Clegg's Lords proposals are made of fail

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Like with AV, Cameron's only gifted this to Clegg because he knows it'll be voted down.

Any change to the Lords can only be positive, and I support this, but need does need to be 100% elected and those terms need to be MUCH shorter. Why settle for a half-done idea?

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It's not quite as bad as what we have now, but it's up there.

He made a crap electoral reform proposal as well. He can't do anything right.

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As with the AV referendum, which was defeated by Labour, it's up to Ed Miliband to do the right thing.

The AV referendum which he personally supported, a system that was originally proposed by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.

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Just watching the highlights of Clegg's speech on News at 10. Clegg getting laughed at, nothing I love more.

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Also shows that the Tory right are the same wreckers that they were in the 90s as well.

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Is there any real reason to keep the House of Lords at all?

It's a British thing. You won't understand.

Most of us don't even understand.

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Do they have any red lines at all?

Well, supposedly they're threatening to sabotage the boundary review as revenge.

The LibDems say a lot of things.

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Clegg says Lords reform plans abandoned, "coalition contract broken", will not back boundary review

Thought he said their fate wasn't tied together.

Sums him right up. Truly disgusting, vile excuse of a politician. Just when we all thought his approval rating couldn't get any lower.

And as for the PM, he's looking more and more like John Major and less and less like Margaret Thatcher every day. Isn't it extraordinary that the Prime Minister of our country can't even urge his party to support his own position? Weak, weak, weak.

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If Clegg had any grapefruits at all, he'd withdraw his support from the government before it's too late for them. If I was a LibDem MP, I would be pressuring him to end the coalition or risk getting kicked out the way he and others did to Charles Kennedy.

Don't take it for granted that there's a contingency of Liberals who're actually against the coalition. And even if there was, what kind've party would trigger an election which would see a near 13-14% swing against them?

Key lefties like Ming Campbell and Simon Hughes would be voting to end their careers.

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Someone care to point out exactly where the Tories breached the agreement?

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House of Lords reform can wait.

Yup, already been waiting a century.

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The man from Washington County is not entirely wrong, actually. The comparatively clever thing to do would have been to have at least threatened (in public) to end the coalition and maybe to bring down the government; it's true that a snap election would likely reduce the LibDems back to phone box status, but it would also likely see the defeat of the government generally and don't think that all those senior Tories would happily wave goodbye to their ministerial cars...

And the LibDems would?

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Are the Liberals supposed to be centrist or centre-left?

Where do we start?

On the record, raw votes in parliament and such things, it'd be incredibly difficult call them "centre-left" by any definition. There front benchers, by default, have nodded through every government policy once it got to a division.

I'd, personally, have a painful time calling them centrist.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/aug/07/david-cameron-boundary-changes

Exactly, all this can't go on unless Dave's wanting to hit the eject button. If that's the case, he must genuinely think he can overcome a 10 point Labour lead on Ed Miliband's wonkishness alone despite being without any major (popular) policy achievements.

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If Clegg had any grapefruits at all, he'd withdraw his support from the government before it's too late for them

...and resign from British politics and go raise sheep in New Zealand.

No......no.....NOOOO!!!!!!!!

Chatham Island maybe?

I was thinking more the Pitcairn Islands

Seriously the guy sounds like a slippery, patronizing w****r.

As long as Lord Clegg of Hallam is as far away from Parliament as possible by the end of May 2015, everything'll be okay.

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Would someone with more knowledge of the constitution clarify for me? Wouldn't all the LibDem ministers have to resign if that was to happen, Cameron trying to shove them through parliament? If that's the case, I wonder how long Clegg'll go before making a u-turn on "I'm not supporting the boundaries".

I'm assuming Cameron's banking on the LibDems not wanting to go for the early election, for obvious reasons.

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Only technically.

As is our constitution.

If they didn't resign, it'd set dangerous precedent for future divided cabinets (such as Major and Brown's and even Blair's at times). Again, as is our constitution.

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Is he perhaps trying to set a point of differentiation from the Conservatives, to try to pacify the half of the Lib Dem supporters he upset by backing the Coalition?

Those voters were supporters, past tense. Something as trivial to the man on the street as the boundary changes isn't going to win back the 60% of their 2010 voters that they've lost.

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Is he perhaps trying to set a point of differentiation from the Conservatives, to try to pacify the half of the Lib Dem supporters he upset by backing the Coalition?

Those voters were supporters, past tense. Something as trivial to the man on the street as the boundary changes isn't going to win back the 60% of their 2010 voters that they've lost.

But I thought their voters basically were more middle class liberal types who cared about such issues a Lords Reform.

The ones you find on online election forums are, yes...

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I'm assuming Cameron's banking on the LibDems not wanting to go for the early election, for obvious reasons.

The reason being that he knows Nick Clegg well and does not consider him a vertebrate?

The obvious reason for the Liberals wanting to avoid an election at all costs being that predicted swing from 24% to 10%.