andrewducker | Political Question

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 .

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

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.

Aaah. I don't see the objection to an MP covering constituents of multiple types. Any MP is going to have people who fall into all sorts of different categories, and have different needs.

The large size of the constituency, and the need to be available to people in it is something I can see needs to be compromised over.

Why not have a system where the MPs voting power is based on the amount of population they represent? If one MP covers 70,000 people and another 110,000 people then MP A has 0.7 votes while MP B has 1.1 votes.

Sounds possible, but fiddly. Probably easier just to go with a proportional system.

Is it that fiddly? All you need to do is see the population in their area (which we already know) and then when they vote that's how many votes are cast (divide by 100,000 or whatever if you like smaller numbers).

Doesn't sound very fiddly to me.

I more meant each day when dealing with votes in parliament. And then you'll have different MPs looking up/down on each other depending on how many votes they're worth, etc.

Why not just do what Scotland does and have non-geographic MPs that pick up the bits and pieces in reasonably round numbers?

Based on what population?

Total population?

Adults?

Registered voters?

Actual voters?

What about constituencies with large amounts of EU national who are able to vote in Euro and local elections?

What would you do if the population changed? (Over a ten year period the population of Swindon increased by 10%, or by thousands of voters a year.)

Yeah, you'd have to pick what measure you'd use, and whatever you picked someone would moan that it didn't perfectly come up with the number they think would be best. Whatever you picked it'd still be a lot better than a system where there is a wild difference between how many people is represented by each MP as in the current system.

You'd also need to periodically update your measure. I'm ... not really sure why you listed that as if it'd be a problem.

I'm concerned about the practical workability of a system where MP's votes were weighted rather than simply having roughly equal constituencies.

I do think there are genuine issues of representation to be discussed when setting the measure. Do MP's work for citizens or tax payers? Are they responsible to voters, registered voters or the wider population.

(Not that these issues don't also affect how you size constituencies but they come out into the open more).

It's not so much the updating of the measure s the timing of the update. Should you change the weighting if a large housing development is built in a constituency or a large factory closes and everyone moves away mid way through a Parliament?

I think issues of what do you do when a factory closes or more people move in to an area aren't all that significant. It's not common for a population (that would be represented by an MP) to change by a very significant amount (like 50%) in a short period like 4 years.

I think constituencies with roughly equal numbers of people are probably better, and that's still how you'd carve things up, but in some cases you can't easily do that as others have mentioned in the threads here, and in those cases this system resolves those problems.

It's not that uncommon that it doesn't need to be considered in the set up and when it happens it immediately creates a case of transparent unfairness.

A similar refinement would be to weight MP votes in proportion to the size of the their majority.

There are some issues in Scotland with Top-Up MSP's being a different class. They often have safer seats, have less case work but lack moral authority. I think a weighting system in Parliament might lead to some of those issues.

Given some of the practical difficulties I'd rather the time and effort went in to enacting PR.

Would you let people chose the size of their constituency?

Might I be allowed to have a small, very culturally and politically homogenous constituency if I wanted with one, low geared MP or opt for a larger constituency with a more powerful MP?

I agree about these issues being currently present, but less obvious in most countries. Check the number of actual votes required to become a MP in a Maori electorate vs a General one in NZ. Low turnout in the Maori seats is just one contributing factor.

Re timing, look up the Australian federal system for triggering re-districting. BTW, they have the advantage of a high degree of compliance to compulsory registration and voting.

Personally I'm a big fan of compulory voting so long as the ballot included a "none of these" option and something happened if there were a lot of "none of these" votes cast.

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.

Of course, in citites you have small geographic areas with some very different communities with different needs.

(As you can probably tell, I get the size argument, but not the different needs argument.)

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.

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).

As I've observed before, the issue with moving from AV to AMS is that you go from AV back to FPTP to do it, making everyone look a little bit silly.

You don't have to. You could use AV for local constituents and then top-up.

