I don't really care who wins a by-election in Scotland, but what I did notice was that it takes far less votes to elect an MP is Scotland than in my part of the country.
Working on the figures provided by the BBC news report, it would seem that Inverclyde constituency has an electorate of about 60,000. whilst where I live, the electorate for my constituency is just over 75,000.
If this difference is typical, and to simplify the maths, if one takes an area of Scotland with a electorate of, say, 300,000, it would get five MPs, whilst a similar electorate in England would get only four.
This is gerrymandering of the worst kind, particularly as Scotland now has its own parliament and there is no excuse whatsoever for enhanced representation in Westminster.
Yet for some reason any thought of boundary changes to remedy this situation seems to have been lost in the debacle over AV.
Perhaps we should have a campaign for "One man, one vote" rather than "one man one vote" in Scotland, and "One man, four-fifths of a vote" in England.
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Couldn't agree more EP. Anyway we don't need the number of MPs we have now, but the sticking point is London labour. They won't budge on numbers. You'll understand why.
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