Labour's accusations of gerrymandering are self-defeating

Jack Straw has put party interest above public good. The voting reform bill deserves more serious scrutiny

Every time a Labour politician uses the word "gerrymandering" a puppy dies. There is a lot of cant being fired off on both sides of the debate raging around the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill, but the "gerrymandering" charge is perhaps the most overblown aspect of it.

Gerrymandering is the act of deliberately fixing a boundary in order to give a political party an unfair advantage. Yet the proposed changes will not to lead to any more political interference in the boundary review process. If anything, by speeding up the process and narrowing the scope of the Boundary Commission, they will lead to less interference.

It is true that the Conservatives want to change the way we draw up boundaries because they perceive it gives Labour an unfair advantage. In that respect, at least, they are correct. If both parties had got equal votes in the last general election, Labour would have won a clear plurality of the seats. This situation has existed for quite some time and was not reviewed during either of the boundary changes presided over under the last Labour government. It would be a cheap shot to call that Labour inaction "gerrymandering" yet it would be no less true than their own current allegations.

Things aren't quite that simple however. First of all, there is the question about whether this boundary review will actually correct the imbalance. According to two recent academic papers, the answer is "no" – or at least not by much. That of course begs the question about whether it is strictly necessary, but it equally forces us to ask why Labour is making dropping the proposals such a precondition to them supporting the referendum on the alternative vote, which was their own manifesto commitment. There are Labour supporters of electoral reform who seem to genuinely believe they are opposing a very deep injustice, but I hope they are open to the suggestion that they are to an extent being manipulated by opponents of electoral reform who are cynically whipping up hysteria within the party in a bid to derail the referendum itself.

There is a second, more fundamental issue. One of the main effects of the new bill is to base constituency boundaries on electorate size, rather than population size. The review is to be completed before the 2011 census will have even been published. There is nothing new about the phenomenon of "electoral deserts" – another problem that Labour took no action over in 13 years – but the effect of this proposal will be to formally deny the existence of millions of people within the electoral process. Constituency MPs with large unregistered populations will end up with disproportionately large caseloads; just because you aren't on the electoral register, it doesn't mean you don't still have housing problems or nuisance neighbours. Indeed, since electoral deserts tend to go hand-in-hand with social problems, those (mostly urban) MPs will be hit by a double whammy.

The way the coalition is planning to mitigate this is by redoubling government efforts on electoral registration, but thus far no concrete plan on how they intend to do this has emerged. What's more, as the director of Democratic Audit, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, has written, by switching to individual voter registration in 2014 (as opposed to the current household system), the electoral roll and the constituency boundaries will no longer bear any relation to each other by the time of the next election. We effectively will have gone back to square one.

So there are genuine social justice problems that need to be ironed out of this legislation. Unfortunately, by focusing on the false gerrymandering charge, Jack Straw puts party self-interest above the public good and only ensures that the debate in parliament becomes more heated. In doing so, the possibility of MPs working across parties to give the bill proper scrutiny recedes. It is at best self-defeating and at worse a deeply cynical attempt to derail the coalition which has nothing to do with the real issues that are at stake. Labour reformers should think carefully before going along with this ploy; the stakes are simply too high.