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| 26th August 2010 |
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| Reform Bill |
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| I will occasionally write about Bills passing through Parliament to seek your opinion. One such Bill is the Constitutional Reform Bill which proposes Fixed Term Parliaments, a reduction and re-sizing of constituencies and a vote on the electoral system for electing MPs. |
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| Fixed Term Parliaments will mean that the Prime Minister can no longer decide on the date of the General Election and an end to political advantage by choosing a date when the ruling party’s popularity is high. |
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| The reduction and equalisation of seats element of the Bill means that there will be a reduction in the numbers of MPs from 650 to 600, thus saving millions of pounds. This goes hand in hand with the re-drawing of boundaries to make equal sized constituencies. It is also argued that there is an in-built structural bias for Labour against the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in the current sizing as more votes are concentrated in the cities and less votes are needed to elect a Labour MP. |
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| Changing our electoral system will be subject to a referendum, more than likely at next May’s council elections in England and to coincide with the devolved legislatures’ elections in Wales and Scotland. It is not a proportional system change but a choice between the current first-past-the-post system and the Alternative Vote (AV). AV means that you get to vote for a number of candidates, in order of preference, not just the one and those second, third and so on preferences are counted too. |
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| Let me know what you think about these proposed changes and whether you think it will be beneficial to our democracy. |
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CONTACT Gareth
By Post:
You can write to Gareth Johnson at:
House of Commons,
London SW1A 0AA
By email:
[email protected]
By phone:
House of Commons 020 7219 7047
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