Constitution and Home Affairs

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

On the question of city seats, is my right hon. Friend aware that the first casualty could be the Deputy Prime Minister in his Hallam seat in the city of Sheffield—unless, of course, they try to manoeuvre the boundaries so as to try to save his neck, which would test the coalition?

[Mr Straw]

There is no doubt that the biggest net losers under the current proposals in the so-called coalition agreement would be the Liberal Democrats, for reasons that I shall spell out.

On election night, when the Deputy Prime Minister heard that people had been locked out of the polling stations and prevented from casting their ballots, he said:

“I share the bitter dismay of many of my constituents who were not able to exercise their democratic right to vote in this election…That should never, ever happen again in our democracy.”

Yet he now proposes a programme that could have the effect of disfranchising not only some hundreds in his own constituency, but some hundreds of thousands across the United Kingdom. I urge him to think very carefully about what is being proposed.

As for the proposal to cut the number of seats, we need not speculate about the Conservative party’s intentions because they are on the record. Just months before the general election, the Conservative Front-Bench team moved the most detailed amendments to cut the number of seats by 10% and to force the redrawing of the boundaries by rules requiring that arithmetical quotas trump all other considerations. I have a copy of one such amendment before me. It says that the electorate

“shall be as near the electoral quota as is practicable”—

only a 3% margin would be allowed—

“and all other special geographical considerations, including in particular the size, shape and accessibility of a constituency, shall be subordinate to achieving this aim”.

The scheme, therefore, is that arithmetic will trump all, so that history, geography, mountains, rivers, and even communities and the sea, are to be subordinated to arithmetical rules.

The effects would be extraordinary, especially in Scotland. The Orkney and Shetland electorate is 33,000. Under these proposals—official Conservative proposals—Orkney and Shetland would have to be jammed in with Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, which has an electorate of 47,000 in order to make a single seat exactly within the electoral average. The Western Isles, with an electorate of 22,000, is the smallest constituency in the United Kingdom. It would have to be jammed in with a vast swathe of the western highlands—of western Scotland, indeed. In England and Wales, too, long-established patterns of democracy would be destroyed in pursuit of the new Conservative formulae. How such changes, defying history and geography and people’s own sense of place, could possibly be said to strengthen our democracy I do not know. Perhaps the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam will be able to tell us whether he is comfortable with this scheme.