Proposed new parliamentary constituencies

[northwichcat]

Several prominent MPs are facing reselection battles ahead of the next general election under new constituency boundary proposals in England and Wales.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-chancellor George Osborne are among those whose seats would be abolished.

Most constituencies are affected by the bid to cut the number of MPs in the Commons and create equal-sized seats.

Labour - expected to be hit hardest - said the proposals were "undemocratic".

But the government said they would "ensure an equal say for each voter".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37344525

According to the Telegraph one of the new constituencies will be "Altringham and Tatton Park" - yes the Telegraph can't spell a town which has strong Conservative support! The old plan proposed putting Wilmslow with Macclesfield and Knutsford with Northwich - the latter probably wouldn't have been a safe Conservative seat as while Weaver Vale has a Conservative MP, the Conservatives won it by selecting a centralist candidate from a working class background. Mr Osborne would have had more difficulty winning votes in Northwich.

 

[Howardh]

Mine's bigger (ooh er...) and seems to take in more Labour-friendly areas. My Toryboy already had a slim majority so he's probably on a knife-edge. Now to get rid of him Labour will need the three votes from these towers - so if they'd kindly agree to keep us in the EU then they get the three votes, even though I'm not in any way a traditional Labour voter.

 

[phoenixcronin]

Looks like Comrades Corbyn, Abbott and Thornberry will have to fight it out! Should be fun

 

[northwichcat]

Mine's bigger (ooh er...)

That will be the case with a lot of constituencies due to 650 being replaced by 600.
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Looks like Comrades Corbyn, Abbott and Thornberry will have to fight it out! Should be fun

But a chance to deselect people like Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Mine's bigger (ooh er...) and seems to take in more Labour-friendly areas.

That's the point of gerrymandering, to put all your opponent's supporters in a smaller number of seats. This gives your opponent safer seats, but makes it much less likely for them to win outside of those seats.

 

[CardiffKid]

That's the point of gerrymandering, to put all your opponent's supporters in a smaller number of seats. This gives your opponent safer seats, but makes it much less likely for them to win outside of those seats.

Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

 

[northwichcat]

Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

The same size counting registered voters (not people eligible to vote) and after some people have been removed from the register.

 

[TheKnightWho]

That's the point of gerrymandering, to put all your opponent's supporters in a smaller number of seats. This gives your opponent safer seats, but makes it much less likely for them to win outside of those seats.

Or in the case of my local seat (Oxford West and Abingdon), they're moving much of north Oxford into Oxford East, whilst incorporating much of Henley. That has the result of getting rid of many north Oxford LibDems in a Tory/LibDem marginal and shoving them into a safe Labour seat, whilst smuggling in lots of new Tories from Henley.

It's blatant gerrymandering to shore up a Tory marginal.
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Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

You can gerrymander with constituencies of all the same size. If they all had 100 people in and there were an equal number of Labour and Tory voters across the country, you can make sure Labour won all of theirs unanimously, whilst the Tories scraped through with 51 votes in every seat. This would result in a 2/3-1/3 split in seats in favour of the Tories.

 

[phoenixcronin]

Personally, I'm glad that my borough of Hammersmith and Fulham will once again be re-united, as its currently awkwardly split into Hammersmith and Chelsea and Fulham.

 

[northwichcat]

You can gerrymander with constituencies of all the same size. If they all had 100 people in and there were an equal number of Labour and Tory voters across the country, you can make sure Labour won all of theirs unanimously, whilst the Tories scraped through with 51 votes in every seat. This would result in a 2/3-1/3 split in seats in favour of the Tories.

But as there's more than 2 parties it makes it easier to gerrymander.

A seat with 51% Conservative and 49% Labour could easily be won by Labour if the Conservatives become less popular and Labour become more popular. However, if it's 50% Conservative, 35% Labour and 15% Lib Dem or even 50% Conservative, 40% Labour, 7% Lib Dem and 3% Green it makes it harder for Labour to get a majority.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

Yes, because it is about demographics. Certain demographic groups tend to vote Labour, others tend to vote Tory.

