Both are important and legitimate.
Third, the government has rushed this bill, failing to consult. By sticking to an arbitrary rule that almost all seats should be within 5% of the average size, it risks imposing the sort of statist uniformity that both Conservatives and Lib Dems are supposed to be against. There is a good case for a more flexible quota, perhaps closer to the 10% Labour wants.
All sides are testing the power of the Lords to the limit: an ugly and harmful standoff from which no one emerges with credit. It is time for a deal and, for peers, a good night's sleep.
