Democracy at work

For some time I have been wondering why Boris Johnson's affluent west London constituency have not chucked him out for his role in unleashing the Brexit disaster on us. Today, I got around to checking and find that his current constituency, the one he took after his mayoral stint, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, voted 57% to leave. While his old constituency, the one he had before his mayoral stint, Henley, voted mirror image, that is to say 43% to leave. Both constituencies are affluent places, although I dare say Henley is a good deal more so; much more Bullingdon. At least if my limited experience of the place is anything to go by. See reference 1.

In any event, the fat Tory is acquitted of the crime of not taking notice of the views of his constituents.

On the other hand, I am reminded of the insouciance with which his former chum Cameron sailed into the referendum by the fact that there was no requirement on local authorities to count the results by Parliamentary Constituency and such numbers as have were put together by some statistician from East Anglia.

While his oppo Corbyn, having been very hot on party democracy when he was outside the tent, seems to have gone rather cold on it now that he is inside the tent. He is not to be shifted from his mildy Brexit views by all those young things who propelled him to his present eminence being remainers. But he is in good company: nearly all national politicians dump their views about participative democracy once they get in sight of power and want as much of it as they can grab for themselves. That said, he may come to regret having handed so much power over his own tenure and succession to rank and file party members.

While I continue to regret the continuing failure of the House of Commons to recognise that with the country split more or less down the middle, the sensible way forward would be some sort of compromise - with that presently on offer from Prime Minister May probably being as good as we are going to get.

All of which has reminded me to check up on the boundary commission, at reference 2. My understanding had been that their latest review, if implemented, would make it very hard for Labour to win an election. Given which, the Tories without a proper majority were unable to push forward with implementation. The boundary commission website, very properly, tells us nothing about such matters, but a great deal about the process by which they came to their latest final report in September of last year. It all looks like a model of democracy, or at least it would be if it were implemented, certainly compared to the unsavoury shenanigans in the US, shenanigans which contributed the word gerrymandering to our language.

It seems that it was a given that that total number of MP's for the UK should be reduced by 50 to 600 and I can find no explanation - beyond thinking that even 600 is rather a large number. And I imagine that the Labour beef is that the number of lefty constituencies for what used to be our industrial cities is coming down, while the number of Tory leaning constituencies in our leafy suburbs is coming up.

Which leaves me with a problem. We are supposed to operate a two party, representative democracy, with the two parties alternating in a reasonably regular way - which is proper and healthy, how the system is supposed to work. But if we build in a structural majority for the Tories, perhaps not properly reflecting their share of the popular vote, where does that leave us?

Mathematically challenged would be one unhelpful answer, as no one system is going to meet all the desirable requirements for a representative democracy.

PS: illustration snipped from Volume I of the final report. Lots of other stuff out there where it came from.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=henley.

Reference 2: https://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/.