Promising signs ahead of next Queen’s Speech

There wouldn’t normally appear to be much of a connection between private universities and House of Lords reform, but it is there in the process details of today’s news about the government dropping its plans for a bill to allow the creation of new private universities from the forthcoming Queen’s Speech.

It makes for good news for the Liberal Democrats too, as the process reason is that the legislation was going to be highly controversial and Nick Clegg is successfully pushing for other controversial legislation to be kept to a minimum in order to allow plenty of time for the House of Lords reform legislation to go through.

It is also, from a Liberal Democrat perspective, a good proposal to chop as the bill would have been primarily about implementing Conservative, rather than Liberal Democrat, policy.