It seems that David Cameron has finally gone for the ultimate power grab in pushing through his own laws – in effect bypassing the House of Lords altogether.

Continuing the career work of dismantling the House of Lords started by his predecessor Tony Blair, Tory PM Cameron seeks to further weaken the House of Lords, thereby gutting the legislative House as the last remaining check to Cameron’s apparent preference towards an undemocratic authoritarian party whip system.

What this latest move does is formalise a single party state, but getting to this point has been clearly a two-party effort. Blair’s main strategy was to literally sell-off Lords membership peerages to party donors and as political favours. This was a clever Machiavellian strategy on two fronts: by selling off positions, it discredited the Lords chamber, reducing its image to that of a malleable political tool. The second objective was to fundamentally weaken the constitutional integrity of the chamber, forever. This was Blair’s leg of the mission.

Cameron’s leg of the job is somewhat more blunt, by attempting to almost physically (in political terms) subdue the decision-making and democratic functions of the Lords. Lord Strathclyde, a Tory grandee appointed by David Cameron, has been instructed by the Prime Minister to look at curbing the powers of the second chamber, is proposing that ‘hostile peers’ should be banned from overturning legislation – which, ironically, is one of the primary roles the Lords play in Britain’s constitutional checks and balances system. In other words, Cameron wants to stop the House of Lords from opposing any legislation he proposes – which by definition is a dictatorship.