Coalition Promises

The coalition government have made many promises to reform the United Kingdom's constitution, but when it came to enforce these promises major controversial issues were raised to the table. The three major reform issues were the House of Lords reform, the referendum if Scotland should become independent and the change to the AV voting system. These issues raised caused problems in Westminster and the media put its own twist on the issues. Overall if all the reforms proposed are implemented by the coalition it will be a major change in the UK constitutions because the changes proposed include the reduction of the powers of the prime minister to changing to the party system.

One of the first major constitutional reforms the coalition tried to put through was the House of Lords reform. In May 2011 detailed proposals for the reform where drafted and published on 17 of May 2011. The draft explained the following; it showed changing the way the peers are appointed to a more democratic way which is through elections, they also wanted to cut the amount of peers from 800 to 300 but to keep at least 60 peers which were appointed for their expertise and the rest of the peers would have been elected for a 15 year non-renewable term as a peer. The first election was set to take place in 2015. There were major controversial issues surrounding this when the deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg introduced a bail and gave its first reading on 27 June 2012and therefore on the 9 July the bill began to be debated. From the day this bill was introduced the conservative back bench and labour MP's said that the bill needed more scrutiny and that they would vote against this bill if it was not scrutinised further. By the 10 July the government started to realise that the government was going to lose the vote on the bill. At the vote 91 conservative MP's voted against while 19 more abstained. It was by August when Nick cleg announced that they were abandoning the bill due to the opposition from Conservative backbench MPs, claiming that the Conservatives had "broken the coalition contract". However, David Cameron disputed this view, saying that the agreement contained no specific promise to enact reform of the House of Lords. This sparked so much controversy in Westminster.