« Short's story | Main | Newsnight tonight »
September 14, 2006
Ed wants to balls-up the boundaries
Boris Johnson is on sparkling form again this morning, as he relates the woe of the Ballses. In short: Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper "were given two lovely safe Labour seats, side by side, his in Normanton and hers in Pontefract." Then, however, the "grim mathematicians" of the Boundary Commission "have worked out that West Yorkshire's population is declining by comparison with other parts of the country. The place does not need 23 MPs. It can manage quite happily with 22, and Ed Balls has been wiped off the map.
"Now you might have thought that this was the kind of well-deserved reverse he would take in his stride. Being a man of supreme confidence, and, indeed, balls, you would have thought that Ed would dust himself down and take himself off to some other part of the country, whence to join his wife in Parliament.
"But the funny thing is that Ed is making a terrific fuss, and together with Yvette and two other Labour MPs he is taking the Boundary Commission to court, to preserve Normanton and his right to sit in a seat adjacent to his wife."
"This legal action", says Boris, "has all the makings of a serious scandal. As is well known, Labour already has far more seats than it deserves."
Which is totally true, as we all know. However, Boris lets himself down badly in the statistics he chooses to illustrate this:
"Labour tends to have loads of small seats (Hackney South and Shoreditch has 57,204 electors, compared with 103,480 for the Tory Isle of Wight), and Tory MPs need about 4,000 more votes to get to Westminster than Labour MPs."
Firstly, individual cases are an abysmal base to an argument, especially when the Isle of Wight comes into play, given that it has way more electors than any other constituency. More puzzling, however, is his assertion that Tory MPs need about 4,000 more votes to get to Westminster than Labour MPs. It's actually nearer 17,000 more.
Statistics aside, "we cannot", as Boris says, "tolerate this kind of jiggery-pokery". It's scandalous gerrymandering to demand that boundaries be drawn not in line with population or natural communities but so that two MPs can sit next to each other. They don't own the constituencies, the constituencies own them. It is a lessen New Labour seem increasingly unwilling to learn. Of course, if we had STV, we wouldn't have this problem, but that is a different tale for a different day.
Posted by pauldavies on September 14, 2006