You have 300 voters, 50% of whom support the Tories and 50% of whom support Labour. You split them across three seats, so 100 per seat.

You can split them equally, and have three close contests.

Or you can have one seat which is 80/20 Labour and two seats which are 65/35 Conservative.

Do the same thing across the entire country- making sure the Labour vote is concentrated into a small number of seats- and you've successfully gerrymandered.

 

[miami]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37344525

According to the Telegraph one of the new constituencies will be "Altringham and Tatton Park"

I recall my old deputy headmaster telling us that somebody had applied for a job at the school with an address of "Altringham". It went straight in the bin.
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But the government said they would "ensure an equal say for each voter".

2/3rds of the voters said "No thanks" to a Conservative Government. Yet that's what we got.

 

[tbtc]

Median total parliamentary electorate:

• 72,400 in England (533 seats)
• 69,000 in Scotland (59 seats)
• 66,800 in Northern Ireland (18 seats)
• 56,800 in Wales (40 seats)

Is that fair? Especially when Wales and Northern Ireland have assemblies to deal with "local" matters? If anything you'd expect them to need fewer MPs. Scotland went down from seventy something to fifty something after the parliament at Holyrood opened.

So you can have Arfon in Wales with 37,739 people getting the same number of MPs as north-west Cambridgeshire in England (89,991 people).

If a move to equal numbers of voters per seat isn't fair then what would be fairer? Population size? How do you define that, if not by the electoral roll? Since people not on the electoral roll may well also be the people who don't complete census forms or appear on other official registers.

I don't know. I'm left of centre, but I find this move hard to argue against - I've not seen any new constituencies that seem "dodgy" - maybe others have though?

That's the point of gerrymandering, to put all your opponent's supporters in a smaller number of seats. This gives your opponent safer seats, but makes it much less likely for them to win outside of those seats.

This proposal isn't gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering is where you create strangely shaped constituencies - hence the district in Essex County, Massachusetts, where there were lots of neat constituencies plus one strangely shaped one that seemed to be designed to keep "similar" voters together (even though they lived in areas that were stretched over a strangely shaped region).

The only mild example of this I've seen in the 2016 UK boundaries is the new Sheffield Hallam And Stocksbridge, which lumps various parts of the city together that have no link to each other (Dore, Stannington, Stocksbridge), but this seems to be more about reducing the number of Sheffield MPs by one than any politically motivated move (Dore is an ex Tory area that is pretty solid Lib Dem territory, Stocksbridge is a former Labour steelworking town that has a couple of UKIP councillors now). If it were "gerrymandered" then they'd have created a seat to keep lots of similar voters together - and nobody who's been there could confuse Dore and Stocksbridge! Nick Clegg will miss the relatively "liberal" bits of Crosspool that his constituency will lose...

There were a couple of interesting tweets from ‎@chrishanretty I've seen quoted today: "the compactness (area/perimeter) of #boundaryreview proposals is greater than current English constituencies" - i.e. the "new" constituencies generally have tighter boundaries than the existing ones - if there were gerrymandering then you'd expect to see some strangely shaped boundaries designed to lump certain types of voters together (rather than constituencies that are broadly circles/ squares).

If you want to see gerrymandering, look at the maps here >> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...s-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/

 

[AlterEgo]

Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

It can be. Gerrymandering is about gaining political advantage, which broadly relate to demographics.

 

[ainsworth74]

That will be the case with a lot of constituencies due to 650 being replaced by 600.

Mine seems to be getting geographically smaller if my quick look this morning was right!

 

[AlterEgo]

Gerrymandering is where you create strangely shaped constituencies

It *can* be, but it doesn't have to look strange on a map to be gerrymandering.

 

[deltic]

Boundary Commission is an independent body with no agenda other than coming up with broadly equal sized constituencies- not sure why we get into conspiracy theories about gerrymandering. One of the reasons it was set up was to get away from such problems in the past which were endemic in Northern Ireland.

 

[TheKnightWho]

It *can* be, but it doesn't have to look strange on a map to be gerrymandering.

