Constituency sizes

With the relevant Bill currently passing through Parliament, Labour have (predictably) been kicking up another fuss over the proposed equal-sized constituencies. For years Labour has benefited from unequal-sized constituencies that give voters in some areas more power-per-vote than thos in other areas.

Admittedly there are a couple of difficult cases such as the Isle of Wight one, and I don't know how best to solve those; but the basic principle remains: all votes should be of equal weight/value. Labour call that "gerrymandering", whereas it is in reality the present boundaries that seem to have been gerrymandered.

Interestingly, it was the nineteenth-century Chartist reform movement that established the principle of equal-sized constituencies (point No, 5 at this Wikipedia page), that movement being described as "possibly the first mass labour movement in the world". Notice that: Labour movement!

If you read through the rest of the Charter's main aims, you can see how very much in tune with the original (pre-Fabian) principles of the original Labour party the whole thing was. This is yet another reminder that today's Labour is far removed from that principled political movement of yesteryear, and is nowadays essentially just a Communist outfit with a carefully manufactured public image, whose primary aim is to turn Britain into a kind of Soviet Union Mk 2, via the EU and others.

Fortunately the Bill should go through, despite Labour Lords' well-reported filibustering practices, which will be a victory for the electorate, rather than any political party's own vested interests, which of course is as it should be.