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The Boundary changes – the winners and losers – politicalbetting.com
The Boundary changes – the winners and losers – politicalbetting.com
No doubt everybody will be looking first for their own seats and the chart above shows the changes by region.
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In Sussex, it has been necessary to propose one constituency that crosses the boundary between East Sussex and West Sussex. We have proposed that this constituency contain electors from three districts (Lewes, Mid Sussex, and Wealden), combining the towns of East Grinstead and Uckfield.
I predict a riot.
There’s also a big change for Guildford as it exchanges its rural part to the south for part of what was the Mole Valley constituency.
The Cornish won their argument against sharing an MP with Devon, looks like the green ink Angry from St Austell letters worked...
You could easily claim John O'Groats is a British citizen and lives in your basement.
Should the authorities come around to check (they won't), then you just tell them he was a lodger who moved out.
There is massive room for electoral fraud, through adding fictitious names to the electoral register, or through postal voting.
It always seems strange to me that the government spends a lot of time clamping down on fraud that largely doesn't exist (personation) rather that on massively more exploitable issues - like inventing fictitious people or postal vote harvesting.
The days when you could put your children or pets down and get them registered because nobody ever cross-checked are long gone.
The days when you could put your children or pets down and get them registered because nobody ever cross-checked are long gone.
Council tax in particular picks up when electors change in a property (matter of days in a Manchester property I owned)...
Indeed the proposals for central north London are bizarre - look at “Kentish Town and Bloomsbury” - from the top of Hampstead Heath at Kenwood down to just short of Covent Garden.
And the biggest insult of all - neither the words Hampstead (apart from ‘West Hampstead - which for NW3 heaps insult on insult!) nor Highgate figure in any constituency name at all. I put money on those boundaries and titles not surviving the consultation!
("test" does not count - creativity required from OGH !)
The biggest change appears to be the splitting up of the Cities of London and Westminster.
During my 2001 general election tour of Britain, was tootling along though southern England on polling day, and stopped at a poll site in the (then) Devizes constituency, and chatted for about a half hour with the woman on duty. Only other person who came in while I was there, was a cop who was making his rounds of local polling locations.
Then the morning after in London, was hanging outside of Tory Central Office for a bit, when I spotted Michael Ancram, who was (at that time) MP for . . . wait for it . . . Devizes.
And now it's gone! Yet another victim of COVID, BREXIT & UFO/UAPs
In Washington State, the legislature can make small tweaks to the plans for congressional (10) and legislative (49) districts drafted by the state redistricting commission. Which they've done in the past, in a very minor way.
Which in addition to giving hitherto unrepresented British subjects a voice in the Mother of Parliaments, can be an instrument for resolving ticklish international disputes.
For example, negotiate joint sovereignty agreement with Republic of Ireland re: Rockall. Then use this connection to establish an organic guano industry that can in tern be the linchpin for resolving thorny issues ranging from the Irish Border to the Offside Rule.
Especially the way they blithely describe Stone as ‘what’s left when we’ve sorted everything else even though it makes no sense.’
Instead of three straight forward constituencies at present there will now be:
- One constituency wholly within the Borough
- Four constituencies consisting of part of Barnet and part of another Borough
The four other Boroughs which combine with Barnet are:
Enfield
Harringey
Harrow
Brent
It’s always funny to see the reaction of the MPs to boundary change proposals. This one isn’t quite the bunfight that a reduction to 600 would have given us, although there will be some safe seats that become somewhat more marginal.
At least they are drawn up by an independent committee, and not by the politicians themselves as happens in several US states.
Not sure Cirencester and Malmesbury is going to be well received either. Is it normal for district capitals to be in different constituencies from their district?
There are going to be endless complaints, for sure, whilst people stare at their individual tree rather than the overall wood.
And which is the thing everyone is about to ignore
I suspect MPs will be a bit less forgiving than teachers usually are though.
The the usual stupid boundaries syndrome - City of Durham no longer contains half of the city which is split into three...
The increasing absurdities in the seats proposed demonstrate the problem in the brief - equal seat sizes. As a guide and a principle it is correct, but it can't be applied arbitrarily. The unfairness isn't one seat being 10k bigger than its neighbour, it is in the FPTP system.
Our MPs exist to represent the area and their people. Very difficult to do that when the area is an arbitrary line division that smashes through a town. We need to have better coordination of services and areas, not smashing imaginary lines through Durham or Gloucester or Middleton or Highgate.
Three rather mangy cows
A dachshund named Colin
A small hen in its late 40s
One actual human being who is the sole voter with the right to cast 16,472 votes
I mean ... look ... the system is flawed. We know that. Sir Cleggy had his chance properly to reform the voting system but decided corruption and selling his soul to the devil was a better option for him and the LibDems.
Every time you tinker with an imperfect, many would say broken, system it only makes it look worse.
https://www.cordings.co.uk/menswear
Squareroot was making a valid and good point.
My old town of Thornaby has been part of Middlesbrough and part of Stockton from a constituency perspective. Now it will be both - one ward stays with a redrawn Stockton west, two go to Middlesbrough. Which means the border runs literally through the town centre. No chance of anything getting done ever again.
Want to bring in the fairness and equality that the EC were tasked with? Replace FPTP.
Designed so the MPs can’t vote it down at the end of the process, which might encourage them to be more constructive in their criticisms.
turns out Boris Johnson’s intention to build his new trade yacht in the UK is set to fall foul of a World Trade Organization agreement struck by his own government last year
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1402140834938732550?s=20
"Plan to build UK trade ship will break WTO agreement, warn experts"
"But while Number 10 has announced its “intention” to build the as yet unnamed ship in the UK, this would breach an agreement that Britain signed up to only eight months ago.
