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Editor's factfile: Thursday April 7
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| Between now and polling day Craig Hoy provides a daily briefing on the rules, issues and people making the 2005 election |
April 7: Why is the overall size of the House of Commons falling at the general election'?
Time for a bit of trainspotting here folks, but stick with me.
The number of MPs is set to fall from 659 to 646 as part of what some people mistakenly called the 'devolution dividend'.
For a variety of reasons Scotland has more MPs per head of the population than the rest of the country.
Two reasons for this are land mass and the fact that over recent years the English population has grown faster than Scotland's - without the number of MPs increasing south of the border.
Others rather mischievously claimed Scotland needed more MPs than England in percentage terms because it did not have its own parliament. While in the pre-devolution age Scotland was subject to separate legislation on areas like health and education, all MPs had a vote on these so the argument was a bit of a red-herring deployed to keep the number of MPs up.
In 1995 the average Scottish constituency had 54,569 electors - contrasted with 68,626 in England. That meant England was either under-represented or Scotland was over-represented depending on your outlook.
To address this, at the same time as it was legislating for devolution, the government agreed that the size of Scotland's constituencies should be brought into line with rest of the UK.
That means the number of Scottish MPs falls from 72 to 59 as of May 5.
Some observers have claimed that this has come about because Scotland now has the Holyrood parliament, and therefore the country should have fewer MPs.
That is wrong. It is correcting an old imbalance, rather than responding to the post-devolution situation.
Indeed some argue that the number should be cut further because Scotland now has 129 MSPs in addition to the 59 MPs who represent its interests.
One problem which emerges from the shake-up is that the boundaries for the Scottish parliament and the Westminster parliament are no longer 'coterminous' - essentially meaning they are no longer exact replicas of each other.
That means that Scots voters are in one constituency for the Scottish parliament, but could be in another separate and differently-named constituency in the Westminster parliament.
Straightforward? Never... But progress? Maybe...
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