All proper democrats should back Lords reform. A second elected chamber, with a clearly defined role, would improve democracy. A small number of specialist senators, appointed not elected, would be a useful tweak. By and large the coalition has done a good job of putting together a sensible plan for change.
And now … the reality check. Lords reform isn't going to happen this time either. It is a good idea but it has never really happened. This week, we will see a close vote, as Tory rebels combine with Labour to defeat an attempt to limit debate on the reform. If they win, Lords reform will gum up parliament for many months. Even if they fail, the legislation will fall into a deep swamp of filibuster in the current House of Lords.
Why? If the arguments of such shrewd supporters of reform as the former Tory minister Stephen Dorrell (writing today) are so robust – and his point about a stronger upper chamber taking on the executive is crucial – how can it be that they are so easily shrugged off by MPs, who know very well the public is disillusioned with Westminster already?
The answer is that Lords reform has become what the coalition talks about when it wants to scream with fury and demand divorce but can't quite manage to. It's a substitute. It's Freud's transference neurosis. It's an excuse.
The Conservative party has only now fully woken up to the fact that Britain does not have a Conservative government. It may have a "Tory-led coalition" in Labour's phrase and it may be a government whose cuts to welfare and health budgets cause outrage to many people. But for the true-blue, red-clawed Tory, it's a coalition that has failed to deliver satisfaction on tax cuts, shrinking the state, boosting private enterprise, confronting Europe and implementing more punitive law and order measures, not to mention tighter controls on immigration.
David Cameron is getting much of the blame because, according to several Tories, he too easily accommodates the impertinent demands of the minority Lib Dems, of which Lords reform is the cheekiest. Stop Lords reform and you remind both Cameron and the Lib Dems who's boss: the Conservative party.
On the Lib Dem side, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable know they are perilously close to having to face the electorate next time as partners in a coalition that has delivered next to nothing for Lib Dem voters – not a better relationship with Europe, not electoral reform, not a revived economy. Ministers such as Clegg and Danny Alexander have become completely associated with the political personalities of Cameron and Osborne, and the early tax changes and reforms to the banking system aren't enough to cheer the Lib Dem troops.
So for them, Lords reform is essentially a political virility symbol: look what we've done. You may say we were the junior partner. We may have lost voting reform. Europe may be going belly-up. But we have finally responded to the old Liberal promise of an elected replacement for the Lords made before the first world war. Lloyd George, we have kept faith.
Both Tory backbenchers and Lib Dems have to find the nearest washbasin and splash some ice-cold water over themselves.
The likeliest outcome of a successful Tory revolt is that furious Lib Dems will retaliate by blocking the boundary changes that Conservative managers expect to deliver a net 20 seats in 2015. Lib Dems were already angry at the outcome of the boundary changes: this could be just the excuse they need to block them. Meanwhile the government will be so sunk in mind-numbing procedural battles it will do almost nothing useful over the next year. If they think the opinion polls are bad now, just wait.
On the Lib Dem side, they must ask themselves what a worried electorate, staring at the financial news, scared of more job losses, will think of a coalition expending so much political energy on remodelling Westminster – and almost certainly for no profit. This really, really, isn't the way to stave off political slaughter in the depths of a recession. The sensible thing for Tory rebels would be to swallow their anger, allow the legislation to pass through the Commons, secure in the knowledge it won't survive the Lords before the election; and pocket the advantage the boundary commission changes would bring.
The Lib Dems, on the other hand, should hope that the legislation at least gets a proper debate going, and if the Tory rebels do prevail, they should ridicule them and get over it, passing on to more important things. Neither Tory nor Lib Dem, I can absolutely promise, will benefit from the tedious, obscure parliamentary games both sides seem so excited about.
The Lib Dems do indeed need something to brandish to the electorate in 2015 – a triumph they have secured in government. But it's not going to be Lords reform. A far better bet would be the reform of the social care system – and it's funding. If the coalition partners want to fight, fight over that. Now that Labour and the more radically minded on the government side agree on the basics of reforming the banks, let's see them push forward fast there. But that's unlikely. Driven by the polling, the internal politics of the coalition are growing more poisonous almost by the day.
Both sides of the coalition accept that at some point ahead of the next election there will have to be a parting of the ways. But confecting a split over Lords reform is not the way to go about it. With the economy on life support and the country contemptuous of its ruling classes, political games about fantasy senates are much too dangerous to play.