Ministers failed to exclude the construction of civilian ships from the list of contracts that must be opened to global competition when it signed the WTO “government procurement agreement” (GPA) covering 48 countries last October."
"Liz Truss, trade secretary, boasted in October that the GPA would allow British companies to keep bidding for public sector contracts around the world worth £1.3tr a year. Likewise, she said, overseas groups would be able to continue to bid for UK public sector contracts, “delivering better value for UK taxpayers”.
But that could frustrate the government’s attempts to use a “Buy British” approach to building the new yacht. Item 47 of annex 4 of the UK schedule of the GPA explicitly says the procurement of “ships, boats and floating structures, except warships” must be advertised internationally and awarded without discrimination."
https://www.ft.com/content/c77b7aa1-cebc-47c6-a04a-d21eef2d1d38#comments-anchor
They truly are dumb bastards.
Could it be that the UK can't negotiate for shit?
You make a big claim about MP representation, which I'll come back to, but it's obviously not good for democracy to have some MPs voted in by 50,000 constituents and others by 140,000. As well as clearly over-burdening some MPs compared to others, that can lead to huge problems on a national scale which is worse for democracy.
I'm going to be controversial here in terms of a site like this but I suspect that constituency affiliation is vastly overrated. I've never written to my MP about anything and I suspect the number of constituents who actually go to see an MP about something is fewer than 1% of the population.
For some areas there may be great pride in their local constituency boundaries but I suspect you're clinging on to something which, if it ever did exist, was an awfully long time ago.
The purpose of the old flexibility clause for community ties is that you could resolve this by letting through one seat in the sub-region that was a tad over- or under- the strict limits of the range, to avoid having to make unnecessary knock on changes around the rest of the area.
As soon as you take the discretionary flexibility away, you are forced down paths where some areas are guaranteed to have to suffer dogs dinners, as we can see this morning.
Given that electoral registration, which provides the data, is itself not fully scientific - missing out some people and double registering many others (some by intention, like students), holding to rigid inflexible limits isn’t really justifiable.
We've all got cars, travel all over the place and vote for Boris against evil Corbyn.
I'll put my more sanguine post another way. No one gives a shit which constituency they're in.
It's the MPs who will kick off about this. And political anoraks. No one else will care.
An MP is not a Council they don't need to get stuff done unilaterally for a town. They need to represent their constituents and they can do that whether it's one, two or three MPs across a town.
Trying to blame the other MP doesn't achieve anything when a constituent is demanding answers from their local MP and determining who to vote for next time.
I can see it being popular with the Admiral of cocktails and the Commodore of canapés.
Military vessels are exempt
Its a military vessel to be staffed by the Royal Navy. Even if its to be used for generating trade.
I fully expect this vessel to go ahead and to be built, I expect locally by Cammell Laird. Though others might expect their own local area to get it instead.
We are currently operating off a 2001 census. It is absurd. The government should do the minimum consultation to stop legal impediments and then push this through. We also need to make sure that we never end up with these kinds of delays again. It is undemocratic, much more so than some town being split in 2.
Going back to my old town as an example - and there are worse ones that have already been flagged by others. Thornaby has enough of a struggle to be properly represented on Stockton council. Having an MP who knows where it is (Wharton didn't have a clue, Williamsd and Vickers are both excellent on that front) is critical.
Post review the town gets split in two. The poorer wards lump into Middlesbrough who frankly have their own problems. The richer ward goes to Stockton West. Neither will focus much on anyone's radar, now will there be a voice standing up in parliament able to represent the tow or its considerable issues.
There had to be consideration for effective representation. Setting the focus solely on number of voters was wrong.
- Equal population-sized constituencies
- One MP per constituency
Pick two.
As a country, we've gone for numbers 2 and 3, and we try to pretend we go for number 1 as well, despite being as convincing as a puppy next to a big poo on the floor trying to look completely innocent.
We could validly go with a system starting at Land's End and counting population inwards, cutting it off down the middle of a street if necessary, and iterating to the next seat. Forget the regular pretence that actually Reading North and some villages and Reading South and some other villages were a natural community but that some population growth in Slough means that actually NOW Reading West and some villages is a natural community instead, as well as Reading East and some villages.
It'd be gratifying for constituencies to have some more honest names like "Abingdon and the bits of Oxfordshire left over from the other seats" so we don't have to try to handwave justify things.
https://twitter.com/jonbernhardt/status/1402079908633919490?s=21
I suspect circa £50m in pre planning will be swallowed up before the whole affair is shelved.Although in the grand scheme of Johnson's grandiose vanity projects, that will be money more wisely spent than if the project is completed.
Of course scrapping it and going to STV or some such would be the 'fairest' idea. But this is not what we are offered. We are offered a choice between FPTP on very out of date boundaries or more up to date boundaries.
Obviously the more level numbers of constituents per constituency are better than previous.
Maybe we can have one MP for every town or city no matter the size. So Thornaby gets one MP, as does Warrington, as does Liverpool.
Be great for the Tories that, not so much for democracy.
Although my seat, Newcastle upon Tyne North, could now be a marginal.
Just heard Burley on Sky say that Whitty and Vallance briefed the government yesterday suggesting it is 'grim'
To be honest I have not heard them say that and does anyone challenge Burley's sources