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

[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]

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.