Written evidence submitted by David Allen
(PVSCB 02)
UNNATURAL CONSTITUENCY
BOUNDARIES—THE
HIDDEN MENACE
The big electoral reform next year—or
so everyone thinks—will be the referendum on AV. Alongside
it, there will be a boring technical change to equalise constituency
sizes and get rid of the present bias towards Labour. Most people
assume that we won't need to worry much about the constituency
size changes.
Massive mistake! The change from natural to
unnatural constituency boundaries, and rigidly fixed constituency
sizes, will have profound and far-reaching ill effects. It will
largely destroy the effective link between a local constituency
and its individual MP. It could also threaten the very survival
of the Liberal Democrats.
Now, how can I convince LDV readers that these
dramatic and shocking claims might possibly be true? Please bear
with me, because it really does matter. What I am talking about
is a hidden and largely unanticipated consequence of the way the
electoral mathematics will work out under the planned new system.
At the moment, each county is subdivided into
a number of constituencies. Under the new system, that will not
be possible. There will be a fixed "quota" constituency
size, and it will no longer be permissible to allocate either
five constituencies or six constituencies to a county which contains
(say) 5.4 times the "quota". Instead, constituency boundaries
will have to cross county boundaries.
It gets worse. Once Cornwall has burst its bounds,
Devon must do likewise, and Somerset, and onwards. The new constituencies
will soon bear no relation to the old constituencies they replace.
It gets worse. When Muddletown gets split in
half and its residents appeal to the Boundary Commission (BC),
the BC will simply not be able to allow the appeal. They cannot
possibly put Muddletown back together, because that would have
knock-on effects on all the other constituencies for many miles
around. It would make them too big or too small, and that is not
allowed.
Under the present system, the Boundary Commission
can look separately at each county, independently of its neighbours.
Under the new system, the Boundary Commission will simply have
to draw themselves a single crude national network of gridlines,
with each grid unit enclosing equal numbers of voters. It will
look a bit like the way Ordnance Survey maps work—you know,
where the bit you want is always straddling an edge, and so you
need to buy two or three maps to cover quite a small area of interest.
Typically, an old constituency will find itself split across three
or four new constituencies.
It gets worse. Nobody will know where the new
constituencies are until eighteen months before the election.
Nobody will have time to work up a constituency as a PPC. Paddy
Ashdown took ten years to make Yeovil winnable. His successors
will hardly have ten months.
It gets worse. By the 2020 election, Britain
will have changed again. The 2015 boundaries will be torn up and
the grid totally recast yet again. The MP who has tried to gain
the trust of local people will once again need to contest a brand
new locality. Never again will we have longstanding respected
MPs who serve the same locality for decades. At best, MPs will
dot about from place to place within their region, shifting loyalties
every five years.
It gets worse. Lib Dems in particular rely tremendously
on building a local reputation over the years, on targeting years
ahead, on the respect that comes to a good incumbent MP. None
of that will be possible under the new system. Expect to see our
representation halved and our MPs driven back to the Celtic fringes.
This appalling mistake can be overturned. Once
people understand that it would turn respected local MPs into
rootless wandering national nonentities, they will reject the
new system. Lib Dems must lead the opposition to unnatural boundaries.
What the Tories want, which is to eliminate
pro-Labour bias, is perfectly justifiable. Labour's defence of
the status quo is not. We should aim to persuade the Tories
on this issue, rather than fight them. We should go back to the
mathematicians and ask them to devise a more appropriate and flexible
system. A system which gets rid of the bias, while preserving
stable constituencies based on natural localities.
28 August 2010
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