WE ENGLISH are bad at thinking constitutionally. To adapt the Cole Porter song, the Scots and Welsh do it, the Northern Irish do it, even the Iraqis do it — and the Americans love doing it all the time. But not the pragmatic English. We can no longer afford that luxury. Our constitution is increasingly unbalanced.

Tony Blair denies there is any problem. One of the most curious aspects of his premiership is his lack of interest in the far-reaching changes in the constitution which will be one of his main legacies. He believes the public has no interest in such matters compared with health, schools and crime.

Moreover, Mr Blair is not really a pluralist. His big-tent approach, originally a marquee and now just a camping bivouac for two, was never about sharing power, but about absorbing other groups, from businessmen to the Liberal Democrats. He has not wanted any checks on his exercise of power: hence, his scepticism about a partially elected Lords and electoral reform.

During the Queen’s Speech debate, Mr Blair was unusually triumphalist, reminding Michael Howard, who had been more gracious, about “which party won and which lost the election. He has 197 MPs. We have 356, and I stand here and he sits there.” True, but you cannot ignore the 5.5-point fall in Labour’s share of the vote to 35.5 per cent, the lowest for any government with a majority. Labour won the support of less than 22 per cent of the total electorate. This compares with more than 34 per cent in 1959 when Labour lost and had more than a hundred fewer MPs. And remember also that the Tories won more votes in England than Labour, though gained many fewer MPs.

That does not mean that the election outcome was illegitimate. There is no question about the Government’s right to govern. Labour has a clear working majority. We have had lopsided results before, notably in 1983, when the old SDP-Liberal Alliance won 25.4 per cent of the vote, but only 23 MPs. Nothing happened then and virtually nobody cared.

A couple of years ago, David Butler, the doyen of election experts, and I chaired a commission set up by the independent Constitution Unit to look at the experience of proportional representation since 1997 in the devolved bodies. Our report did the work of the review promised by Labour in its 2001 manifesto. This is now belatedly under way in Whitehall.

The cross-party commission was neither pro nor anti-PR. Its message was that there are no absolutes. Electoral systems are the product of time and circumstance. What makes sense, and has worked well, in Scotland or Wales is not necessarily right for Westminster. Voters also have contradictory views, backing PR in theory but also wanting strong governments.

By all means let us have a further public review, though it will not resolve anything. The real issue is political. There is now the prospect that neither Labour nor the Tories will be able to win an overall majority in the Commons on their own. While the huge in-built advantage to Labour in the electoral system is partly unwinding, the Tories still have a mountain to climb in both votes and seats.

It is time for both main parties to think about the possibility of coalition politics and electoral reform. The alternative vote (a one, two, three list of preferences), however, favoured by some senior ministers, is not a proportional system. If used on May 5, it would have produced an even larger Labour majority, at the expense of the Tories. Ironically, support for electoral reform on the Tory benches has disappeared just when it may be in the party’s long-term interests.

The Liberal Democrats have sought to use the election result to attack the Salisbury convention, created in the late 1940s to prevent a stalemate between a Commons with a big Labour majority and a heavily Tory Lords. Under the convention, the Lords respects the right of a government to enact its manifesto pledges. This permits scrutiny of detail, but not obstruction.

However, Charles Kennedy argues that the circumstances are now very different. Labour is about to become the largest party in the Lords for the first time, even though it will still only have fewer than three in ten members of the House, and can still easily be outvoted by Tory and Lib Dem peers. The Lib Dem peers tend to be very self-righteous about their rights, and Mr Kennedy is on treacherous ground in invoking “such an inadequate basis of election” in the Commons to stir up the peers to ignore the convention over “bitterly contentious items such as Lords reform and identity cards”. Summoning up the Lords to defy the Commons is the language of diehard Tories, not the heirs of Asquith and Roy Jenkins.

There is a case for caution about changing, or codifying, the powers of the Lords. These cannot be viewed in isolation from composition. Parliament needs to decide whether we have an appointed House with a largely advisory, scrutinising role, or a partly elected chamber as a check on the powers of the Commons. At present, we have an appointed House claiming a legitimacy which it does not have because of the failings of the Commons.

The Government has promised a joint committee to review these issues as a step towards a Bill removing the remaining 92 hereditary peers. As Lord Strathclyde, the wily Conservative leader, has argued, its terms of reference must be wideranging. But Mr Blair does not really want an open debate to cloud his final, urgent drive towards creating his legacy. Perhaps Gordon Brown, a Scot who does think constitutionally, will be the prime minister who resolves these questions.

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