Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

That is a relief to hear, but I remember that someone else there caused some trouble. The point is that the river is important, but it divides. You would have had great difficulty organising community activity across the river. If you ran a campaign because someone had led off with an issue—not necessarily on school closures but perhaps on other wider issues—it was really difficult to unite people across the river. Transport was another example. For reasons that I understand are to do with the geography and soil of the south, it is difficult to provide underground systems south of the river. Getting a campaign going on underground links was difficult or almost impossible because—with the exception of one or two links, such as the Victoria line, that cross the river—everyone south of the river wanted to talk about buses either on their side or on the northern side. Where there are real issues about community, the river is an important factor. Given that the Government have moved, or I hope have moved, on the Isle of Wight under pressure from the House, we need to recognise that there are other divisive factors. The further you go down the River Thames towards the mouth of the Thames, the more impossible the issues become, although constituencies quite commonly cross the Thames at the Oxford end. The community bit is important. We need to give the Boundary Commission much more flexibility—as we have said a thousand times—so if the Government were prepared to move towards 10 per cent, if they were prepared to make any movement at all, that could help significantly. While the Government are not prepared to talk or move, that makes it difficult to ignore individual cases, whether those relate to the Thames, the Tyne, the Mersey or whatever. We then have to address these issues, which seems a rather painful way of making these points. As I mentioned before, another factor that came out of the research that was done on my constituency casework was that the majority of an MP’s cases—this seems to apply particularly in inner city areas—come from the wards immediately round the centre. The further that you try to go out, the more difficult it is to reach out unless you go to those areas. I know that that happens all the time in rural areas—you have to do it, and I know that you can get round it to some extent with modern technology—but the reality is that that brings home the importance of the community. Indeed, when I represented Hammersmith for many years, my constituency was virtually the smallest in the UK. I had grand plans to persuade the Boundary Commission to let me link up with the north-west coast of Scotland, so that I could do that in the summer and Hammersmith in the winter, but the Boundary Commission did not buy that. The important thing for me was that, when the size of the constituency was increased and I took over the Ealing-Acton part, there was a significant difference between the outer London borough and the inner London one. The groups in the inner London borough had a different psychology. I will finish on one point to remember about all great cities, which is particularly true of London. We all think of London as the greatest city in the world, and it is. London is recognised as such for its variety, ethnicity, wealth, diversity and everything that makes it so. Yet we forget at our peril that London is made up of villages. I talked the other day about the turnover of people on one of my constituency’s estates being 25 per cent every year, but the other 75 per cent included another group who never moved, who were there from birth to death and who remembered their parents, grandparents and so on. There was a real community sense. Particularly in Shepherds Bush, people could trace their ancestors back for several hundred years. We do not think of London like that, but London is an incredibly powerful, influential and great city that has its roots deeply within what I call village communities—people who have lived there for years and have family links and so on. If we are to stay with constituencies—as I hope that we do—we need a system that allows the Boundary Commission to recognise that community links are profoundly important.