‘Cutting the cost of politics’ — really?

After the House of Lords blocked the attempted tax credits cuts, the Tories pledged to sort out our apparent ‘constitutional crisis’. It’s curious that they’ve only realised the problems with an unelected upper chamber now it has impeded on their own authority. Given the fact that tax credits cuts were not in the Tory manifesto and just a month before the general election David Cameron appeared on Question Time, cateogorically denying any fall in child tax credit you can hardly blame the Lords for intervening, particularly with the government’s weak electoral mandate.

Despite this new found contempt for the power of the Lords, since 2010 David Cameron has appointed an astonishing 244 new peers to the Upper Chamber. However, his latest pledge to scrap the number of constituencies from 650 to 600 — clearly a tactical manouvre that will inevitably iron out small, urban and, funnily enough, Labour controlled constituencies — has been masked as a means of saving money on the cost of politics. In actual fact, the newly appointed Lords amount to a cost of £6.3m per year — hardly a saving.

Whilst there are Tory complaints of the House of Lords compromising the will of the electorate, questioning the UK’s representative democracy and going against Parliamentary convention, Cameron will make an 8% cut to the number of elected MPs which will fund the 17% increase in the size of the Lords. The New Statesman reported in October that ‘of the 50 seats that would have been eradicated had the 2013 review [of boundary changes] taken place, 35 were held by Labour’. Along with the change from household to individual voter registration whereby an estimated 800,000 voters have been lost from the electoral register, which includes many potential Labour voters, the Conservative government is subtly rigging our democracy in their favour.

The issue of voter registration may well be to reduce potential fraudulence in voting and the boundary changes may be to promote fairness but the main beneficiaries of such changes are clear. There are far more important issues that must be put back on the agenda to improve representation. Almost 4m people voted UKIP in the last election and received just one MP in return whilst 1.4m voted for the SNP and received 57 MPs. Serious considerations must be given to the future of First Past The Post and the possibility of introducing a proportional system; this will create genuine democratic change, unlike the mediocre reforms of this current government.

The hypocrisy of berating the Lords for impeding government plans whilst, at the same time, massively increasing its members (and, in turn, its costs) throws the legitimacy of reducing MPs to ‘save money into some serious doubt.