Agreed. That's just a form of obvious gerrymandering, but the Tories stand to gain from this when they already have the lowest votes/seat of any party. I cannot fathom how this can be construed as fair when that is the case.

 

[radamfi]

The likelihood of a constituency to be Tory largely depends on the split between urban and rural. Generally speaking, fully urban seats are Labour with mixed or rural seats Tory. Until now, where possible urban areas are kept together so a typical town of about 80-100,000 population will be one seat on its own with its rural hinterland as a separate seat. In order to equalise populations it is no longer possible to keep some urban areas together, resulting in more mixed rural/urban seats which will favour the Tories.

It is up to the other parties to make an alliance at the next general election to ensure there is only one non-Tory party in each constituency. That alliance would then change the voting system immediately after the election so that a fair election could then be held.

 

[telstarbox]

Good luck getting UKIP to sign up to that one when they're taking votes off both sides...

 

[JamesRowden]

Is it really gerrymandering though if you're making all the seats the same size?

The simple way to create such equality would be to keep the existing constituencies and to have the vote of an MP in parliament weighted to equal the number of voters/population in its constituency. The MPs would be voting for the members of their constituency. This system would also be far simpler to update as populations change compared with the government's plan.

 

[telstarbox]

And then you'd have a situation where some MPs' votes were worth more than others which would have its own consequences. MPs representing larger constituencies would be under additional pressure to vote one way or the other.

 

[northwichcat]

Gerrymandering is where you create strangely shaped constituencies

One of the proposed new Cheshire ones will be a strange shape with it including both Northwich (removed from Weaver Vale) and Audlem.

 

[JamesRowden]

And then you'd have a situation where some MPs' votes were worth more than others which would have its own consequences. MPs representing larger constituencies would be under additional pressure to vote one way or the other.

The only pressure that an MP should be under is from their voters since it is the voters which they are representing in parliament.

The government's plan does allow the number of MPs to be decreased which is the only rational fair reason I can see for changing the borders rather than simply introducing the system I suggested.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Boundary Commission is an independent body with no agenda other than coming up with broadly equal sized constituencies- not sure why we get into conspiracy theories about gerrymandering.

Assuming we believe the Boundary Commission are "independent", in any case it doesn't matter as the terms of reference have been set by the Government. It is the Government who stands to benefit from this gerrymandering.

The changes in London and Sheffield, in particular, are as clear a case of gerrymandering as you'll ever get.

Gerrymandered constituencies don't have to be of irregular shapes, either. In many parts of the country, nudge a line a few miles and you end up switching a council ward of one demographic for a council ward of another.

 

[radamfi]

Good luck getting UKIP to sign up to that one when they're taking votes off both sides...

But they are in favour of PR.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

not sure why we get into conspiracy theories about gerrymandering.

We get this every time the boundaries are re-drawn; we always have and we always will.

 

[GrimsbyPacer]

It's the towns and areas that need representation from a local MP who only cares for that area, if more people live there, have a second MP for the same seat like Grimsby used to have.

The voting system in the Scottish parliament is what we need though, First Last The Poll is flawed and always will be unfair, leaving many unrepresented regardless of what MPs are supposed to do.

More MPs is surely more democratic, I know we don't have democracy in this country, but we should move towards it and give everyone a vote.

 

[MidnightFlyer]

... and give everyone a vote.

Define. I presume you mean 16 and 17 year olds, but I'm not sure who else from those currently exempt could be reasonably included.

 

[DarloRich]

It's the towns and areas that need representation from a local MP who only cares for that area, if more people live there, have a second MP for the same seat like Grimsby used to have.

The voting system in the Scottish parliament is what we need though, First Last The Poll is flawed and always will be unfair, leaving many unrepresented regardless of what MPs are supposed to do.

More MPs is surely more democratic, I know we don't have democracy in this country, but we should move towards it and give everyone a vote.

we had a chance to change the electoral system and voted not to. Your MP represents you regardless of the colour of his rosette. I have contacted my MP about several matters and despite never having voted for him have found his response to be entirely correct.