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One of the big political developments that could have a huge impact on the outcome of the next general election will come in the next two or three months when the final report of the Boundaries Commission comes out.
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GE 2017:
Seats where either Con or Lab scored 50-60% of the vote:
Con 155
Lab 107
Seats where either Con or Lab scored 60-70% of the vote:
Con 88
Lab 78
Seats where either Con or Lab scored 70-80% of the vote:
Con 0
Lab 27
Seats where either Con or Lab scored over 80%+ of the vote:
Con 0
Lab 10
There are no possible FPTP boundaries that wouldn't give Labour problems while their vote is astonishingly badly distributed. Having said that, if they took back a good number of the Scottish seats that the SNP quite narrowly hold over them then they'd make things look considerably less uneven in relation to the Conservatives.
Convinced Labour had an unfair advantage that gave it more seats per vote -- which was in fact mainly due to differential turnout -- CCHQ borrowed a cunning plan from the American Republican Party.
Step 1: purge electoral rolls. Erase people who have left; move to individual registration to make it just a little bit harder for new voters to register. This will mainly impact urban areas with fleeting and mobile populations. and university towns for the same reason. Get rid of the Brown family, which moved out last year, and hope the Smith family which just moved in has not yet registered. The aim is not to lose actual voters (although that would be a nice bonus) but to reduce the size of the rolls.
Step 2: redraw constituency boundaries based on the new rolls. Not on populations but on registered voters. Thanks to step 1, towns with transient populations will have smaller rolls, fewer registered voters, than their populations would suggest.
Step 3: reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. Tell the papers some old guff about reducing the cost of parliament and trust them not to ask how much the hundreds of new Tory peers will cost. The real reason is this forces every constituency to be re-evaluated. In blunt party terms, regions that tend towards Labour will qualify for fewer constituencies. This means that in future, there will be fewer Labour MPs.
So that's the plan: make Labour-leaning areas seem smaller than they really are, then redraw all the constituency boundaries.
So how did it lead to Brexit? Well, the young and transient Labour-leaning voters were also more likely to vote Remain.
Eventually, the problem dawned on Downing Street that it was about to be hoist by its own petard, so the government launched a voter registration drive. It even, to the outrage of Leave campaigners, extended the deadline to register. Two million voters were registered in the last couple of months.
Too late. The brilliant wheeze that was to have led to Cameron's ten or fifteen year reign before handing over to George Osborne led directly to losing the referendum and their banishment from Downing Street.
Labour are suffering from the same problem as the US Democrats, that they’re racking up huge majorities in safe inner-city seats but losing out in more marginal areas.
The most significant statistic in the poll is that Remain now leads Leave (hard and soft combined) by 48% to 40%.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/angry-labour-antisemitism-ian-austin
I think this has been discussed before, but I can't remember the answer:
" redraw constituency boundaries based on the new rolls. Not on populations but on registered voters."
If you want to redraw constituency boundaries based on populations, on what basis do you get that up-to-date population data given a census is once every ten years?
55/35 ... 60/30 ...(I’m assuming around 10% DK) ?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/ohio-state-sexual-abuse-scandal-jim-jordan-implausibly-says-he-and-others-didnt-know.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45001916
Come to think of it, censuses might be a once-a-decade event but how often are boundaries reviewed?
If you're proposing an alternative system to the electoral roll, you must have a clear idea of what you want so we can critique it.
And that is why Brexit won.
I'd love a answer to this, as I can't see how constituency boundaries could currently be based on a population-based system (and especially one that might not have similar disadvantages to the current system).
BTW, I think you're being ridiculous to blame Brexit on the constituencies.
Mr. Smithson, you're not the only person who thought May might prove rather smarter than she is.
Naive averaging might have convinced Conservatives they were unfairly treated but more interesting is the method of gerrymandering -- taken from the Republican Party in the United States -- and that it inadvertently led to losing the Brexit referendum.
