An island’s fight to keep its MP points to trouble for the government

IN THE summer of 1488 some 440 men from the Isle of Wight—a small island off England’s south coast—decided to declare war on France. Conceived by an ambitious local overlord, the plan went awry. Legend has it that a lone survivor straggled home, accusing the islanders’ allies—a bunch of rebel Bretons—of abandoning them in battle near Rennes. A memorial plaque to this fiasco, hailing the gallantry of those involved, hangs in Carisbrooke Castle, just below the room where local bigwigs locked Charles I after the civil war. (The king was on the run, and peeved islanders with further escape attempts, one of which left him wedged in his bedroom window.) When it comes to defying higher authority, in short, the Isle of Wight has form.

Now the island has done it again. On February 15th the government was forced to drop plans to split the Isle of Wight into one and a half parliamentary seats. The half-seat was to be joined to a chunk of the English mainland, creating a constituency divided by several miles of sea. Victory honours go to Lord Fowler, a former Conservative Party chairman and longtime island resident. Fully 196 peers, among them seven former Tory cabinet ministers, backed his House of Lords amendment that makes the Isle of Wight an exception to a government plan to redraw almost all British constituencies to fit a quota of 76,000 voters, with only small variations allowed. The Isle of Wight constituency (Britain’s biggest) currently boasts 110,000 electors.

Desperate to pass a wider package of electoral changes by a self-imposed deadline of February 17th, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition blinked, adding the Isle of Wight to a list of only two other exceptions, both of them sparsely populated Scottish seats. Unexpectedly, the government also said it would chop the island into two constituencies of 55,000 or so voters apiece (a local, cross-party campaign to preserve the island’s electoral integrity had offered to stick with just one MP, even though this would leave islanders under-represented). Cynics note this generosity suits the coalition, as the Isle of Wight is Tory territory with Lib Dem pockets.

Political scientists talk of a tension between the “mathematical” model, in which an MP represents a set of people, and an “organic” model, in which members represent communities. The Isle of Wight knows where it stands. “They are an island people, this is their bit of the country,” explains Lord Fowler. Andrew Turner, the sitting Conservative MP, talks of “a feeling of us-ness”. In Newport, the largest town, islanders say a mainland MP could never understand their home: a handsome backwater of green hills, chalk cliffs, beaches and yacht harbours, where the state is the largest employer. The islanders have duly defended an organic vision of politics, but—looking at the national picture—theirs is a lonely victory.

Not gerrymandering, but…

Governments have been fiddling with constituencies since 1832, when reformers swept away “rotten” boroughs with handfuls of voters, and enfranchised new industrial cities. Each time, their motives have blended principle and partisan calculation. The latest plans follow that tradition: coalition leaders point to disparities in the size of today’s seats—with the average Welsh seat, for example, boasting 56,500 voters, compared with 72,000 in England—and thunder about “the broken scales of our democracy”. In private, Tories gloat that the process may take perhaps 20 seats off Labour—and all in the name of fairness. There is nothing new about that, either: most constituency redistributions in modern times have been perilous for Labour, thanks to long-term population movements away from the party’s inner-city strongholds to more Tory-friendly suburbs.

But this time is also different. By insisting that almost all seats contain almost exactly the same number of voters, the government has made it impossible for constituencies to remain neatly inside county boundaries, as most do today (London is an outlier, with seats spreading across borough lines). Talk of a seat straddling Cornwall and Devon already has campaigners in the south-west incensed. Many more county borders (and rows) will follow. David Cameron and his coalition wax romantic about the pent-up power of organic, living communities. But in their plans for Westminster’s constituencies they look more like coldly rational Roundheads, sweeping aside ancient boundaries to create a parliament of pure, mathematical equality.

The mathematical camp does have a point. Its hero is Edmund Burke, the philosopher and MP who (rather bravely) informed his 18th-century constituents that he was not an agent for their narrow interests, but merely their elected representative in a national, deliberative assembly. And some Isle of Wight voters can sound pretty parochial. An MP shared with the mainland would “never be here,” says a woman shivering at a bus stop in the rain, “and if they did come, it would be at the convenience of the ferries.” Another talks of the island’s unique “needs”, mostly involving public cash.

But the government’s radical approach involves dangers. First, says one thoughtful Tory, most of his colleagues have yet to wake up to how sitting MPs will have to fight each other as safe seats shift or vanish (the House of Commons is set to shrink from 650 to 600 seats). A “disaster”, he mutters. More importantly, Britain has largely escaped the curse of outright gerrymandering: parliamentary boundaries are drawn by neutral civil servants, even if partisan appeals by party officials are common. The coalition’s plans still leave civil servants in charge. But by ignoring the historic boundaries of lots of tight-knit communities, they will further fray the ties between electors and the elected. With trust in short supply, it is an odd time to start alienating voters.