Over at ToryDiary (which is to CentreRight what Hillary Clinton is to Barack Obama), there is jubilation:
It appears that one of ConservativeHome's campaigns for 2008 can be retired. Our campaign for fair seats was launched in January and was given a positive reception by Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert at the time. This morning the party has confirmed that it will move to a system where votes have "equal value".
Unfortunately, the reform plan would involve the mother of all boundary reviews, which wouldn't even report until 2014-2018.
There is a much easier and faster way to eliminate the contribution that constituency size makes to the pro-Labour bias in the electoral system: Rather than re-size the constituencies, re-weight the voting power of each MP in line with the size of his or her constituency.
In other words, instead of giving each MP one vote in each division, they'd have as many votes as there were persons eligible to vote in their constituencies. Thus to take the most extreme example of constituency size variation, Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) would have over five times the voting power of Angus MacNeil (Western Isles) – for the very good reason that there are over five times as many people in Mr Turner's constituency than in Mr MacNeil's.
At a stroke, the size bias would be eliminated – though it would mean some complicated arithmetic in the division lobbies.
