Lib Dems can be proud of much of their coalition work. But pursuing Lords reform risks wasting what time they have left
It would require an Einstein to explain the strange elasticity of political time. The calendar says we don't reach the actual halfway stage in the life of the coalition government that took office in May 2010 until November this year. Yet the effective political midpoint in the coalition's lifespan is almost upon us, right now.
Even in this fixed-term five-year parliament, politics will be on an election footing from at least autumn 2014 onwards. This means in turn that the governing midpoint is actually in late spring 2012, not November. By mid-May this year, there will have been the budget, the cabinet reshuffle, the London mayoral election and the new legislative programme in the Queen's speech. With these four major imminent events, I would argue, the watershed of the 2010 parliament will effectively have been crossed.
That's why this early 2012 period of planning and campaigning is also a time for serious strategic political thinking. From May onwards, the politics of getting elected is going to start encroaching again on the politics of governing. That's not to say that politics is suddenly about to lurch into general election mode. It's not.
But it is to say that time's winged chariot draws nearer. From this May, the government – and, in its own inevitably more minor key, the opposition – will begin to run out of time to do big new things and establish big new themes which could make a difference to the way they are perceived when the election finally comes around.
To put it another way, we are beginning to get to the end of a period in British politics, which started in May 2010, in which it was honest and proper to give the parties some benefit of the doubt. The coalition parties were new to government. Coalition itself required the political rulebook to be rewritten. Labour was unused to opposition and had a new leader. The economy was contracting dramatically fast. All the parties were entitled to be cut a bit of slack. The voters understood this. More fanatical observers did not.
But that will start to change now. And the change matters for all of the political parties in different ways. For the Conservatives, it means above all the need to keep winning the economic argument over Labour. For Labour it means the converse – getting into a better position to wrest the mantle of economic competence from the Tories. Other things matter too, of course. David Cameron will want to go into 2015 as the man who kept Scotland in the United Kingdom, for instance. He will want to do things that confound the "nasty party" image. Ed Miliband will want some costed flagship social reform pledges for hard times.
What does the watershed mean, though, for the Liberal Democrats? You might think, given the traumatic electoral consequences thus far of their first experience of government in modern times, that their big strategic need is to win a fresh hearing for the argument that the Lib Dems in government have made a beneficial difference which the country would otherwise have been denied.
Up to a point, you would be right about that. There is an awareness among Lib Dems in government that a lot of hard things have been done in the first half of the parliament which now need to be sold in the second. The mantra, just as it was in Tony Blair's day, is delivery. The Lib Dems are proud of things like the pupil premium, the nursery places and the youth contract, which they believe prove their dedication to fairness as well as economic discipline. Even on tuition fees they think they have a good social mobility story to tell about access safeguards. Now, like Blair before them, they are obsessed with getting things working and noticed on the ground. Like Blair, they may find this frustratingly tough.
So far, so fair enough. On the other hand, I utterly fail to see the strategic question for the Liberal Democrats to which the answer is reform of the House of Lords. Nick Clegg's Lords reform plans, to be unveiled in the Queen's speech, are delusional. They will dominate the 2012-13 parliamentary year. If they are voted down in the Lords, as they may be, they will have to dominate the 2013-14 session too, so that the government can get its way.
In the end they will either fall or create an unwanted new chamber of professional politicians. If you want a pretty effective revising chamber, then leave things as they are. If you want a second chamber that makes bicameral sense for modern Britain, then go for a federal one within a devolution context.
But the real tough strategic point is that nobody looking at the condition of Britain today thinks that Lords reform is a priority. When the whistle blows for the start of the second half of the coalition's period in office, the Liberal Democrats will have a precious two years in which to prove to voters that they have made a positive difference in difficult but unavoidable times.
That could, even now, be a much more runnable argument than many allow. But it will not deserve to succeed if they squander so much of the rest of their time in office on a half-baked and doomed folly that would not solve the constitutional problem and for which, in grim economic times, there is no demand anyway.