But do you base the top-ups on people's first preference votes, or on the votes they ended up with after their preferences were redistributed?

In Scotland, neither. We get two votes. But that's because we have FPTP +Top-up, and the FPTP bit is recognised to have a lot of tactical voting so you need a second vote to be used to say what you _really_ think.

With AV you'd get a lot less tactical voting, so I think you'd be safe going with the original vote being the one that got used for top-up.

Hence the invention of AV+, which looks shiny but for the fact it's (a) untested and (b) not fully proportional (although the latter seems to me to be something that could be easily fixed).

(Personally I'd go for the top ups to proportionality being based on the first votes, whether or not those votes were counted in run-off.)

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.

And at a slight tangent, this is where I have a problem. It all sounds so complicated, I have no real grasp on what the different systems mean, in real terms. And I consider myself pretty well informed on political matters.

Gods only know how Joe Bloggs on the street thinks and feels about it.

Well, the simple answer is that we've only got a choice between two systems in the referendum anyway. I (and the Lib Dems) may prefer STV, Andrew (and the Greens) may prefer AMS, Roz (and Labour reformists) may prefer AV+, but we've all got to choose between just AV and FPTP. And AV itself is a very, very simple system - see my explanation at http://andrewhickey.info/2010/08/22/the-alternative-vote-system

Right, so it's not the best system, but it's the best we're ever likely to get?

The best we can get through a parliament elected by FPTP, at least. I have hopes that within fifteen years we'll have a better system, but even if not we'll be better off with AV.

And I suppose it would have to go some to be any worse than the stupid system we have now.

Well, not ever. But the best we're being offered this time around.

AV is basically the way the French do it: a majoritarian system, but if nobody gets 50% of the vote at first you eliminate candidates until someone does. The French do it by having a first ballot one weekend, and then another the week (or is it fortnight?) after with only 2 (or in some cases 3 or 4) candidates; AV does it by having people rank candidates in order.

The advantage of moving to AV is that in a few elections' time, once people have got used to voting for candidates 1, 2, 3 rather than putting a cross in a box, you can then move to a more efficient form of voting (e.g. STV in multi-member constituencies). And, of course, once the LibDems have got over the drubbing expected for any junior coalition partner, they'll be in a stronger position to have significant numbers of MPs elected.

Meanwhile the Tories don't have to worry about UKIP costing them seats by splitting the right-wing vote. Assuming they can't convert the LibDems into a long-term junior coalition partner, that is.

AV is basically the way the French do it:

there goes any hope of anyone in the Conservative party, UKIP or the BNP voting in favour of it then...

Actually, amazingly enough, Racist UKIP are supporters of the Yes campaign. The BNP and Tories are, though, the only two parties that have actually come out against it, though Labour are doing everything they can to stop us ever getting to have a vote...

Oh, I should think if the tories are deadset on this potentially catastrophic NHS reform, then they'll have difficulty holding into the LIbDems as even short-term junior coalition partners...

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.

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

That was the big announcement July 2010 about this census being the last one ever - according to Francis Maude - and they would use credit card agency records and so on in the future. Of course this could be reversed if the government changes, but the longer until another election the harder to reverse the policy.

Yeek. I managed to miss that entirely. I shall have to do some digging. Thank you!

The boundaries aren't going to be based on census data but on the electoral register. That is, in fact, one of the things Labour are complaining about - that the changes won't count people who are on the census but not on the electoral register (for the reasonable reason that they can't vote).

The census thing is, of course, worrying, but it's not connected.

I think people - such as teenagers and immigrants - who are entitled to vote but not registered - should be counted. This is a very stark issue in the USA, where the ethnic bias is massive, but it should also be confronted in this country.

There's no such thing as "entitled to vote but not registered". If you don't register you're not entitled to vote.
And immigrants - from outside the EU, anyway - aren't allowed to vote in general elections.

