By Rab Bruce’s Spider

The Tory Government at Westminster are pushing through changes to electoral boundaries and this is causing a bit of a stir. However, it must be said that the current arrangement is extremely unfair in what is already a poor attempt at democracy using the First Past The Post voting system.

So what is it the Tories are trying to change and why? Well, it seems that the current constituency boundaries mean that some MPs have as few as 30,000 voters in their constituency while others have over 100,000. That is patently unfair because it could mean that an MP gains 100% of the vote in his small constituency and is elected despite having received fewer votes than a losing candidate in a much larger constituency. The Tories want to redraw the boundaries so that every constituency has roughly the same number of voters.

It must be said that this idea seems practical and fair – within the undemocratic system of FPTP. But if you are going to have a FPTP voting system, it should at least ensure that each MP has roughly the same number of constituents.

So, fair enough, the Tories have a valid reason for making the changes. They are, of course, putting a cost-saving spin on it by claiming that the overall number of MPs will reduce from 650 to 600. That may sound like a good idea but dressing it up as saving taxpayers’ money is a typical Cameron misdirection. When you consider how many additional members of the House Of Lords he has put in place, the overall number of legislators, and the cost of maintaining them, will have increased despite any cut in the number of MPs. In fact, there are already more unelected lawmakers than elected ones in the UK Parliament. That’s not what most people would regard as democratic.

However, the biggest problem with this proposal, and another reason the Tories want to push it through before the next General Election, is that the region of the UK which will return most MPs is the region which is most densely populated, i.e. London and the South east of England. And guess where the Tories get most of their support from? Less densely populated areas like Scotland will return fewer MPs and so have even less influence than they have now, if such a thing were possible.

So, if this change goes through, and there seems every likelihood that it will, we face the prospect of permanent Tory Governments. Isn’t that a scary thought? What a pity we had no way of escaping this rule by the Plutocracy.