Debates on the floor of the House of Commons do not generally win a mass audience, even at moments of high drama – the knife-edge vote that settles great affairs of state. The proceedings of the third delegated legislation committee, while not actually secret, are hardly the stuff of political fanfare. That is surely the reason this arcane forum was used on Thursday to push through plans to scrap student maintenance grants.

Labour expecting £6m loss in funding through trade union bill Read more

Thanks to a crafty, albeit constitutionally permitted, parliamentary manoeuvre, a cut that will affect hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged young people went through without proper debate or vote on the floor of the Commons.

David Cameron commands a slender majority, but it is enough to pass most of his legislative programme in a more transparent fashion. Only the most controversial elements risk obstruction, either through rebellion on the Tory benches in the lower house or rejection in the upper one. Both mechanisms were involved in the scuppering of George Osborne’s proposed tax credit cuts last year. Then, too, the chancellor had tried to minimise exposure to dissent by smuggling the changes in a statutory instrument, hoping, by way of procedural side-alley, to dodge the full gauntlet of parliamentary scrutiny.

When peers intervened, instructing the Commons to consider the matter properly, Mr Osborne was forced to drop the cuts. But Downing Street was so affronted by this ermine-clad rebuke as to threaten the upper chamber with punitive loss of powers. There are good reasons to assert the primacy of Commons over unelected Lords, but pique at having been exposed in an act of parliamentary chicanery is not one of them.

That episode, like the vote on student grants, is consistent with a pattern displayed by this government of impatience with democratic norms, verging on contempt. One habit is bundling measures of primary importance up in secondary legislation. This week the Commons held its first ever vote excluding Scottish MPs – a provision of the English votes for English laws (Evel) system introduced last year by statutory instrument; so without an act of parliament.

The Lords are currently debating the trade union bill that has been designed quite clearly to damage the organisational capabilities and finances of the labour movement in general and the Labour party in particular. Under the guise of requiring more democracy and transparency, the bill makes it harder for unions to collect membership fees and allocate them for political causes. This is flagrant defiance of the unwritten accord that measures affecting party funding be handled on a multilateral basis. Auxiliary to that assault is the chancellor’s decision to cut levels of Short money – the state’s contribution to the maintenance of opposition parties – in his 2015 spending review.

The budget squeeze alone would seem cynical. It turns sinister when considered in concert with alterations to the way MPs are chosen. A requirement that many individuals sign up anew to the electoral register is widely expected to lead to a drop in the number of lower-income voters in multiple-occupancy and rented accommodation – especially students and immigrants – on the rolls. They may not all be Labour supporters, but past trends suggest they will disproportionately lean that way. The revival of old plans to redraw constituency boundaries will boost the number of notional Tory seats without a single vote being cast.

In both cases, there is a sound theoretical basis for reform. A shift from household to individual voter registration obstructs some kinds of ballot-box fraud. Boundaries need routine updating to match flows of population. But it is no coincidence that a Conservative administration, hardly famous for craving constitutional modernisation, has chosen as a matter of priority to enact changes that damage the Labour party’s prospects of electoral recovery and lay the foundations for a long-term Conservative monopoly on government. Narrow partisan interest has trampled pluralist convention.

It is normal for a party in power to want to stay there. But there are also protocols that underpin British democracy and an uncodified ethos of fair play that sustains the legitimacy of any electoral system. Taken in isolation, any of the steps this government has taken to avoid scrutiny and queer the institutional pitch against the opposition would be disreputable. Taken as a package, they are downright dangerous.

• This article was amended on 15 January 2016. An earlier version referred to “short money”; Short money, that should have been.