andrewducker | Political Question

Crossposts: http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2302115.html

Political Question

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?

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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

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com - 2011-01-18 14:17 (UTC) - Expand

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

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

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com - 2011-01-18 14:37 (UTC) - Expand

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.

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com - 2011-01-18 14:40 (UTC) - Expand

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.

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marrog.livejournal.com - 2011-01-18 14:53 (UTC) - Expand

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marrog.livejournal.com - 2011-01-18 15:06 (UTC) - Expand

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.

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