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

[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.