Politics: The coalition gets away with a sneaky power grab

On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power.

On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power. They went against the spirit of their pre-election commitments to restore trust in politics. While the press concentrated on the government’s strategy for the economy, they sneakily expanded the government’s future powers of patronage. The coalition quietly whipped its MPs into voting for an expansion of the power and influence of the executive (government) over the legislature (parliament). The bill in question was the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, and the result was that the number of MPs will now be reduced by 10 per cent at the next election but the number of ministers will remain the same.

Perhaps most shocking was the supine manner in which the Commons went along with this reduction in its independence. At the start of the debate on this measure, there were only 19 MPs on the coalition benches, six on the opposition ones and two milling by the door. There was no attempt on behalf of coalition MPs to make the government back down and only 22 Conservative MPs ended up rebelling.

Monday night’s events were at odds with Cameron and Clegg’s reformist rhetoric during the election. In February, Cameron declared, ‘We’d want to reduce the power of the executive and increase the power of parliament even if politics hadn’t fallen into disrepute.’ The Liberal Democrats claimed that their policy was to ‘cut the number of ministers and MPs’. Now, however, the two parties have pushed through a law to reduce the number of MPs while keeping the number of ministers constant, thus further reducing the ability of the legislature to rein in the power of the executive.