I'd rather see us go the other way, have MPs representing smaller constituencies and therefore hopefully being closer to the people they represent. Having a larger talent pool to choose from when it comes to Ministerial appointments, select committees etc. could also be a good thing.
This is why the government, once it belatedly realised the implications of what it had done, set out on a registration drive which added two million voters in just a few weeks. It even passed emergency legislation to extend the registration deadline, which led to Leave threatening judicial review.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36486369
This is not the USA where the boundaries are drawn up by the parties for their own advantage, the impartial Boundaries Commission is responsible for the lines and they don’t care too much for what politicians think about their approach.
The change to IVR was long overdue, and came as a result of a number of court cases, one of which famously resulted in a judge describing the system as like “a banana republic” so endemic was the fraud perpetuated. Registration can be done online and takes only a couple of minutes, it’s not as if people have to travel to an office that’s only open for an hour every other Thursday.
The plan was for the 600 seat boundaries to be done before the IVR change, but due to coalition problems that never happened so we now have them the other way around.
I'm also far far from convinced it had anything to do with Leave winning the Brexit referendum.
Perhaps, rather than shaking your fist at the sun, you should start at first principles and come up with an alternative workable scheme?
But not many. Even double locked pensioners need to use healthcare.
The problem is in the range of views represented. In a country where a minority believe that any political party represents them, we need to move to a more proportionate system to allow for much greater diversity of voices heard.
As for your second paragraph, you might want to read the link you gave:
"It comes after the government website for registering voters failed just before Tuesday's original deadline."
So the emergency legislation and extension was because of a system crash, rather than some nefarious plan. I can imagine if they had not done so, you'd be complaining that the government stopped people from voting!
Anyone who has ever canvassed in an urban area will know how many register entries there used to be for people who had gone away, as well as some for people who shouldn't have been on the register in the first place.
Suppose Labour had the same idea. They could have required everyone over 70 to re-register. In time, the over-70s would do this so no harm done, right? Now put a comprehensive boundary review in place before they'd had time to re-register and Surrey would qualify for fewer MPs. What the Conservatives did was not aimed primarily at voter suppression but artificially reducing the apparent population (or number of registered voters) in Labour-leaning areas.
As for the connection with Brexit, the problem for the Remain side was the same "missing" voters tended to favour staying in the EU. That is why the government first launched and then extended its registration drive. That this drive added two million voters shows that at least that many were missing from the rolls beforehand. Downing Street knew that -- because that had been the plan all along.
What Labour needs to do to counter the Tories in rural and suburban seats is to establish appeal to older voters, or for tacit electoral pacts with the LDs to reappear. There can be surprising Lab strength in shire areas, but not enough to win. I am thinking of my own Harborough constituency where Lab got 30%, or Huntington which was about the same.
Leverage works both ways, and there is a tipping point around 40% where a lot of seats flip. After the 2015 LD obliteration, Lab are second in a large swathe of Shire England. Corbyn needs to improve appeal to just a few more of these voters to gain his majority.
I've never met or even seen my MP and I think that would be true of the vast majority of people I know. If you increase constituency sizes to 100k then that would exacerbate the problem further.
There are what 80-100 Ministerial jobs? So a parliament of 350 could basically mean 1/2 the governing party are Ministers... that doesn't seem optimal to me.
Don't normally bet on F1, but pleased I did this time...
"As for the connection with Brexit, the problem for the Remain side was the same "missing" voters tended to favour staying in the EU."
Is there evidence for that claim, and for the numbers thereof?
Reform hangs, as ever, on Labour, which should have kept its promise to sort this out last time. So long as Labour supports reform only when opposition (and, this time, not even then) then it is unlikely to happen.
In my view, an appropriate Labour response will be to pledge that when elected (which will happen sooner or later), we will ask the Boundary Commission to define boundaries in accordance with the best estimate by the census of the number of people in each area entitled to vote. That avoids skewing the system to constituencies with settled populations (which tend to be rural and Tory).
