Political Question

[andrewducker]

At the moment the House of Lords are debating the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill.

I've heard numerous claims that this bill is incredibly unfair, and blatant gerrymandering by the Conservative Party.

Looking at the details, I'm feeling baffled. I can see a claim that the exemption for the three Scottish constituencies (Two Liberal Democrat, on Scottish National Party) are biased in their favour. But I can't see how a system whereby people are grouped together in what's going to be a massively arbitrary manner (each area must be within 5% of the national average, and are set up by independent bodies - the Boundary Commissions).

I don't really have a stake in this one - I'd just like someone to explain how this system would give an advantage to any one party. I can see that it could _remove_ advantage from a party if the old system with much less equal constituency sizes gave that party an advantage, but I'm totally failing to see how it's anything like gerrymandering.

Am I missing something obvious?

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

And given how much gerry-mandering New Labour got away with, which didn't cause a fuss, one imagines this must be an order of magnitude above that.

[andrewducker]

Do you have anything on that? Because I don't remember seeing anything on Labour gerrymandering. I have a vague inkling that they have an advantage because the areas their supporters are in have different demographics, but I didn't think there was anything at all blatant going on. As always, happy to be educated if you have something to point me at.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Well where I live, the boundaries got changed to shuffle a lot of traditional Tory votes into a safe Labour seat, making it harder for the tories to mount a comeback in Perth and Kinross. And I was told a lot of little boundary shuffles happened in Glasgow that were very much to Labours advantage over the SNP. But I don't have a source for it I'm afraid.

[matgb]

Rhetoric.

Labour MPs convinced themselves it was gerrymandering. Tory MPs were convinced by Cameron this would balance it in their favour.

Neither of these statements were ever true, but enough people believed them that it's become 'fact' to a bunch of people. The Adherants of the Repeated Meme spring to mind.

The current system biases in favour of urban areas over rural areas, in general. Which means that a party (or parties) that get a lot of votes in urban areas will, on balance, do slightly better, but that assumes that all urban areas back that party. They don't.

Tories deluded themselves into thinking they kept losing because the constituencies were rigged, whereas it's a lot more to do with vote concentration and FPTP. Labour have now deluded themselves the Tories want this to 'wipe them out' and that this is actually true.

That Labour spent a lot of time debunking the Tory claims about the bias of the system and then bought into the same claims to oppose reform is interesting.

Chartism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

# Equal Constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing small constituencies to swamp the votes of large ones.

Sounds like a fair idea to me. If we must have single member seats, do them properly.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The problem is the current system is biased in Labour's favour. They hold more of the smaller seats, which are likely to be reduced in number when the boundaries are rearranged to make every seat roughly the same.

This bill will actually make the system fairer, but because Labour are likely to be the net losers, they are the party making a fuss about it on the basis that very few people will bother to actually look at the proposal in detail and work out they are talking nonsense.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

The Grauniad when the changes were first suggested - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/dec/21/cameron-plan-bias-electoral-system

Suggests it's not 'gerrymandering' at all. And a couple of articles by James Graham of Unlock Democracy:

"Ultimately then, neither the “reduction” or the “equalise” part of these reforms are likely to make much of a difference, either to the political breakdown in the House of Commons or the nature of MP’s roles."
http://www.theliberati.net/quaequamblog/2010/07/04/electoral-mythbusting-2-spotlight-on-labour-and-boundary-changes/

"So there are genuine social justice problems that need to be ironed out of this legislation. Unfortunately, by focusing on the false gerrymandering charge, Jack Straw puts party self-interest above the public good and only ensures that the debate in parliament becomes more heated. In doing so, the possibility of MPs working across parties to give the bill proper scrutiny recedes. It is at best self-defeating and at worse a deeply cynical attempt to derail the coalition which has nothing to do with the real issues that are at stake."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/28/labour-self-defeating-gerrymander-accusations

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think the legitimate concern that leads to concern over gerrymandering is the number of unregistered voters in urban areas.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I too have been unable to see how the boundary changes do anything other than recalibrate what was previously a slight advantage for Labour.

The Scottish constituency exemptions as I'm sure you realise are, while on the one hand to the advantage of the parties that hold them, nonetheless entirely justifiable on an objective level .

[andrewducker]

I don't realise it at all. What's the objective justification?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Okay, but forgive me if I over-simplify or tell you things you already know here - I'm not sure how basic you want this.

Well, let's work on the (I would say pretty reasonable?) premise that the basis of UK politics is that an MP is responsible, first and foremost, to his or her constituency. He or she is there for them, is answerable to them, and is in his or her position to represent their specific needs and requirements in parliament.

The Scottish Highland constituencies have an incredibly low population density by comparison to the rest of the country - no large cities, lots of mountains. As such, they also have specific needs and objectives as constituencies - needs that are quite different from those constituencies that contain large population centres. Rural areas have vastly different priorities from urban areas with regard to funding, education, government subsidies, transport, and the list goes on and on, and those few rural MPs are the only people representing those already very large (in land mass) areas in government.

