When is a gerrymander not a gerrymander: who benefits and who loses from the changed rules for defining parliamentary constituencies?

Members of the British Labour party have, not for the first time, criticised the Boundary Com-missions’ proposals for new constituency boundaries as gerrymandering. This represents a mis-use of the term: the Commissions have produced recommended constituencies in the context ofnew rules for such redistributions that give precedence to equality of electorates across all seatsand the boundaries of those constituencies have been defined without any reference to thelikely electoral consequences. The Conservatives, who were responsible for the change in therules to emphasise electoral equality, wanted to remove a decades-long Labour advantage inthe translation of votes into seats because of variations in constituency size, and the Commis-sions’ implementation of those rules has achieved that. A Labour advantage has been removedbut not replaced by a Conservative advantage: in terms of electoral equality between the two,the playing field has been levelled. Labour’s claim to have been disadvantaged by decisions onthe electoral register is also examined; the disadvantage is probably only small.