Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Feet talking

We can perhaps judge the desirability of countries not by happiness indices drawn up by think tanks but rather by migration - which countries are people leaving and which ones are they trying to move to.

Is there a similar judgement to be made about the desirability of forms of political governance within a country by looking at internal migration between constituencies represented by politicians of different parties?

I ask because of this fascinating snippet from an article by John Rentoul in the Independent a week or so ago (emphasis added):

The Boundary Commission is supposed to equalise constituencies anyway: that is its main objective. Yet it always lags behind population change, because it is working on out-of-date data and by the time the changes are made, the population has drifted further from Labour to Conservative areas.

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