Well, there is the position that everyone is entitled to vote as a basic right. But the solution would seem to be more effective voter registration drives than anything to do with electoral boundaries?

I think both, because it is such a massive problem, and a growing one

Agreed. And unfortunately there are many people in our society who don't have that basic right, such as my wife. Voting is still a privilege, not a right, in this country.

Perhaps it should be phrased as "entitled to register, but not registered". Should they be counted?

Edited 2011-01-18 14:26 (UTC)

I would say not - assuming that we put more effort into electoral registration than we currently do. If we don't count them, then we're counting every actual vote as equal to every other vote. If we *do* count them, then we're weighting votes so that the votes of those who live in areas where more people don't register count more than the votes of those who live in areas where people *do* register.
That would make a kind of sense - *if* we could assume that the people who do register are an accurate representation of those who don't. I think the mere fact of them having registers makes that an inappropriate assumption. For a start, I know some (not many) people who refuse to register to vote because they object to the whole concept of parliamentary democracy. Their refusal is an active political gesture (in their eyes) and they would probably object to 'their vote' being distributed among the other people in their area who don't share their views.

Fundamentally, if your concern is that, for example, teenagers aren't being fairly represented because they don't register to vote, the solution to that *isn't* to count the votes of adults who live in an area with lots of teenagers. If poor people don't register, then counting the votes of rich people who live in poor areas as more important might actually end up further *dis*enfranchising them. And so on.

Actually a whole range of non-citizens who are resident in Britain can vote in local, national and European elections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote#United_Kingdom

The only thing they need to do is to put themselves on the Electoral Register.

Sorry, should have said "from outside the EU and 'qualifying Commonwealth immigrants'". There are so few of the latter that they don't really impact on much.

The boundaries aren't going to be based on census data but on the electoral register.

As indeed is the case at present.

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.

Imagine a county with a large rural hinterland - naturally conservative - and an industrial city - naturally leftwing. You can divide the county up by splitting it north and south, with the city votes split. Or you can divide it rural/urban. One way will produce two conservative MPs, one will produce a conservative and a Labour MP.

.. and neither is objectively right or wrong.

because right and wrong are not objective issues, this is the argument I am making. People are not being objective, they are arguing from a social position.

I'm not sure this is generalisable.

Say your country has 10 million people in the hinterland and 10 million in the city, that hinterland voters always vote for party A and city voters always vote for party B, and that population density in the hinterland is basically consistent everywhere, but much lower than in the city. In that case, a north/south split will get you just over half the hinterland people returning a member of party A, and just under half the hinterland people plus all the city people returning a member of party B. So the north/south split and the rural/urban split return the same results.

With a sufficiently large hinterland population you can get the result you describe. But I'm not sure that giving the minority population 50% of the political representation is the ideal solution...

Where there are multiple communities in an area you can create boundaries to represent communities (and I include conservative communities) or not. That is a perennial issue with boundary setting, which constantly balances representation against counting. To argue that head-counting is value-neutral, is false. It's an arguable position, but it's not a no-brainer.

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.)

Yes. I think it is easy (perhaps normal) for people who belong to a particular section of society - geographically mobile, no strong links, privileged - to build models which reflect their own experiences.

(Andy, this is partly in answer to your comment above too)

I just remember the year our high school of 300-odd had an unusually small first year intake and an unusually large fifth year departure. We had to lose a staff member, and consequently a whole subject, from our curriculum, because the staff:pupil ratio was now considered too high, even though some exceptions are made for smaller schools. Cry me a river, you might say, your Standard Grade classes were 25-strong at the largest, and mostly under 20. But being on an island we had no choice but to either take what we were given, or be sent to private school on the mainland (not really an option for most people). That meant French or German, no Spanish, no Latin, no Gaelic even until after I'd already left. That meant me having to choose between Music or Art because not enough people wanted to take both to justify having a second class not running at the same time. That meant not actually having scheduled classes for CSYS English because only two of us were doing it and the teacher was basically helping us as a favour in her spare time.

