There are two Bills before the House which give me cause for concern. The Public Bodies Bill gives excessive power to Ministers and is discussed in several posts below. The main problem is that Ministers want to take powers that enable them to wind up, merge, change staff or sell off QUANGOS without proper Parliamentary scrutiny or votes.
The second Bill is the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill referred to by Baroness D’Souza below. I have no problem with the Alternative Vote and in principle I am sympathetic to a reduction in the number of MP’s – and Peers! There are however, two important caveats. Firstly, if you reduce the size of the House of Commons you have to reduce the number of government Ministers in the Commons otherwise there is a smaller number of backbench Parliamentarians to hold government to account.
Secondly, No government should be allowed to decide the size of Parliament without cross party agreement. The reason the Government is reducing the size of the Commons to 600 is because that number maximises the chance of the Tory Party winning more seats than anyone else.
My condition for a reduction is that it should not go ahead unless there has first been an independent review of the impact on political parties and the number has been agreed on a cross party basis. If you think this is of little importance bear in mind that the Government is about to announce the creation of around 50 new Government Peers.
Any government that tries to give itself a majority in both Houses has to challenged
“No government should be allowed to decide the size of Parliament without cross party agreement.”
I don’t remember you speaking and voting on the basis of no change without Conservative agreement when Labour introduced devolution to Scotland and Wales with obvious party advantage. Yet that and a number of other far more major constitutional changes then those proposed were passed with your support.
If constituencies were equal and the measures were designed to make them unequal then you would have a reasonable line of argument but you know perfectly well that at present for a number of reasons – of which the size of constituencies is part – that Labour requires far fewer votes to win a general election than either of the other major parties.
This seems the fundamental problem with the opposition line of attack. Having enjoyed and electoral bias in government they are now raging against a more equal system and a reduction in MPs both parts of the coalition promised in their manifestos. If labour didn’t need three/cross party support to change the constitution they can’t now bleat about the present government taking the same view.
Having said that I think the exemption of Orkney and Shetland etc is outrageous and should be treated as all other seats in the proposed reforms.
“My condition for a reduction is that it should not go ahead unless there has first been an independent review of the impact on political parties.”
Absolutely 100% in agreement. This brings back the question of whom has a right to alter our Constitution in any manner regarding both Houses. No part of our system should be altered by any of the many parts that make it up. This needs careful INDEPENDENT review and if it does NOT receive it the people will KNOW the system is corrupt.
It does however need investigating, as it stands I believe that Labour has an unfair advantage. An independent review is the right way to go.
Croft. If devolution in Scotland and Wales gave an in built majority to Labour how come Labour didn’t win and when they did it was with a reduced majority?!!!
If Labour does well under the present number of constituencies then no doubt an independent review would say so.
Simon Hoggart has covered this rather touchingly..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/15/house-of-lords-teddy-bears
I didn’t say devolution gave them a guaranteed governance in the Scottish parliament, I said they ‘introduced devolution…with obvious party advantage’. Your colleges knew devolution would guarantee that even if another 18 years in the wilderness occurred they would have an electoral and governmental stronghold in Scotland (and Wales) That has proved to be largely sound in that they were the largest party in 2 of 3 elections and only 1 MSP change short in the third. That Labour lost control doesn’t prove the party political motivations of devolution wrong merely that things don’t always go as planned. Labour expected devolution to pull he rug from under the SNP and that the Tories would recover sufficiently that Lab/Lib/Tory would retain a sufficient strength for the SNP never to get into government and with Labour the dominant/predominant party. It was probably only the deep unpopularity of New Labour (-v- Labour) that lost things in ’07; Labour had recovered pretty strongly in Scotland (with Brown) in the GE and now out of power will doubtless retake the Scottish parliament.
“If Labour does well under the present number of constituencies then no doubt an independent review would say so.”
As I’m sure you are aware academics have published paper after paper on this exact topic though the 90s and 00s. I’ve read them and I suspect so have many of the more thoughtful Labour MPs. Now you wouldn’t be wanting an independent review to kick the matter into the long grass for months, then to be debated/delayed for months in parliament when it reports? If the boundary commission doesn’t begin very soon then they won’t have time to finish it before the next election.
As it happens I think the Tories have miscalculated this effort, thought equal constituencies might just have nudged them closer to a majority in 2010 they would still have been short. The change that would have more impact is certainly the use of the latest population data or even predictive population data at the time of the future election for seat apportionment as at present the data used is far too old and tends towards an electoral drags that leaves urban seats with lower populations than suburbs.
No Scotish or Welsh MP should be allowed to vote on matters that do not affect them.