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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The planned new boundaries give CON 40 more seats than LAB for the same national vote shares

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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DecrepitJohnL

Cameron and Osborne's gerrymandering that led to Brexit. 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.

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.