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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

The biggest hope in that respect is probably that the rumours of Tory attempts at redrawing boundaries to keep Labour out goes through. They attempted it this period, but where stopped by the Lib Dems. If that happens it may align Labour with the smaller parties in this question.

Couple that with continued huge over-representation of the SNP, which certainly will rub many English voters the wrong way, and maybe.

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Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression redrawing the boundaries wasn't some diabolical plot but rather the boundaries were set independently and intended to equal up consituency sizes? The fact that this doesn't favour Labour should be beside the point?

Correct - the Boundary Commissions (there's one for each nation) are independent and come up with the new boundaries, based on simple mathematical principles. Parliament then votes them through.

In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.

There is basically no way of redrawing those boundaries that is apolitical. It may not be a "diabolical plot" but constituency size is not all of it. How you alter that inherently alters vote distribution in a FPTP system, and as such it is a major problem.

Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.

You need to boundaries to be created by a well-known, impartial algorithm rather than a person. And you pay a committee of academic programmers from other countries, with no political ties to the country where it's intended to be used, to design the algorithm. And you use the same algorithm forever rather than changing it from year to year.

That solves the gerrymandering problem. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of getting whichever party currently benefits from gerrymandering to agree to switch to the neutral algorithm.

I think any attempt to "fix" the boundaries in Scotland to attempt to reduce the number of SNP MPs would create a very strong backlash that would almost certainly lead to a new drive to independence.

I didn't imply they'd try that in Scotland. Scotland is basically irrelevant for the Tories today - they won't ever win many seats there any more. In that scenario a strong SNP is good for the Tories, because if it prevents Labour from getting an overall majority on occasion, it puts Labour in the uneasy position of having to consider a coalition with SNP.

But the over-representation of SNP - a party they've vilified, and that actively fights Tory policies, and that drags up the whole "Scottish MP's voting on English issues" deal may very well make more Tory voters sympathetic to a system that'd reduce the SNP influence.

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