BIG PICTURE
WHAT NEXT FOR CASTINGS SITE?
and Roe Street, is now a privately owned car park open to the public for a fee.
Across the road is Duke Street car park and a few yards away is another large car park at the corner of Great King Street and Churchill Way, and across Churchill Way is Tesco Metro car park.
The only time the two larger car parks are nearly full is on Treacle Market day or in the case of Duke Street when a large piece of it is occupied by the traveller community. Do they pay for its use? Will the council tell council tax payers what their long-term plans are for the Sutton Castings site? Hopefully it is something of use to the people of Macclesfield and something which will improve the town. David Booth Bond Street, Macclesfield THE Boundary Commissions for England and Wales last week published the details of their proposed changes to Parliamentary constituency boundaries. According to Minister Chris Skidmore, “Equalising the size of constituencies in the Boundary Review will mean everyone’s vote will carry equal weight.”
Macclesfield constituency welcomes the addition of Chelford, Alderley and most of Wilmslow, while Disley and Poynton residents may have mixed views about joining a constituency alongside Hazel Grove and Bramhall.
But constituency boundaries are not the problem. The problem is our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system.
In a multi party democracy, it is simply not possible to draw the Parliamentary map in a way that makes all votes matter and that ensures that the House of Commons resembles the voters – as long as we have this primitive and perverse voting system.
Wherever the lines fall on the map, FPTP ensures there are constituencies like Belfast South – whose MP was elected with 9,560 votes (24.5%) in 2015, while in Liverpool Walton, 31,222 (81.3%) voted for the winning candidate.
This is not because these constituencies are different sizes – they each have almost exactly the same number of registered voters – but because it is impossible for FPTP with single-member constituencies to ensure there is fair representation of a diverse electorate with a wide range of political preferences.
Nationally, 1,157,613 Green voters saw only one MP elected (UKIP fared even worse).
When you apply our broken voting system across the whole country, you end up with what we have: a Parliament in which a party’s share of the seats has little relationship to the number of votes they received.
Until we join the 83% of developed democracies which use some form of Proportional Representation, Parliament will remain unrepresentative of the voters and our democracy will remain broken.