Austin Mitchell: Having fewer MPs would make a travesty of democracy

Nothing upsets MPs so much as a threat to their seats, but the new boundary review forthcoming in a few days is going to turn each against the other in the biggest Parliamentary upset we’ve ever seen.

That will produce an angry game of musical chairs, reviews, party changes and re-selections going on into 2018.

It’s fair to make constituencies as equal as possible, and population changes mean that there are now striking discrepancies between seats with 100,000 electors and midgets with 25,000.

With Labour holding more of the smaller city seats, this creates a bias against the Conservatives whose seats tend to be bigger in terms of population.

They were happy with the boundaries 30 years ago when the bias worked for them, but now it works the other way they want something done about it.

This is what the Boundary Commission is now doing. It’s equalising the seats to within five per cent of each other and reducing over-representation of Scotland.

So what’s all the fuss about?

It’s not the principle of redistribution, but because David Cameron coupled it with a reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, that means that every boundary has to be changed – so the fights for seats will be more bitter.

The now former Prime Minister argued that the reduction will cut the cost of politics, a dangerous principle in a country which has fewer elected representatives per capita than others, and particularly when we are boosting the unelected House of Lords to a crowd spectacular of 850 members.

The Lib Dems managed to stop the reduction in 2012, but now it goes ahead and brings a loss of six seats for Scotland, four for Yorkshire and Humberside (a reduction from 54 to 50 seats) and six going in the West Midlands. Power is moving south because the South East loses only one of its 84 seats so its weight in the national balances increase.

It also weakens the Commons. A smaller House will be less effective, reducing its power to check the executive.

The number and weight of Government with its Ministers, parliamentary private secretaries, whips and hangers on is well over a hundred, a greater proportion of a smaller House of Commons.

The pool of talent from which to pick able Ministers and shadow ministers, already too shallow, will shrink just at a time when much more work is going to fall on the reduced number of MPs from the legislative and scrutiny work on Brexit.

The standing committees introduced by Margaret Thatcher have been a crucial development of the power of the Commons and are now proving their usefulness as a national system of audit and accountability.

This has led to the exposure of the tax fiddles of multi-nationals of Government overspends and failures. They have called Rupert Murdoch and Sir Philip Green to account, and demonstrated the failures in immigration control and flood protection.

Yet it’s a lot of work. That makes it difficult already to get MPs to take on the hard work of committees, or to find effective chairs. Both will be worse with fewer MPs in Parliament.

Constituents will lose out too. The most striking change in my 38 years as an MP was the growth in the amount of constituency work letters, surgery visits and constituents’ problems,

All increased exponentially because MPs have become local ombudspeople, with constituency offices and staff. They have to devote more time to social work, a burden which is heavier in Britain because we have larger constituencies, and fewer elected representatives per capita, than nations with federal structures or elected second chambers.

There, power is distributed and more representatives can stay closer to the people to help with local service and support. Here everything falls to the MPs making the job ever harder.

Bigger British constituencies with a new average of 75,000 electors must make that work even harder, distract MPs even more from their Parliamentary roles and undermine the service they can provide to constituents who struggle with an increasingly complex world.

I voted against this reduction when it was first proposed. A healthy democracy requires us to stop it this time.

Austin Mitchell is the former Labour MP for Grimsby.