There has been one welcome piece of news this morning. The Electoral Reform Society has just noted that:
The Government has abandoned proposals to cut the number of MPs in the House of Commons from 650 to 600.
Cabinet office minister Chloe Smith said ministers will scrap the previously-planned shake-up of UK constituencies, due to Parliament facing a 'greater workload' after Brexit.
I have long opposed this drive by the government to undermine our democracy by reducing the number of elected representatives that we have, just as I have always been happy to see a cap on the Lords, simply because they are not elected.
I welcome this move, even if an excuse had to be found for it.
At a time when democracy and government scrutiny is going to need all the help that it can get this is a rare bit of good news right now.
Next, of course, the electoral system needs reform. And even if that's not a job for today I sincerely hope someone is still working on it. Like so many issues, this will be one needing to be addressed when the post-coronavirus consensus (PCC) is established.
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“Next, of course, the electoral system needs reform. And even if that’s not a job for today I sincerely hope someone is still working on it. ”
Some of us are – see lder.org/stv
Good!
I seem to recall that Cameron said the reduction was a response to the MPs expenses scandal. It seemed to me an excuse for a different agenda which was to redraw constituency boundaries in their favour.
The best ‘punishment’ would have been to make safe seats difficult to have; the best way being Single Transferable Vote.
Another item for the list would be to turn Westminster into a museum and get a new modern parliament fit for the purpose. Some basics like enough seats and offices with electronic voting would be a good start. I would also suggest moving it to Birmingham as that would indicate some seriousness about decentralising from London and it is also more or less in the middle once Scotland has secured Independence.
🙂
Nothing to do with the winning a thumping big majority then!!! The system doesn’t seem to need rigging in their favour any more. Plus all those newly elected Tory MPs probably don’t want to see their jobs disappear just as they have got their feet under the table.
Still good news though.
Want the change in boundaries etc driven by the Electoral commission to make voting fairer and even up the number of votes per consistency?
If making things ‘fairer’ happens to be in favour of the Tories, then doesn’t that suggest that the current system was biased against them?
Tell us why, please
The proposed revision of constituencies is based on the supposition that “equalisation”, i.e. making the numbers of electors in each consituency more nearly equal (variation is to be capped at 5%), will achieve a fairer outcome. This perhaps sounds fair, but because it makes it more difficult to relate constituencies to natural communities, it produces a more random collection of electorates, which is likely to increase the disproportionality of our FPTP system.
To understand this, take it to extremes, and imagine a set of 600 or 650 random but equal-sized subsets of the population (think of going through the phone directory and allocating people to different constituencies in turn); then simple statistics show that it would only require a majority of about 2% in the popular vote for a party to win ALL the seats.
So equalisation is likely to make our already highly disproportional system even more disproportional. Portraying this as fairer is a wonderful bit of deceit.
But then we’re used to this. Much of the population accepts the claim that the present government’s 56% of the seats on 44% of the vote is a strong democratic mandate 🙁
Agreed
@ Shane
Suggesting the current system is biased against the Tories is quite possibly the most ridiculous comment I have read on here for a very long time…
I feel very conflicted about this one.
These MPs are the same idiots who pretend to manage services and starve the real professionals of adequate funding to do a good job.