Evil Tory Bastards To Abolish Safe Labour Seats

[Albus]

David Cameron is planning an urgent boundary review for the Tories' first term in office, which would reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons by 10 per cent.

The Conservative leader wants to drop more than 60 seats in a move which would radically redraw Britain's parliamentary map.

Speaking as a new poll showed the Conservatives have regained their double-digit lead over Labour, Mr Cameron said an incoming Conservative government could legislate so that all seats had roughly the same number of electors in time for the general election that followed.

The review could see an end to safe Labour seats in Wales and the inner cities.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Cameron said: "I think the House of Commons could do the job that it does with 10 per cent fewer MPs without any trouble at all."

He added: "We can legislate for that, yes, and we should. I believe in having seats that are the same size all across the country."

In Wales, which is traditionally over-represented at Westminster, the number of seats could be cut from 40 to around 30, under Mr Cameron's proposals.

Small inner city constituencies could also be axed to reflect the shift in population to the Tory suburbs.

In Scotland, devolution to Holyrood cut the number of seats to 59, having previously been over-represented.

There will be 650 seats in the House of Commons at the next general election.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4225580/Cameron-plans-first-term-boundary-review-to-slash-10-per-cent-of-Commons.html

[LeftishBrit]

1. Yes, try disenfranchising significant regions of the country...

this will heat up the Welsh Nationalists no end, if it's seriously attempted.

[enlightenment]

2. mmm - hmm. Yep. Jerrymandering.

Always an excellent way to rile up the populace.

[T_i_B]

3. Yep, this stinks of Gerrymandering

All political parties try and do it where they can sadly.

Cameron is wrong on one important point, we need more MP's not less. That's the best way to ensure fair representation in parliament. And I say that despite the fact that this would mean more politicians.

[enlightenment]

4. Argh. Cannot believe I spelled that with a 'J' . . .

time to turn in my historian credentials (and stop making brief, snarky, and largely meaningless comments on DU).

I blush. Seriously.

Also, seriously, I agree with your assessment. Government isn't supposed to be tidy or efficient. The best protection the populace has from government is in its inefficiency and messiness. More politicians make it messy - but they also increase the possibility that some level of fairness will come out of the decisions that are eventually hashed out.

I wish, sincerely, that we had a parliamentary system in the US.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. And yet there's no evidence this will be gerrymandering

Labour and the Tories, and even the Lib Dems, are fairly adept at presenting their cases to the Boundary Commissions, so it's not some one-sided process. And I haven't heard of a single case of a boundary change that anyone has really thought was 'gerrymandering' in the past 20 years. All the dodgy constituencies are the ones that haven't been altered, although the populations have changed.

Do you think Wales deserves 25% more parliamentary seats than its population should have, compared to England? That comes from the number of electors in each nation and the number of seats under the new boundaries recommended in 2006

37,817,466 in England / 533 = 70,952 electors / seat
2,257,474 in Wales / 40 = 56,437
3,887,571 in Scotland / 59 = 65,891
1,120,343 in Northern Ireland / 18 = 62,241

Now, personally, I'd like the single transferable vote system to be introduced - that way, we'd get to rank politicians in a party. Then you'd get some more independently-minded ones who listen to their constituents, rather than ones that just follow the party whip.

[vinylsolution]

6. This sounds like hisTORY repeating....

.... Didn't Conservative council leader Dame Shirley Porter get caught doing this sometime in the 80's?

My memory is very sketchy, but I'm sure there was some kind of boundary re-drawing scandal in London during the darkest depths of the Thatcher nightmare.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. No, it'll be like the Scottish boundary revisions in 2005

see http://www.scotlandoffice.gov.uk/our-communications/release.php?id=3470

It's good to see so many people being so suspicious of the Tories, but this is to correct existing inequalities in the number of seats in different areas. See my post above about the discrepancies.

[T_i_B]

8. Is this being linked to greater devolved powers for the Welsh Asssembly?

If not then it's not like the Scottish revision.

In any case, we've only just had a parliamentary boundary review - and the next one isn't due for about a decade. The law already requires the Boundary Commission to aim to get constituencies of roughly equal size.

And what if the Conservatives want to break the current - and historic rule - whereby the Boundary Commission never cross County boundaries when they draw up constituencies? That way we'd end up with absurd combinations bringing together communities that had been in different local authorities throughout their history (bits of East Lancs & West Yorks?), just to squeeze in an extra Tory seat here or there.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Why was correcting the number of Scottish constituencies connected

to the Scottish parliament?

As noted in post #5, Scotland still has slightly fewer electors per seat than England (but it's now only 4 more than they would have if they had the exact English allocation - and given the 'special cases' of the Highlands and Islands, where constituencies just get impossibly large, geographically, if you try to get the full number of electors, I'm OK with that). Do you mean that, before the Scots got their own parliament, they were meant to have more electoral clout in Westminster than the English - a sort of positive discrimination?

Anyway, the Welsh still have those excess seats, as I showed. Therefore it's unfair, and a departure from the best democracy we could get, and so it it morally right to fix it, even if Labour suffers from it, because their traditional seats have shrunk in population, while some Tory seats have gained. I have no idea if the Tories propose crossing county boundaries or not; but that's becoming less of an issue, I'd say, because constituencies already cross between unitary authorities and old-style counties/boroughs.

If anyone can quote the justification for giving the Welsh excess seats (or allowing them to keep them) at the last time the English and Welsh Boundary Commissions redrew boundaries, I'd be interested.

[Wabbajack_]

10. No she just

closed housing projects and moved homeless people out of the area or into safe labour wards.