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.

[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

[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 .

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

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

Why have geographic constituencies?