Tag Archives: parliamentary boundaries

The Voice

BBC: ‘Lords boundary vote delayed ‘indefinitely”

By The Voice | Sat 3rd November 2012 - 1:10 pm

Mark Valladares reported here yesterday the ‘temporary withdrawal of the Election Registration and Administration Bill’. That temporary appears to have become a bit more permanent, according to the BBC:

A Lords vote to delay the review of constituency boundaries until 2018 has been postponed “indefinitely”. The vote on an amendment to delay the changes, tabled by Labour and signed by Lib Dem and other peers, was originally expected on Wednesday and postponed until Monday. But government sources say it has now been delayed to an unspecified date. It follows reports that Downing St was unaware Lib Dems supported the motion

…

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Stephen Tall

There’s zero chance of Clegg cutting any boundary deal with Tories over party funding

By Stephen Tall | Tue 14th August 2012 - 8:58 am

There’s zero chance of Nick Clegg cutting a deal with David Cameron on boundary changes in exchange for party reform — that’s the firm message I’ve got from some of those closest to the Lib Dem leader in response to my post last night, Nick Clegg should say no to any link between state funding and boundary changes.

It’s pretty rare for in-the-know Lib Dems to contact me unprompted about a story and to refute it in no uncertain terms: we’re just not that kind of a top-down party. So when I get various messages with outright denials that there’s …

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Mark Pack

The Conservative candidate dilemma

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th August 2012 - 11:50 am

Unsurprisingly, both the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have decided to go ahead with selecting candidates for the 2015 general election based on the current constituency boundaries.

Where does that leave the Conservatives? In rather a tricky position given David Cameron’s talk of still pressing on hoping to win the boundaries vote.

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Stephen Tall

Peter Kellner’s advice to the Lib Dems: ditch boundary changes, and get a new leader before 2015

By Stephen Tall | Tue 19th June 2012 - 5:15 pm

Chairman of polling firm YouGov, Peter Kellner, has a must-read article over at his firm’s site analysing the big challenges facing the Lib Dems at the next election. I know some Lib Dems might baulk at reading it: Mr Kellner, husband of Labour peer Baroness Ashton, is a self-declared non-Lib Dem, and YouGov’s daily polling consistently shows the party’s ratings to be significantly lower than other polling firms do. But get beyond those facts, and it’s clear we need to take on board the stark questions he has for the Lib Dems — even if we disagree with his …

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Mark Pack

The Parliamentary Boundary Commission for Scotland impresses…

By Mark Pack | Thu 20th October 2011 - 9:56 am

… with its rather nifty interactive online tool for examining the details of its draft proposals and commenting on them: https://consultation.scottishboundaries.gov.uk/.

The Scottish Boundary Commission has an advantage over the one for England in having a much better IT (GIS) system, courtesy of proper geo-coding of the electoral register to deal with previous reviews at other levels of election and the more unified handling of the electoral register across Scotland compared to England. That is why they are able to provide tools like this and also why the Commission has the level of accurate data which means they can split …

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Mark Pack

Boundary Commission for Scotland publishes its initial proposals

By Mark Pack | Fri 14th October 2011 - 11:50 am

As ever remember that (a) these proposals are draft and (b) many a person has made a fool of themselves with crude projected vote figure calculations.

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Stephen Tall

New constituency boundaries in Scotland: the impact on the Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Fri 14th October 2011 - 7:20 am

Last month it was the turn of English MPs to look nervously at the proposals of the Boundary Commission’s re-drawing of constituencies — Scotland’s turn has now come, with its national Boundary Commission yesterday publishing its proposals for public consultation.

The Financial Times has undertaken a quick reccy to work out what it might mean:

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Stephen Tall

The 7 Lib Dem MPs unaffected by the Boundary Commission proposals

By Stephen Tall | Tue 13th September 2011 - 6:20 pm

The last 24 hours’ political news has been dominated by the Boundary Commission for England’s proposals for new parliamentary constituencies — and in particular the reduction from 533 to 502 in accordance with the Coalition Agreement to reduce the size of the House of Commons.

I’m a self-confessed politics geek, so I find this stuff interesting. But I was surprised that it should be the lead news item on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning — does the public care as much as us anoraks? I doubt it.

True, some members of the public will have particular concerns about …

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Mark Pack

The most exciting part of the Parliamentary Boundary review proposals

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th September 2011 - 11:55 am

This is, colleagues in Scotland in particular note, an England only policy announcement:

We consider that the use of commas in existing constituency names is currently inconsistent and sometimes does not aid clarity. We have therefore taken a policy decision that commas will no longer be included in the names of constituencies.

Posted in Election law | Also tagged | 16 Comments
Mark Pack

Redrawing the Parliamentary boundaries: busting some myths

By Mark Pack | Wed 7th September 2011 - 8:45 am

With the Boundary Commission for England set to publish its provisional proposals for England’s Parliamentary constituencies next week, expect plenty of talk about how the process will then work with the initial consultation period, the public hearings and then the post-Christmas period for further written submissions. However, on past form there is likely to be quite a lot of mistakes or misinformation about how the review process works. The Guardian, for example, has been particularly poor when it has not been Julian Glover writing pieces.

So in an attempt to guide you through the information, here are some of the myths …

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Mark Pack

The perils of projecting the impact of boundary changes from previous election results

By Mark Pack | Mon 6th June 2011 - 10:35 pm

There’s been an understandable flurry of interest in The Guardian’s reported projections of what boundary changes might mean for the parties, but there are two major caveats about the nature of such projections.

From what I’ve seen, Lewis Baston (as I would expect) has done the numbers well, but not only do we not yet have the actual boundaries on which to make projections but also projections based on looking at previous election results have a decidedly ropey record when it comes to Liberal Democrats MPs.

That is because the party’s voting support is far less polarised demographically than that of …

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