In the process of setting electoral districts,
gerrymandering is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries to create partisan advantaged districts. The resulting district apportionment is known as a
gerrymander
however, that word can also refer to the process. When used to allege
that a given party is gaining disproportionate power, the term
gerrymandering has negative connotations.
In addition to its use achieving desired electoral results for a
particular party, gerrymandering may be used to help or hinder a
particular demographic,
such as a political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, or class
group, such as in U.S. federal voting district boundaries that produce a
majority of constituents representative of African-American or other
racial minorities, known as "majority-minority districts."
Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect.
By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win
(increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder
among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes
for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition
can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins in
the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is
minimized.
While the wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow
margins across multiple districts, gerrymandering narrow margins can be
risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of
demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition,
politicians can create more packed districts, leading to more
comfortable margins in unpacked ones.
This controversial proposal has come to light just days after the
District Auditor recommended in his preliminary report that 10 former
councillors and officers (including one who is now a Tory MP) should be
forced to pay back the pounds 21m their policies cost ratepayers, and be
disqualified from standing as local councillors. That case involved an
attempt to manipulate elections whereas the new proposal does not, but a
common theme links the two: in both cases the council demonstrates a
determined reluctance to accept responsibility for housing the poor
people within its boundaries.
Last week's revelations about what the auditor, John Magill,
variously described as the 'disgraceful', 'wilful', 'unlawful',
'unauthorised' and 'improper' decisions of Westminster Council, were
based on events between 1986 and 1988. His report describes how Dame
Shirley Porter, the heiress to the Tesco fortune who was then council
leader, with her Conservative colleagues and some council officers,
produced a two-track strategy to ensure that the Tories were returned to
power in the marginal local authority.
One track dealt with the homeless, whom the Labour Party had
organised and put on the electoral roll before the closely fought 1986
council election. They were regarded as a danger to the Conservatives,
and a policy document drawn up for the local Tory leadership said in
1986 that the council must examine the costs of 'homeless / down and
outs who are not our natural supporters'.
The other track involved house sales. The Conservatives decided that
home ownership - at very low levels in central London - should be
increased so that a natural and permanent Conservative majority could be
manufactured in Westminster. This was to be achieved by setting aside
10,000 council homes for sale to Westminster residents or to people from
outside. Vacant council homes - where tenants had died or moved on -
were to be sold at a rate of 500 a year. Most of the 'designated' homes
were in eight electoral wards with fragile Tory majorities. By promoting
owner-occupation in the target wards, a paper for the Tory leadership
explained in 1987, the politicians would encourage 'a pattern of tenure
which is more likely to translate into Conservative votes'.
Gerrymandering, the word used by the auditor, is not quite the right
term to describe this policy. Technically, the word means drawing
electoral boun daries to the advantage of the governing party.
Westminster was more ambitious: the council was not merely changing the
boundaries it was attempting to change the electorate.
These policies, the council and the Conservative Party maintain, are
all history now. Lady Porter left in 1992 and the council is under new
management - although it is still Tory management.
But Labour politicians, housing associations and workers for the
homeless claim that Lady Porter's successors are still shipping such
people out of Westminster to leased accommodation in the East End of
London and down-at-heel suburbs.
This would matter less to the rest of the country were Tory
Westminster not secretly using its considerable influence with
Conservative ministers, who have praised it to the skies over the past
eight years, to press for a change in the law. A confidential document,
Home lessness: a Shopping List for Early Change, shows that it is urging
the Government to clamp down on the rights of the homeless to be put on
a council's housing list. The council recommends that the Government
should make it harder for young single mothers, battered wives,
immigrants and the mentally ill to obtain council homes.
Later this month, Sir George Young, the Housing Minister, whose civil
servants are being lobbied by Westminster, will announce a review of
council housing policy. It is likely that he will reflect some of
Westminster's hardline views. In one of the 'back to basics' speeches at
the Tory Party conference last October, Young indicated that he wanted
to restrict the rights of single mothers to priority on council house
waiting lists.
Gavin Millar, the Labour spokesman on housing on Westminster Council,
said: 'What we are seeing is a battle to escape from responsibility for
the homeless. First, the Conservatives tried to ship them out . . . now
that policy has failed, they are trying to change the definition of who
is homeless and has the right to be cared for by the council. They want
the centre of London to be like the centre of New York - a British
Manhattan where the rich can walk without being troubled by conscience
and the poor are safely tucked away in their ghettos.'
