New Constituencies for the United Kingdom – at Last?
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905818815195 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
DECEMBER 2018 • POLITICAL INSIGHT 27
New Constituencies for the
United Kingdom – at Last?
Reform of Britain’s electoral boundaries has been on the agenda for
years. But changing the boundaries has proved highly politically
sensitive. Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie and David Rossiter explore the
latest proposals for change and assess their likelihood for success.
This September, the Boundary
Commission finally delivered
to Parliament their report on
the future of the UK’s electoral
boundaries. Six-and-a-half years after they
first started to implement Parliament’s new
instructions on how to redraw the map of
British constituencies, the Commissions
recommended a number of changes, most
notably a new set of boundaries for a 600-
seat Commons.
This was the second time the
Commissions had worked on a new
set of constituency boundaries since
2011, applying rules drawn up by the
Conservatives in order to remove what they
identified as a major bias which operated
against them in application of the previous
rules for redistribution.
The Conservatives were left reeling after
their substantial defeat at the 1997 General
Election, but when that was repeated in
2001 they began to analyse why they had
performed so badly at both contests. With
31.7 per cent of the votes in 2001, they
won 166 seats, at a ratio of one seat to
every 50,347 votes; Labour won 412 seats
with 40.7 per cent of the votes, at a much
smaller ratio of one to every 26,031 votes
(see Figure 1). As the graph shows, this was
a new feature; at the three elections before
1997, the Conservatives had a better votes-
to-seats ratio than Labour, but the switch
in 1997 was a large one, very likely to cause
concern.
Labour advantage
Why that difference? Analysis by
Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie in 2004
showed that it was in part because, on
average, the seats won by Labour had
fewer registered electors than those
won by the Conservatives for three main
reasons. Firstly, the four British nations
were unequally represented in the House
Political Insight December 2018.indd 27 01/11/2018 09:02
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