If you imposed upon those constituencies the population requirements levelled at the rest of the country by these reforms, you basically divide the top of Scotland into a few enormous constituencies - I'm sure someone smarter than me has already worked out how this would likely look but being at work I don't have time to do the Googling on this one.

This creates several issues. Firstly, the MPs for those constituencies already have their work cut out for them getting around the place; this gets worse. On a practical level, it's just hard to get everywhere when it takes hours to drive across your constituency - my MP can walk across his in twenty minutes. Secondly, the constituencies themselves become so diverse in terms of area - urban vs rural, island vs mainland - that their needs and priorities begin to conflict, and the MP is faced with the difficulty of trying to represent a constituency who themselves have very little in the way of a coherent, consistent voice - they all want different things. What would inevitably happen is that the majority would will out, and that would almost certainly mean that urban priorities would be met over rural.

Now, I suppose on a purely Utilitarian level this is absolutely fair - the majority of the population of Scotland is urban, and so they just win and the rural communities lose out because there just aren't enough of them. But the choice has been made to attempt to strike a balance in this and to exempt these rural areas from boundary redistribution both to look after their unique needs as highland and island communities and from a practical point of view in terms of how much land a working MP can really be expected to cover, and I think there's a pretty good argument that, in the interests of a more balanced, reasoned fairness, one that takes into account minority needs and practicalities, exempting those constituencies is the right choice.

So I suppose 'objective' is perhaps not quite the right term, since that might suggest I mean 'without compassion'. I suppose what I mean is that there's an objective argument that the decision is non-partisan.

[fearmeforiampink]

If they're the ones for the Shetland Isles and so forth, that the needs of the Island are quite different to that of the mainland near it, and that it'd be impractical for one person to do both.

The general argument in Scotland against it was that in low population areas you'll get massive (geographically speaking) areas, with some very different communities with different needs and/or the MP unable to properly work for them all.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, one of the major problems with the proposed changes is that they break up, quite arbitrarily, any sense of locality in various constituencies. Bits of country are allocated to the nearest town; islands are amalgamated with the coast and so on.

The real problem, though, is that sticking a complex programme of boundary change into a bill alongside a referendum for change to the voting system is something of an abuse - it allows the coalition to represet opposition to the bill overall on the basis of the boundary changes as a hypocritical retreat from Labour's manifesto support for AV. The answer is very simple - take the bill and split the two subjects into two bills. And then see what Labour does.

There is also the argument that AV is a far weaker form of electoral reform than the Jenkins proposals and that if we accept AV now, any prospect of proper reform is undoubtedly stuffed for a generation. I really do think that the LibDmms should have stuck out for implementation of Jenkins, especially since the Conservatives are expecting their support on all sorts of public services changes that wer not in the Coalition agreement or the Conservative manifesto.

[andrewducker]

I can see a historical objection. But (personally) that doesn't both me - for local representation you have local councils and the like.

I don't see anything more than AV being on the table as possible, or getting the support of Labour. I am hoping that a move to AV allows people to get used to the idea of less horribly partisan politics, and leads to people shifting their beliefs slowly in the direction of something like AMS (as we have in Scotland) or STV (as I believe that some people would prefer).

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

As far as the 'arbitrary' thing goes, see http://stephensliberaljournal.blogspot.com/2011/01/labour-lords-sleeping.html

"The real problem, though, is that sticking a complex programme of boundary change into a bill alongside a referendum for change to the voting system is something of an abuse - it allows the coalition to represet opposition to the bill overall on the basis of the boundary changes as a hypocritical retreat from Labour's manifesto support for AV. The answer is very simple - take the bill and split the two subjects into two bills. And then see what Labour does."
The problem with that is threefold. Firstly, the 'two subjects' are of a piece - without equalised constituencies, AV would create a greater bias in Labour's favour. Secondly, without the boundary changes being part of the bill, the Tories wouldn't vote for it and it wouldn't pass at all. And thirdly the bill has to be passed in less than a month if the referendum is to go ahead.

As for the comments about the Jenkins proposals, well, my own opinion is that AV+ is a horrible system - top up lists mean safe seats for life for leadership loyalists, create a two-tier system of MPs and remove choice from voters. It's a nasty fudge and I'd actually much prefer AV to it, though I'd prefer STV to either. But AV is a *very* small step away from either AV+ or STV, and can be easily modified into either without anything like as much change as the initial step to AV.

Also, if, as is being rumoured, we get a Lords elected by STV, then keeping plain AV for the lower chamber makes some sense - proportional elections for the upper chamber with MPs for smaller local areas elected by AV seems a pretty reasonable system to me.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

The point is that poor people tend to live in communities, where they are a majority. You can draw boundaries around these majority areas, or split them.

Rich people think clustering is 'not fair', because their votes are 'wasted'. To give them a better representation, boundaries have to be redrawn by using mathematics instead of communities as the basis.