TO MOST people, Westminster is merely the Houses of Parliament,
Buckingham Palace and West End shops. But for all its apparent glamour,
the area has its fair share of metropolitan poverty. Westminster pushes
north into Kilburn, the traditional London home for the working-class
Irish, and west into Bayswater, where Peter Rachman had his slum housing
empire in the 1950s.
As offices and shops moved into the richer part of Westminster and
wealthy homeowners moved out to the suburbs, the Conservatives found
that they were left with an electorate overwhelmingly comprised of
tenants. In 1981, just 21 per cent of residents owned their own home
compared to 65 per cent nationally. In 1986 local elections, the Tories
came within a handful of votes of losing control of the council.
Homeless ness was, and remains, high in central London, where the
council had to cope with people coming from all over the country looking
for work.
The Magill report shows that the council leadership's response to
this unfavourable demographic trend combined two themes: a passionate
belief in privatisation and an attitude to the poor which might most
charitably be described as high-handed.
On 2 September 1986, a note of a meeting of senior politicians shows
that the blunt question was asked: 'How can we get them (the homeless)
out of Westminster City Council?'
A few days later, Porter sent senior Tories a confidential paper
which included the warning that 'we are spending an extra pounds 1.52m
this year' on meeting statutory responsibilities to house the homeless.
The paper advised that the council should 'test the law to its limits',
and move the homeless to 'property outside Westminster'. The aim was to
encourage 'gentrification' within the area. In this case, gentrification
was defined as 'ensuring that the right people live in the right
areas'. The right areas were to be identified 'on the basis of electoral
trends and results'.
Porter wrote to colleagues: 'When you've read the documents . . . it
would be helpful if you swallow them in good spy fashion otherwise they
might self-destruct]]' Her instructions were apparently not obeyed.
By 18 September, a homeless action plan had been drawn up and
approved by Porter and six other Tory councillors. The policy was
summarised by officers as 'mean and nasty'. In 1987 the two elements of
the strategy were in place. Westminster would not just sell council
houses to tenants; it would 'gentrify' the key marginal wards by selling
empty properties to anyone with a connection with Westminster who
wanted to buy. The homeless and priority families on the housing list,
who might normally be expected to take the homes, were to be shunted out
of the area instead. A council draft paper proclaimed that targets were
to 'stop housing Westminster homeless in Westminster with immediate
effect (and) to move all homeless out of Westminster starting with key
wards by end 1988'.
The homeless were treated as meanly and nastily as Porter and the
rest intended. Some went out to Essex and the London suburbs; others
were left in hostels and on the street. The consequence was a steep rise
in the number of people Westminster could not house but who were
entitled to a home. In the five years from 1987 to 1992 the number rose
from 210 to 871.
When it was asked to account for this, Westminster claimed that it
faced special burdens because the council is in central London. But
Westminster's own analysis of housing applicants showed that only a
quarter were immigrants, refugees or people from other parts of Britain.
Most had been thrown out of asylums in the community care programme or
thrown out of their homes by friends, relatives and landlords. They were
not scroungers who had come to London hoping that the streets were
paved with gold, but ordinary people looking for a council to provide
them with housing.
Porter said from California last week that she would return in
February and clear her name. She denied that her conduct was illegal or
improper. She said of Magill's report: 'I have received legal advice to
the effect that his view is neither correct in law nor in fact.'
The central Porter policy - the targeting of key wards - was exposed
and the auditor's investigation was instigated when Patricia Kirwan, the
former Conservative chairwoman of Westminster's housing committee,
admitted to the BBC in 1989 that gerrymandering was taking place. The
plan was 'to increase the number of upwardly mobile Conservative-type
voters in specific key areas to ensure the vote went up', she told
Panorama.
WHILE the Magill report has exposed the policies of the 1980s to
public scrutiny and condemnation, local Labour politicians in
Westminster allege that the spirit of those policies lives on, because
the Conservatives are still failing to build cheap homes for rent in
Westminster and are continuing to move the poor out.
Council figures support the opposition claim. They show that in the
past year 524 homeless people were sent to flats outside the area. In
Westminster itself, just 147 cheap, public homes for rent were built.
