Written by Henry Hill | 16 September 2011
Posted in Comment - Politics

Photograph: UK Parliament

The boundary review has been announced! MPs queue up to see what’s going to happen to their seats. The Lib Dems stare into the face of even more bad news. Northern Ireland tries to adapt to changes in the lines that are practically carved on its political psyche. Labour launched into a shrill chorus about gerrymandering while being rather undercut by the bookies’ decision to make Labour odds-on favourite to win the next election. The usual rigamaroll.

Except this time it’s different. The boundary redrawing has been combined with a reduction in the size of parliament and a tightening of the size tolerance to equalise constituency sizes. If you exclude the parliamentary reduction that occurred when Ireland seceded from the Union, this is the largest single reduction in parliamentary history.

In my view, constituency equalisation is an important and just reform. Yet opposition to it has been fierce. The opposition has stemmed from two quarters: the faintly ridiculous and undoubtedly petty assertion that this is all a big Conservative scheme to maximise our vote; and the more genuine if no less objectionable claim that an equal franchise should take a back seat to identity politics.

To deal with the first complaint: if it was an evil Tory scheme, it was a spectacularly bad one. Entrusting it to an independent commission who end up coming up with a scheme that is far kinder to Labour than many predicted whilst decapitating their coalition partner was a rather fundamental error.

The boundary review: fairness for the Tories, unexpected kindness to Labour, and justice for the long-suffering people of the Isle of Wight

But if such a scheme does or did exist, what is so evil about it? Yes, the Conservatives benefit from the boundary changes. But the commission’s only criteria were that constituencies should be equally sized, an essentially fundamentally fair proposal. If such a policy benefits the Conservatives, it is only because they were unfairly disadvantaged under the previous system – a fact that most non-partisan observers are willing to acknowledge.

The second reason – communalism – is more insidious. Often, it’s used as a cover for the defence of party political advantage: for example, Labour trying to cover a staunch defence of their excessive Welsh seats with appeals to community identity. Then there are the more serious/silly examples of localist outrage, such as a Cornish nationalist’s abortive hunger strike over the creation of a cross-border ‘Devonwall’ constituency.

Clearly, this is something that arouses passions, not just locally but amongst many sympathisers in the national commentariat. There is undoubtedly a superficial appeal to the idea that seats should be based around identity rather than cold, unfeeling numbers. Surely that’s a good thing? Yet give it a few moments thought and the manifest unjustness of it becomes apparent.

The smallest constituency in the United Kingdom – and one which I believe is being specifically exempted from the strict conditions of the new constituency system – is Na h-Eileanan an Iar, formerly and commonly known as the Western Isles, with a turnout of roughly 13,000. The largest under the old system was the Isle of Wight, with an average turnout of roughly 70,000 in recent years. The existence of both of these anomalous seats was justified on the grounds of identity and a determination to treat coastlines as inviolable borders for political representation.

The consequence of this policy is that living on the Western Isles gave you five times the franchise power of someone living on the Isle of Wight. When someone argues that identity should be more important than numerical equality, that is the price they’re tacitly – rarely openly – accepting: that identity can legitimately be the basis of an severely unequal franchise. It’s an idea that modernising democrats have been trying to excise for hundreds of years.

Of course, nothing is black and white. There will always be a certain amount of discrepancies between seats – that is the price paid for having MPs with a clearly defined geographical area of accountability. But the tolerance for such divergence should be as tight as reasonably possible.

So there you have it. The boundary review: fairness for the Tories, unexpected kindness to Labour, and justice for the long-suffering people of the Isle of Wight. If only the whole exercise of removing fifty MPs from the Commons was actually a good idea.

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