What do people think, on a related topic, about the proposed shrinkage of the House of Commons? I'm all for a boundary review - we should just legislate to have them automatically IMO, keep it out of the hands of the politicians - but I don't actually feel cutting 50 MPs would be a good thing. Sure, it's less of them to pay, but that's really not much money considering it gives people much better access to local representation. The current seats also tend to fit nicely to local authority boundaries, which would no longer be the case. Having access to an MP can be really useful to people who need to deal with ministers on justice or migration issues; the more people per MP, the harder it will be for MPs to keep up with their huge loads of casework - they already end up with as many as six and a half thousand pieces a year to do.
Other countries have smaller main chambers, sure, but then other countries often have more of these affairs decentralised to states so the MP doesn't have that casework issue.
There's also the fact that the seat cut would make it harder for smaller parties to break into Westminster - as seats would straddle local authorities much more, the route of building up at a council level then making a breakthrough (as the Lib Dems have done in many cases, as the Greens did in Brighton, and as I suspect UKIP may eventually manage to do in Thanet) would be far tougher to go down, cementing the Tories more in place. Methinks they may have goals other than simply cutting the cost of politics here...