Negotiations on political reform: mission impossible?

'The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats may seem far apart on their ideas for political reform, but they are not impossibly so,' said UCL's Professor Robert Hazell. ?Now that negotiations between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are underway, the Director of the UCL Constitution Unit commented: ?The hardest issue is electoral reform.  If the Conservatives can move some way on that, they can readily agree the rest. The Liberal Democrats want STV (a single transferable voting system) and to reduce the House of Commons to 500 MPs. The Conservatives also want to reduce the size of the Commons, to 585, but to retain first-past-the-post. To reduce the size of the House of Commons requires a wholesale boundary review of all constituency boundaries.  That is difficult to achieve in one Parliament; but not impossible, if the boundary review process is drastically streamlined.