There is a clear political dimension to the way that the coalition’s proposed boundary changes will be implemented.
Today during Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions, the shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie raised the matter of House of Lords reform, asking Nick Clegg whether the proposed reduction in the number of MPs, accompanied by new coalition appointments to the Lords, was intended as a political move against Labour.
Clegg responded by confirming that the Labour-instituted method for appointing peers will remain in place until a full review of the second chamber has taken place, and also pointed out that a number of Labour peers have just joined the Lords, appointed as part of the Dissolution Honours list in May.
However, the Deputy Prime Minister did not really address the main point of Leslie’s question: under the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill 2010-2011, which is now making its way through the House, 50 MPs’s seats will be scrapped, and it looks as if a significant proportion of them will be in Labour-supporting areas.
Yesterday, the House of Commons Welsh affairs committee published a report which concluded that not only does the coincidental clash of the referendum with the next Welsh Assembly election raise concerns, but that Wales would be affected disproportionately by the cut in the number of constituencies. The report reads:
The reduction in the number of Members of the House of Commons proposed by the bill would affect Wales more than any other part of the UK; the evidence we have received suggests that Wales would lose at least ten of its 40 MPs, a 25 per cent reduction (in comparison to a 17 per cent reduction for Northern Ireland, 16 per cent for Scotland and 5 per cent for England).
Give a gift subscription to the New Statesman this Christmas from just £49
Of the 40 Welsh MPs, 26 are Labour, eight are Conservative, and the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru have three each. Reducing this total by a quarter would inevitably impact more on Labour than any other party, purely as a result of it being the largest political grouping.
The new boundaries would be drawn in order to create constituencies of roughly equal size – each consisting of roughly 76,000 voters. The rights and wrongs of the changes themselves will no doubt still be debated at length before the final vote on the bill. But, without doubt, the boundary changes will have a heavier bearing on the opposition than the government, and clearly there is a strongly political dimension to the way the coalition has gone about delivering its “new politics”.
Content from our partners
Related
