There are two groups, not entirely mutually exclusive, who are desperately trying to ensure that the UK clings on to two relics of a bygone age – the First Past the Post Westminster voting system and the House of Lords. When defended in isolation, the arguments can sound persuasive but when defended together, it becomes increasingly clear that each entity could quite easily cancel each other out and the country wouldn’t miss them. Quite the contrary.

James talked in his last post of the four different groups competing in the AV referendum but I would like to suggest a fifth – those who would vote against First Past the Post in order to assist in doing away with the House of Lords.

The most common defence of the House of Lords is that there is nothing cheaper to take its place. Those who claim this are wrong. Having nothing in its place is considerably cheaper, 100% cheaper in fact.

After all, why do we need a House of Lords? Just because it dates back to the 1300s and we’ve gotten used to it, it doesn’t mean we still can’t just pull the plug on the arrangement despite its supposed merits:

The House of Lords as an Upper Chamber has the primary purpose of scrutinising Legislation proposed by the Lower House through the form of debate and through proposing amendments to legislation. Governments in recent years have used the Upper House as a variant of the Select Committee process to finalise legislation before presentation for Royal Assent.

The House of Commons already scrutinises legislation and I daresay that Select Committees do a more effective job of being a, well, Select Committee. For those concerned about this halving of our political Houses, don’t worry, there is already a term for this state of having one parliamentary chamber – the delightful Unicameralism. Were the UK to drop the House of Lords then it would be joining such appealing company as Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Singapore and Norway (ok, and China, Iraq and Iran. What’s your point?). Devolved Scotland, if you want to see it that way, is also already practising Unicameralism.

The next argument advanced by the grey and the crusty who wish to save the Lords may then be that a Government with an unassailable majority should not wield such power, which leads me on to the next part of this two-step solution – introducing proper PR.

Were we to have proper PR in the UK then we wouldn’t need unelected Lords to check the power of our Governments as the existence of eight or nine political parties, all negotiating and compromising with each other with an engaged public watching on, would ensure that controls were inherent in the system to ensure legislation was always sufficiently refined.

Obviously we don’t have the option of full PR on our badly limited voting slip on May 5th but there is surely little doubt that voting Yes to AV is a more positive statement that one wants a more proportional voting system than voting No or abstaining.

There is even an incentive for the many proponents of independence to involve themselves in this idea of pushing for Unicameralism supported by PR through voting for AV. A stronger Yes vote north of the border on May 5th would show that Scotland is more open to the idea of a proportional system than our southern neighbours, just one more example of a more ‘leftie’ philosophy that makes us distinct within the United Kingdom. A ‘Yes’ majority in Scotland and a ‘No’ majority in the rest of the UK would be enough on its own to make many Scots wonder why we don’t just take such decisions for ourselves when Scottish majority opinion is at odds with UK majority opinion, a feeling that will surely already be incubating along after the General Election result.

We don’t really know who our peers are and we don’t know what they do but their position is protected by an out of date First Past the Post system that is patently unfair and undemocratic. MPs and Lords alike talk a good game about House of Lords reform but the reality is that, at most, only 7 people out of the 1,391 Members of both Houses are arguing for scrapping that second Chamber – SNP and Green MPs.

To become Unicameralists we would need to work around a unilateral Cameron, a duplicitous Clegg and wait out a long election-free 4.5 years that the current coalition awarded itself. Voting Yes to AV is the best way to consign historic practices to history.

Today had a big red-pen circle round it in the SNP’s schedule when they were new to office – it’s the day the referendum would have been held if Parliament had let them Bring It On! Instead, it’s Westminster that’s making the running on more powers for Scotland, and today Michael Moore (with or without Nick Clegg) will come to Edinburgh to announce what we already know – there will a Scotland Bill to legislate most of the Calman recommendations into effect.

The SNP are palpably furious to have lost the initiative to London on the final St Andrew’s Day before the election, and today is indeed significant, although largely in news management terms. Like the National Conversation, Calman was set up to listen only to one side of the argument, and the end product has been suitably lacking in radicalism.

As an anorak, the title annoys me too. If it passes, The Scotland Bill will become The Scotland Act. We already have a Scotland Act, and it’s a pretty historic document wherever you stand on the constitutional question. It’s the only legislation where any proportion of the public might just know the first memorable line: “There shall be a Scottish Parliament”. Now we’ll have to distinguish them by date, which will aggravate the anorak quotient of these future discussions.

But I digress. The plans are to devolve an odd mix powers to Holyrood. Aside from the tax question, the newsworthy items seem to be regulation of airguns, drink drive limits and speed limits. For some reason the media aren’t exercised by the proposals to split Stage 3 consideration of legislation into Stage 3 and Stage 4, the first for amendments and the second for final approval.

Now, there’s a decent consensus against free access to airguns, against drink driving, and Parliament would probably back statutory 20 mile an hour residential zones. Once changes in those areas have been made, though, what remains to do? Where’s the radical change the Coalition tell us Calman will bring? What can we do differently?

Of course, the main thrust is those tax powers, even though the aggregates levy and air passenger duty are not coming to Scotland just yet. Central to those is the idea that the equivalent of 10p is lopped off all the income tax bands in Scotland, and Holyrood then has to take an active decision about how much to raise.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any political difference between simply letting the existing Scottish Variable Rate remain unused, were it still available for use, and a 2015 post-Calman Scottish Government simply sticking 10p on tax so the bands remain the same as the rest of the UK. The bands, allowances and thresholds won’t be subject to change, and the Commission claims “this is because income tax is a progressive tax”. If that was the real reason, Holyrood would simply have been forbidden from making the bands less progressive: given the way Scotland votes, the suspicion has to be that the Grand Coalition (in the case, including Labour) don’t want Holyrood to be able to make the tax system more progressive.

The fact that the upper rates can be changed in lock-step does mark a limited improvement on the Scottish Variable Rate. It would ensure that income tax increases continue to be progressive above the £44,875 level at which the top rate kicks in, unlike the tax powers voted for in 1997 which are progressive only up to that point. So here’s the open question to Scotland’s political parties. If you had the Calman powers now, would you consider using them to limit the cuts?

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