Meanwhile, opportunities to force developers to build affordable
homes in Westminster have been missed. The Government encourages
councils to insist that developers provide some socially useful
buildings - a 'planning gain' in local authority jargon - when they are
given permission to develop a profitable site. But even though
Westminster has big developments under way on the sites of two former
hospitals and in the Paddington basin near the railway station, housing
activists allege that opportunities to construct new homes have been
ignored.
'It is not even willing to go along with Government policies,' said
the chairman of one housing association. 'Westminster still has the view
that planning gain is a nasty socialist policy.'
The present Tory leadership strongly denies that there is anything
wrong in this. They are not gerrymandering but making the best use of
limited resources by buying homes outside Westminster that are better
value for money.
But there is a growing recognition that these policies are not
sustainable. Westminster, like councils across the country, is running
into the problems created by the council house sales programme which
proved such a great vote-winner for the Conservatives after the 1979
general election. Councils are allowed to use only a small percentage of
the receipts from the sale of houses to build new homes. As housing
associations have been unable to meet the demand left by the collapse in
council house building, there is nowhere for the destitute to go apart
from bed-and-breakfast hostels or shop doorways.
Worse still, Westminster can no longer offer tax relief to encourage
the developement of leasehold properties for its homeless in other parts
of London. This is because subsidies under the Government's Business
Expansion Scheme ceased to be available for this purpose at the end of
1993. As a result, Westminster has about 850 homeless families in
temporary accommodation at present and 1,000 on a transfer list waiting
to move from bedsits.
Rather than seeking new ways to build or find homes, the council's
response to this crisis has been to ask the Government to reduce its
obligations to house homeless people. The 'shopping list' it has sent to
ministers calls for Whitehall to make a string of legal changes.
Pensioners should not be automatically regarded as having a 'priority
need' for a home. 'Old age should not, in itself, establish a priority
need,' the council document says. Councils should not be forced to put
people who seem 'vulnerable' - often the mentally ill and battered wives
- in hostels until their cases have been assessed and their
vulnerability established to the satisfaction of council officers.
Westminster also wants to make it harder for homeless immigrants to
claim a house. Councils should be able to consider whether an applicant
has access to accommodation abroad and has deliberately made himself
homeless, it said.
Meanwhile, children who are thrown out of their homes by their
parents, mainly pregnant teenagers, should not automatically be given
priority on waiting lists but should be compelled to go to the courts
and demand re-entry to the family home, regardless of whether they want
to or not.
THE ULTIMATE irony of the policy of the 1980s, and perhaps the lesson
for today's council, is that many of the people who were supposed to
benefit have turned into bitter enemies of Tory Westminster. Alan
Duncan, Teresa Gorman and other Tory MPs have done well buying smart
town houses, but for most of the supposed beneficiaries - ordinary
people who bought modest flats - the experience has been a disaster.
About 800 have formed a pressure group and are demanding that the
council buys their homes back. Mark Green, 35, a medical researcher,
explains why. He paid pounds 45,000 for a flat on the 15th floor of a
block on the Warwick estate in 1989. The flat was valued at pounds
62,000, but because he was a Westminster resident he got a pounds 17,000
discount from a council that was desperate to sell. Now estate agents
have told him that his home is effectively worthless.
Green makes the key point that he had no choice but to buy. 'I and
many others would have been happy to rent a council flat. But as they
were all being sold off we would never have been able to rent in a
million years.' He was assured that the whole estate had been designated
for sale and that he would soon find himself surrounded by
owner-occupiers rather than 'problem families'.
But within weeks of moving in, the council quietly dropped its plans
to sell more flats in the block. It was only three years later, when a
neighbour tried to move, that owner-occupiers discovered estate agents
and building societies would have nothing to do with the properties.
The other victims are of course the homeless, who wanted to find
somewhere to live in Westminster. Maxine Sandford was born and brought
up in the area. She and her two young children have now been dumped by
Westminster two hours away in a leased flat in the East End of London,
where they know no one.
'They moved me away from my family and friends without any regard for
my, or my children's, health and happiness. It's miles from anywhere
and very hard for anyone to visit me. It's become a nightmare, I want to
be moved back to Westminster,' she said.
SOURCES : independent.co.uk
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