David Cameron’s lasting gift to his party will be the gerrymandering of the constitution, unprecedented in modern times. This week it emerges that in revenge for the vote against cuts to tax credits, the already weak powers of the House of Lords are to be neutered. The Lords need radical democratic reform, but instead Lord Strathclyde has been put in charge of silencing it.

David Cameron castigated the peers of acting unconstitutionally over tax credits, affronted that his government – a Tory government! – could be held to account by the unelected chamber. Tories always had a safe Lords majority, while every Labour government always faced a hostile Tory second chamber. Now all but 91 of the hereditaries have been sent away, in an hour of need, Cameron can no long summon backwoods peers from their estates. He has to win over the crossbenchers and make a good case for legislation – a test that tax credits failed abysmally.

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Strathclyde will recommend later this month that the Lords lose their veto over delegated or secondary legislation – statutory instruments for putting through regulations. Worse still, the government plans to dress up much more of its legislation as “secondary”, which leaves the House of Commons very little chance of amending it either.

By convention, the Lords does not dispute financial bills, so now the government will dress up any contentious motions as falling under “financial privilege”. For example, the Lords voted to give 16 and 17 year olds the vote for the EU referendum. The government in the Commons this month overturned it, and it was due to “ping-pong” forwards and backwards between the houses. But the government has had it declared a “financial” matter, claiming it costs £6m to register young voters. By no stretch of the imagination is a decision on who votes “financial” – and if that is, so is just about everything else. A new naked contempt for the Lords was shown this week in Lord Freud’s shameful behaviour on the welfare reform bill, in which he refused to answer anything any peer raised.

If this is war, then let the Lords respond with rebellion. Demand Cameron should bring in a proper democratic constitutional reform, of the kind his party sabotaged in the coalition. If he refuses, then they have every right to block everything in every arcane way they can, refusing to stand by as bad laws are frogmarched through without the scrutiny and safeguards of a second chamber.

If this were just one example of high-handed undermining of democracy, you could put it down to a petulant fit of prime ministerial pique. But it’s part of an extremely sinister pattern. Fifty MPs are to be removed, most of them Labour, as the boundaries of most constituencies are redrawn. The new registers, forcing every individual to sign up, mean losing millions of voters – mostly young, mobile or poor, the sort who might vote Labour. Most shocking is the removal of college and universities’ signing up of all students automatically, for which there is no possible good reason.

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If 16 and 17 year olds were reckoned to be anti-EU Tories, you can bet Cameron’s party would give them the vote in a trice. The only reason the government refuses to modernise the voting system, so that everyone can vote online (as they did for the Tory selection of a London mayoral candidate) is fear that too many of the young/non-voters might vote for the first time, and vote Labour.

Now add in the heavy cut in state funding for political parties, which of course hits Labour far harder than the Tories, with their plethora of billionaire City backers.

For each of these, Conservatives summon up Jesuitical justifications. But put them together, and this is a full-frontal assault on Labour. These are obstacles that may prove insurmountable, installing one party politics for years to come, even if Labour was in a highly electable condition. The lack of proportional representation is becoming a danger to democracy as voters try and fail to elect new parties, leaving Ukip and Greens with just one MP each despite millions of votes and no socialist party. But to undermine even the existing weak democratic process is shocking.