Far be it for me to accuse Peter Hain of being economical with the truth:
One other relevant fact is that we now have 300 (yes, that’s right 300!) other directly elected full-time parliamentarians in the Scottish Parliament, the European Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Greater London Authority and the Northern Ireland Assembly. If anything we should also be organising a cull (humane, of course) of some of that lot- for example, Northern Ireland, population 1.7 million reallly needs 108 MLAs to *ahem* operate as efficiently as it presently does? I think not.
Wales will lose three times the proportion of MPs as the average for the rest of the United Kingdom – a reduction in Wales’s voice in Parliament of fully a quarter from 40 to 30. Wales – a nation with just 5 per cent of the population of the UK – is contributing 20 per cent of the cut in MPs.… but there is one salient fact that he has forgotten to mention there; post the change (if it happens) Wales, with “just” 5% of the UK’s population will have… 5% of the total number of the UK’s MPs, which seems fair enough to me.
One other relevant fact is that we now have 300 (yes, that’s right 300!) other directly elected full-time parliamentarians in the Scottish Parliament, the European Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Greater London Authority and the Northern Ireland Assembly. If anything we should also be organising a cull (humane, of course) of some of that lot- for example, Northern Ireland, population 1.7 million reallly needs 108 MLAs to *ahem* operate as efficiently as it presently does? I think not.
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