Arran's not exactly a targeted area as far as teacher quotas go. They never have trouble with class sizes, and they're one of the best schools in the district (or at least, they were ten years ago and I'd be surprised if much has changed). But kids on Arran don't care that kids in Ayr have it worse, and nor do their parents. They want their own situation to be made better. And they should be able to speak to their MP and lobby for that without being fobbed off and told "You don't know you're born - if you'll excuse me I have some real social problems to solve." They don't want an MP with divided loyalties or priorities. They want someone who represents them.

Nobody gets that.

There are rich and poor people in every area, people who do better out of things and people who do worse.

Nobody gets a representative for just their tiny bit of the world

Of course, but there's still a critical mass in terms of diversity at which point an MP begins to be hit with strong voices from all sides wanting vastly different things at which point nothing is done anymore. A balance must be struck, or we might as well do away with constituencies altogether.

Edit: I'll add that if our eventual aim is a system of PR where we have individual constituencies represented by MPs followed by a part-list top-up to proportionality, a la AMS, then community rather than mathematically based constituencies is exactly what you want on a practical level.

Edited 2011-01-18 14:48 (UTC)

Yup. In some ways I'd be happy to have a "Rural Party" which people could vote for if Rural votes were their thing. If we had a proper proportional system then they'd probably have at least a few percent of the representatives.

I take it your 'yup' is only in agreement with the second paragraph and not the first?

Yes :->

I see huge amounts of diversity in cities too. Take Glasgow where you have some of the richest streets in Scotland less than a hundred yards from some of the poorest ones, with life expectancies over a decade different to each other.

Of course, with multi-member STV this wouldn't be a problem either, because a larger area would vote in multiple representatives, one of whome would almost certainly be of the "I Like Sheep Party".

Again, I think there's a practical difference in scale and type of priority clash in the correlation you're making between x urban dweller vs y urban dweller and rural vs urban.

(Edit: sorry, clarified)

Edited 2011-01-18 15:01 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't see why the rural/urban divide is harder for a representative to cope with than the rich/poor divide.

Well, for a start off you have both rich people and poor people in the country too. So that's twice as many groups to represent right there.

Urban and Rural richness and poorness (especially poorness) tend to be different though, and the issues that rural communities face are often different to the issues that urban communities face even if their economic demographics are similar.

Also people get attached to place-based identities and often urban people attach to cities and rural people, er, not so much. Here in Cambridge the City Council and the County Council are often at odds over things like transport infrastructure; and I don't think that's so much to do with being a Tory/LD split and more to do with being about the different needs of people living in different situations.

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.

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.

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 :->

The bill *does* include an algorithm. (I've read it. ;-) I do think a valid challenge would be, for instance, if a constitunecy is frankensteined together from a rural and an urban area as you could argue that an MP would find it very difficult to adequately represent and address all their constituents' concern.

#include Grumble_about_how_single_member_constituencies_are_the_root_of_all_evil.h

Possibly you'll have better luck persuading me than

marrog did - I can't see why it's more of a problem representing consituents that are both rural and urban than it is representing ones that are both recent-immigrant and long settled, or ones that are both rich and poor, or ones that are both Capitalists and Communists. Can you explain why rural/urban is a special, magical split?

Oh, and can you point me towards the algorithm?

Oh, and apologies for not getting back to you about orphan works, my brain has only just recovered from being ill. Is it still worth sending you my thoughts?

Algorithm is here: http://bit.ly/fO7cjI (if I've picked up the right link ;-)

You ask a good question re why the rural/urban split is more valid than any other split. My answer is geography and infrastructure, which in turn influence access to your MP and how much they can do for you. If you have a constituency that comprises part of Newcastle and part of the middle of nowhere in Northumberland, chances are the constituency office will be in Newcastle, and the MP will spend most of their time in the constituency there, and probably not make much of an effort to make themselves accessible to their rural constituents. That's simply how the numbers work out: it pays for them to spend their effort int he population centre rather than outside it. If they have a purely rural constituency that temptation isn't there and they *have* to put the effort in to represent all their constituents. Yes, the office might still be in a town, but they're going to think differently about how they approach their work from the start.

