“A barefaced gerrymander,” says Stephen Kinnock about the proposed boundary changes. They will certainly have adverse consequences for Labour, but does that mean the swindle he implies? Or is this “electoral districts of equal size” a resonant radical phrase from our history?

The word gerrymander is no more than 200 years old, named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who had drawn electoral districts so contoured on a map that one of them was said to look like a salamander. His object, of course, was to rig the districts in favour of his party, which is quite easily done once you know who lives where.

To this day congressional districts for the House of Representatives in what likes to think of itself as the world’s greatest democracy are drawn in an openly partisan spirit by whichever party controls that state’s own legislature. You can look them up online and some of them are not so much barefaced as barely credible, more boa constrictor than salamander, tiny narrow bands twisting and turning for scores of miles.

Gerrymandering in the true sense was once seen in Ulster, where unionist ingenuity predated partition. Irish local government through elected county councils had been established by parliament in 1898. And by 1911, in County Tyrone, where the populace comprised 82,000 Catholics and 68,000 Protestants, the electoral districts were so neatly arranged that there were 16 unionist councillors and 13 nationalists. After partition and the creation of the Northern Ireland state, this became more flagrant still in notorious case of Londonderry City, which for years had a unionist majority on the council despite a large majority of citizens who were Catholic nationalists.

Parliamentary elections and boundaries were another matter entirely. From the reform bill of 1832 until 1929, the first election at which all British citizens over 21, male and female, could vote, changes were often scrutinised with an eye to party advantage, but the basic principle became enshrined in the title of statutes: the Representation of the People. This was a striking case of parliament changing itself in response to real popular demand, after the People’s Charter in 1838 had made specific radical demands so advanced that they shocked the ruling classes.

Remarkably enough, within 80 years five out those six demands had been met: manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, no property qualification for MPs, payment of members (for better or worse) – and “electoral districts of equal size”, more or less. (The only Chartist demand still unmet is for annual parliaments, which might suit the electorate more than the politicians.) More or less, since it’s in practice impossible to shape constituencies with exactly or sometimes even approximately equal electorates, and movement of population makes it hard for the boundary commissioners to keep up.

People move from city centres to the suburbs, and remote rural constituencies are depopulated. And so there are at present enormous discrepancies, between the Isle of Wight with more than 105,000 voters and Aberavon – represented by Stephen Kinnock, as it happens – with fewer than 50,000. North-west Cambridgeshire has more than 90,000 voters, and Arfon in north-west Wales has fewer than 38,000.

How can it possibly be gerrymandering to try to redress that imbalance? There may be legitimate complaints about the use of the last electoral register as the basis for redrawing boundaries, especially since so many are thought have signed up for the EU referendum. But there was no malice aforethought in this: the existing register has always been the basis for the boundary commissions to work on before now, and that rush of new registrations for the EU referendum was quite unforeseen (particularly by David Cameron). But that isn’t Labour’s real objection. They don’t actually want the Chartists’ “electoral districts of equal size”, since those are bound to damage Labour’s electoral prospects, such as they are any more.

The curious truth is that Labour is now the party of reaction and old custom, of heredity – as we’re reminded by the names of Benn and, come to think of it, Kinnock – and of rotten boroughs. It’s an unlikely fate for a party that once passionately believed in political as well as social and economic reform.