Skipper

Redrawing constuency boundaries is causing MPs no little anguish. We know the Tories will gain around 20 seats from the Boundary Commission's redrawn constiuency limits. Labour will lose around a dozen seats, redressing the inbuilt bias towards Labour within our fairly rubbish voting system (recall I was an AV man).

Labour is always going to benefit to some extent from FPTP as it takes fewer votes in Labour constituencies to elect their MPs. Tories would need a swing of maybe 5 percentage points in addition to drawing level in votes to win enough seats to manage a decent overall majority. The reason for this is that Labour areas tend to be low voting inner city areas while Conservative seats tend to be in the high voting properous suburbs where huge 'wasteful' majorities are piled up beyond what is needed just to win. The Tories will have to do a fair bit more gerrymanmdering to remove this natural advantage and I wouldn't put it past them to try. As it is this exercise will not allow thesame kind of appeal process that existed in ealier reviews.

But what worries me is that taking 50 MPs out of the Commons will save us 12m quid but will reduce still further the talent pool of MPs available to serve as ministers. When a new government comes in it usually has around 350- 400 MPs available but of this number: around a third are too old, of feeble health or mind or are just not suitable for office. In addition not all MPs want to be ministers- maybe only 60% want to bear this burden. Moreover, as time goes by and ministers are found wanting and discarded, the pool of rejects gets larger and the pool of 'availables' gets smaller.

Robbing this 'talent pool' of another 50 MPs doesn't seem like sense tome. of course the sensible thing would be to remove the convention that ministers have to sit either in the Commons or the Lords. Visitors to UK are always astounded when I explain this to them. It's not needed but we cling on to it. I fear NO government will be sensible enough to take this necessary measure.