My bigger problem is how unstable constituency boundaries will be. Any change in the population of a couple of areas, and you start from scratch - the way the formula is designed, it just has a knock-on impact on the rest of the country if one or two constituencies need to be adjusted. In my mind (I might have said this already), this pretty much breaks the constituency link anyway.

In my mind (I might have said this already), this pretty much breaks the constituency link anyway.

This is my issue. If the aim is to eventually have a system of PR that doesn't have single MP constituencies, then fine, go ahead. I just don't see that happening. If we're aiming for a system like AV+ or AMS, then there wouldn't be any harm in taking geographical concerns into account when drawing boundaries, or at least, any imbalance would be temporary.

Mind you, PR is still pretty much a pipe dream, so I suppose we take what we get.

Thinking further about what you (and

elmyra) have been saying, how much of a compromise would work, do you think?

I know that Labour are talking about a 10% variance making them a lot happier- do you think that would be enough to allow communities to be kept together in a useful manner, while keeping the value of votes fairly close?

It has to be a reasonably sized change though - there's a 10% leeway (from 95% to 105% of the mean), so the changes would have to be quite large to need a total redesign, rather than just shaving 2% off of one constituency and giving it to another.

Why should the Welsh get Wales to be Specially Separate but not the Cornish Cornwall?

I think you are vastly underestimating how tribal people feel about their region or city. And the difficulties then inherent in having an MP from OVER THERE in charge of US HERE (witness the complaints where parties "parachute" people in to safe seats rather than choosing local candidates).

Wales is being treated as a minor state, like NI and Scotland. I've not seen much of a push to make Cornwall into a separate state, but I'm prepared to believe I just don't see it...

Mebyon Kernow: The Party for Cornwall

Less than 5% though...

Similar proportion of the vote to UKIP, the Greens and the BNP.

Free Cornwall now, with every Pasty (limited offer, only one Cornwall per family for a limited time only).

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.

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 :->

The removal of partiallity and personal influence is a strength of the proposals. As always with complex things and people what one person values highly in a system (say constituencies rooted in a geographically based strong community) might not be valued by others who might more heavily weight other aspects (say fairness in representation by number).

I can't think of a way to remove gerrymander without making it look partial except in special cases so I think it wiser for the G word not to be used at all.

Having grown up in a realy gerrymander the UK is not one and I don't think the current proposals make it so.

As I recall what happened in Queensland was that the ALP had such moral authority after winning the election that it could do what it wanted so long as what it wanted to do was the right thing. I was only very young when it happened so my memories are very hazy but I recall it as very similar to Obama's election.

Numerical fairness and explicity arbitrariness aside I do quite like the idea of a commission but I'd make sure the people were not from all sides but were more often from none. Bit of Greek democracy, lets draw lots and let a citizen jury sort it out.

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

Why have geographic constituencies?

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.

I think if I were going for the whole country as a multi-member constituency I’d be tempted to go for open party lists. I just don’t like the idea a party head office telling me who is going to be an MP.

Whilst your 0.2% threshold suggestion gets round this if the candidates for MP disagree between themselves about who should get on the list and be given priority I wonder if it does enough for me, the voter, if I think that candidate turquoise 10 is better than turquoise 6 even if the turquoise party as a whole are happy enough with the situation or the situation where I prefer Lilac 1 to turquoise 11 on some fairly narrow grounds that mean a lot to me.

My suggestion does of course create a huge ballot paper which may, in fact, be unworkable.

However, if you used electronic voting you could manage the ballot as an on line questionnaire.

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