Hitting the ‘nuclear’ option over Lords referendum battle

Crunch time is approaching in the battle between Labour peers and the government over the bill that brings in the AV referendum and cuts the number of seats in the Commons by 50.

The Prime Minister is to address Crossbench peers at 2pm today. Amazingly this has been in diary for a while but the timing for the government is exquisite, because David Cameron now wants the crossbenchers to apply what you could call “peer pressure” on the Labour peers who have been slowing progress on the Parliamentary Voting system and Constituencies Bill to a near standstill.

No. 10 is now involved in talks with the Labour leadership to offer some concessions to Ed Miliband in the hope that he calls off his Lords troops. It sounds as though the concessions will not go anything like far enough for the Labour Party.

The government’s picked out a few of the amendments that have appeared on the order paper but there is, I am told, no budging on the limit on 5 per cent variation in constituency size (Tories say the 5 number is as important to them as the “5 May” date is for the Lib Dems on the referendum on the voting system).

And the government will not, it says, be allowing any sort of public inquiries into constituency boundaries or anything else that could potentially delay the Boundary Commission report beyond October 2013, the date needed to have the new seats up and ready for the general election expected in 2015. Ed Miliband met Nick Clegg last week to see if there was a way through but the meeting didn’t get very far.

So the government has got the Lords’ clerks to draft the equivalent of the nuclear weapon – a timetable motion, a guillotine by any other name.

The Lords has never timetabled anything, the time spent on bills is agreed between the parties just as the speaking order in the chamber is agreed with polite nods and deference.

It might seem procedural and irrelevant but a timetable motion would change the very nature of the upper house.

Nobody wants it, but the government doesn’t want to lose its bill – AV was central to the offer to the Lib Dems in the Coalition Agreement and reducing the size of the Commons and regularising the size of seats is a pet project of the Prime Minister himself.

But Labour feels the constituency redrawing is a fix designed to hurt them most. Problem for Ed Miliband is that he is a supporter of the AV referendum and it wouldn’t look great if his Lords team effectively cancelled the May 5 referendum.

We are still waiting to see who blinks.