Media coverage of the Boundary Commission’s proposals for parliamentary constituency boundary charges in 2018 have focused on the fact that had the boundaries existed at the last general election, the Tories would have won a further 30 seats or so. The changes will at least remove the worst of the disparities in registered number voters per constituency, which gives far more democratic power to voters in constituencies with small voter numbers than voters in constituencies with large voter numbers.
Last December there were 105,448 registered voters in the Isle of Wight (currently one constituency, to be changed to two in 2018). Conversely, the Western Isles (one seat) had only 20,887 registered voters.
The BBC guide to the impact of the changes is here, and we’ll be carefully considering changes we might need to make to our 2020 general election strategy.
MPs will vote on the proposed changes in due course. Needless to say Jeremy Corbyn and his people are already calling the proposed changes ‘unfair’, a weasel word too often used by those on the Left.
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
I followed your BBC link with a shudder. I then saw their link to the boundary commission site and followed that instead. Their diversity info for those that applied for the assistant commissioner level vacancies, invited to interview for and appointed to illustrates the continuing public sector gynocentric bias.
From the website: http://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/assistant-commissioners-appointed-for-the-regions/
It can be seen that there were 118 female and 249 male applications. of these 16 females and 35 males were invited to interview (i.e 13.56% of females applying invited to interview and 14.05% of males applying invited to interview). Of those successful at interview and appointed 9 were female and 11 were male (i.e 56.25% of females interviewed were succesful and 31.4% of males interviewed were successful).
I believe that throughout the public sector such disparities exist and that is why we have county councils with 80% female, schools with 90% female, NHS 80% female staffing levels.