Given that he may have just handed the next election to Labour, you might ask why Nick Clegg isn’t being hailed as a progressive hero by Ed Miliband’s MPs this morning. The answer is that Labour still despises him for supporting the boundary changes in the first place. Clegg didn’t merely accept the changes as a quid pro quo for the AV referendum (as the Deputy PM previously observed, they were never linked to House of Lords reform), he genuinely believed in them. In 2010, he told MPs:
There can be no justification for maintaining the current inequality between constituencies and voters across the country.
On another occasion, at Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions, Clegg declared:
It is one of the founding principles of any democracy that votes should be valued in the same way, wherever they are cast. Over the years, all sorts of anomalies have developed, such that different people’s votes are simply not worth the same in elections to this place. That surely cannot be right, and it is worth reminding those Opposition Members who object to the rationale that it was one of the founding tenets of the Chartists-one of the predecessor movements to the Labour party-that all votes should be of equal value.
As shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan noted:
It was left to Labour to fight the arbitrary reduction in the number of MPs. Getting rid of 50 MPs hits Labour the most, and that’s why the Tory-led Government chose that figure. It was nothing to do with better politics, or about saving money – particularly as this Government has created an extra 117 unelected peers since May 2010.
The reason yesterday’s events will do nothing to enhance Clegg’s standing is that he chose to rebel over a matter of politics, rather than a matter of principle (such as the NHS reforms or welfare cuts). The Deputy Prime Minister’s reputation as a turncoat and an opportunist is secure. Once again, he has united both the left and the right in loathing for him.
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