First preferences:
Remain - 54%
Deal - 15%
No Deal - 30%
Second preferences:
Remain - 59%
No Deal - 41%
You're right that IER favours settled areas (although this is in part because the old system inflated electorates in transient areas). You are wrong that the 40-seat Tory lead is because of IER. It is mostly because there are more Labour (or more correctly non-Tory) voters in safe Tory seats than there are Tory (non-Labour) voters in safe Labour seats. Hence the unfairness of FPTnP "wastes" more Labour votes than Tory ones.
But the whole system is rotten to its core and you should have sorted this out when you had the chance.
You make a good point about registration of foreign residents. With the possible exception of Ireland there shouldn’t be any discrimination based on nationality, so you’d be either a Citizen or a Resident. I’m guessing that EU law led to the current complexities in this area.
I wonder how much appetite there is for a Lib/Lab pact from the Labour side, although as you say in certain areas it would definitely be beneficial. My parents live quite near you, they recently moved one villlage and two miles down the road, and in doing so went from a Con/Lab marginal (Corby) to a safe Con seat (Rutland and Melton). It would certainly make sense for the Libs to stand aside in the former, and historically for Lab to stand aside in the latter - although they came second last year as the LDs collapsed.
https://www.gov.uk/know-when-you-can-leave-school
News from Westminister is that the Govt do have the votes for it.
And minority governments tend to make whips especially good at counting....
It’s really not gerrymandering.
That it excluded voters: the late registration drive added two million, suggesting at least two million should have been on there already.
That excluded voters tended to be support leave. We know from polls and results that Labour areas were more likely to vote Remain, as were younger people (more likely to be mobile and not registered) and educated people (more likely to be students and not registered).
That it cost the referendum: HMG thought so, hence the registration drive. Leave thought so, hence it opposed the registration drive. See earlier links or Shipman's book.
And if you hang on till Christmas, we can see what David Cameron says in his memoirs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutland_and_Melton_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
And we think we have problems with voter registration:
"Assam: Four million risk losing India citizenship"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-45002549
The changes favourable vis a vis the DUP probably carry it.
This is a nasty story, and it looks likely to go on for months.
The scary thing is the lack of support for Deal, 85% do not want it.
So you have zero evidence for your assertions, just hand-wavium to back up what you want to believe. Tories gerrymander. The EU vote was stolen by the gerrymandering.
They're both rubbish, and you have no evidence. You also have no solutions.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/anna-soubry-conservative-brexit-broxtowe-eu-nottinghamshire-john-doddy-a8423126.html
In any event, the only solution to the problem you complain about is PR. Are you willing to advocate that ?
There may have been some effect on the referendum, but I’m extremely sceptical that it tipped the balance.
http://www.crickcentre.org/blog/electoral-bias-in-the-uk-after-the-2015-general-election/
https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1023824997096345600
If (and that's a big if) this poll is typical, it looks entirely possible that at the crunch point the public would prefer to remain by a clear margin. That would make for some very interesting dynamics.
We need to recognise that both the main parties are arguing entirely from self interest, not principle, since the old loose registration system marginally favoured Labour.
The actual difference that a minor degree of under- or over-representation makes across the country by impacting on where boundaries are drawn is tiny, compared to the biases already hard-wired into the voting system by dint of its ignoring or "wasting" a majority of the votes that are cast.
https://twitter.com/LeslieCockburn/status/1023701334434959362
Of all of these I suspect the last is the largest effect and surely favours the Tories - in some English coastal towns the number of properties that are empty in the winter can be around 25%, many with their owners on the register, leading to such Tory-leaning seats being over-represented compared to their permanent populations.
But there might be, if it was clear enough early enough that public opinion had decisively shifted.
Your last point is wrong; boycotting a referendum wouldn't work in practice and would be ignored in principle.
A) Stall, hoping the trend will push more voters to Remain, setting up the conditions for another Ref?
C) Let ERG and Corbyn take us over the edge to an economic crash?
D) Resign and let some other bugger deal with it?