UK parliamentary boundary review 2016-2018

[Tintrlvr]

The new map in England is not bad at all. Other than the two Wight seats,* all of the seats are I believe in a relatively narrow range between slightly over 70,000 and slightly under 80,000, which is pretty reasonable, and the overall pattern on the map doesn't show any strong regional or urban/rural preferential treatment that could be indicative of trying to skew to benefit one party.

*Which is really unreasonable - it's fine that they don't want to be paired with the mainland, but then you should just get one oversized seat, as in the past, as an alternative, and it's especially ridiculous/obvious Torymandering that they're getting an extra seat at a time when the overall number of seats is being reduced. And the Western Isles or Orkney/Shetland are a different case - they're much, much more distinct from the mainland, culturally and in terms of connectivity, than the Isle of Wight is. Plus, they're not in England, and the UK has always treated each constituent country separately for purposes of constituency-drawing.

I do agree that Wales should not have the super undersized seats. Oh well.

[Tintrlvr]

Many people wanted the number of MPs cut after the expenses scandal, it was part of the lib Dem 2010 manifesto to cut the number of MPs down to 500

It is bonkers for a third party to want to reduce the number of seats in a legislature. Of course, they didn't see their complete collapse in 2015. A 500 seat legislature could've given them as little as 1 seat maybe?

The Lib Dem manifesto in 2010 also included PR, which presumably went hand-in-hand with a reduction in seats. With PR, you could cut the number of seats down to 200 or so without losing anything of value, which ought to really be the populist argument in favor of PR.