You may think this redrawing (not just an instance of it, but the prioritising of equal-numbering over community representation) is fair. I think it is unfair. I think the pyramidal structure of British society naturally weights democracy to the interests of the poor, and the representation of communities. I think this is good. To other people this is bad. It is not a morally neutral issue.

Furthermore, as I have said elsewhere, the objective measures previously used for person counting are being, and will be further, manipulated for political purposes. For example by using the records of commercial organisations.

[andrewducker]

I haven't heard anything about the latter part. Do you have any more details?

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

If you weight something in the interests of one group over another, then that's not democracy. The pyramid structure you talk about - in which poor people are the majority - *should* mean that any properly democratic system will give them more of a voice in aggregate. But each individual's vote should count no more nor less than any other.

And the counting is not "using the records of commercial organisations". It's using the Electoral Register.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

And it's not just poor/rich but also rural/urban that presents a problem, cf my long comment above.

(This is mainly a note for Andy's reference that you and I are observing different aspects of the same issue.)

[skington.livejournal.com]

It should be noted that while Labour currently has a systemic lead over other parties, this was the complete other way round in the 1980s, when the Tories racked up massive leads in the Commons. The rules didn't change, as far as I remember; it was mostly just demographics.

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

As much as in my head I call it the "AV and gerrymandering bill", you're right - it isn't technically going to give one particular party a massive, predictable, consistent advantage as far as I can tell. I will still have a big impact on our political system - as big as the change of the voting system - and there are some really dodgy parts to that bill, incl. the way the new boundaries can't be challenged.

[andrewducker]

The thing is, with the new boundaries paying no attention to where the old boundaries (or communities) are, I'm not sure what grounds for challenges would be.

I'm sure, for instance, that there will be an endless stream of challenges from the Cornish that the boundaries pay no attention to the boundaries of Cornwall, but the answer to that will be "and?"

I'm beginning to wonder if the law should simply include an algorithm that will be used to create the boundaries, and any challenge would have to be to the algorithm, not the boundaries themselves :->

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure that this is a gerrymander either by design or inadvertently. I do think that political parties should be very cautious about doing anything that looks like biasing the system in their favour as it creates a culture where being good at biasing systems is seen as a good thing and encourages parties to get their retaliation in first.

I grew up in Queensland. Whilst I was there the Australian Labour Party (ALP) won the first state election for decades in the face of a gerrymander operated by the Country National Party (think UKIP with cowboy hats). The irony was that the tools used to set up the gerrymander had been put in place by a 1949 Labour government, who then went on to hold power for decades. As you can imagine the upshot of two long running electorally unassailable governments the whole apparatus of the state was deeply corrupted. The breech in the dam was the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption. In essence the Queensland police was so corrupt they were bribing politicians to turn a blind eye to the organised criminal activities of the police commissioner.

So, I’m instinctively wary of gerrymanders. I’m not sure if the current boundary changes are a gerrymander, or an attempt to unwind an existing gerrymander, or if they genuinely reflect changing demographics but I worry that once you start tinkering with boundaries for what look like they might be partisan reasons, even if your hands are clean, you open to door to the other side doing it better and harder than you did and the end result is deputy-commissioners of the police roaming hotel rooms naked with a bag full of used banknotes and a revolver.

My personal interest in this is that before I moved to Queensland I lived in Darwin, where the same bunch of crooks were taking bribes from the doctor who owned the radiological practise who were sub-contracting for the NT hospital service when my mum was director of radiology. When mum blew the whistle they threatened to kill my sister.

I suggest this kind of behaviour is not good for democracy.

[andrewducker]

I agree. But I also think that this attempt is an attempt to prevent gerrymandering, by removing any level of partiality from the way that districts are made. It means that there's no input from any politicians or local people - they are (basically) purely mathematical in nature.

Can you think of a way of removing gerrymandering without making it look partial?

I guess there could be a commission with people on it from all sides which hammered out a compromise. That might be nice :->

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Take this back one step from a discussion of geographic boundary changes.

Why have geographic constituencies?

[andrewducker]

Personally, I wouldn't. My ideal system:

500 MPs, from party lists. Each party would get to add one MP per 0.2% of the vote they got. You could vote Labour if you wanted, and then rely on them to put together a decent list. Or if your favourite MP had left Labour because they were fed up with their anti-pigeon propaganda, they could form their own party, and you could vote directly for them (they'd probably want to have a second/third/fourth person lined up after them, in case they got a lot of votes.)

There would be a variety of votes left over after everyone was elected (due to fractions of the percentages needed being produced in the results), and they would be allocated in the same way that top-ups are done in Scotland at the moment - the party with the largest negative difference between "percentage of vote" and "percentage of MPs" would get one, and then the calculation would be repeated until there were 500 MPs.

That way everyone who isn't so massively on the fringe that they can't find 0.2% of the population to agree with them ends up represented. And nobody gets to complain that there are no politicians who believe the same thing they do.

I don't expect said solution to ever transpire, but it would make me happy.