A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left. Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

From 650 to 600

Anthony Wells has an excellent post looking at where parliamentary seats will be cut if the Coalition proposal to reduce the Commons to 600 based on seats with a maximum 5% variation in size of electorate: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/2740

I thought I'd take Anthony's projections and make some rough guesses about the likely partisan impact:

The North East - no way of avoiding it, this will produce 3 fewer Lab seats
Yorkshire - probably 3 fewer Labour seats
North West - 1 fewer Tory seat in Cheshire, Lancashire I'm guessing it might be a Tory seat that goes too, Gtr Manchester and Cumbria would both lose a Lab seat, Merseyside loses 1 Lab seat but the second one might be a Tory loss on Wirral.
East Mids - 1 fewer Tory seat in Derbyshire, 1 fewer Lab one in Notts, 1 fewer Tory one in Beds/Northants
Eastern - 1 fewer Tory seat in Essex
West Mids - 1 fewer Tory seat in Staffs, 3 fewer - probably all Lab - in the old West Mids County, 1 fewer Tory seat in Shrops/Worcs/Herefordshire
SE - 1 fewer Tory seat in Kent
SW - 1 fewer Tory seat in Devon/Cornwall, 1 fewer LD seat in Avon/Somerset, 1 fewer Tory seat in Dorset/Wilts
London - the most difficult to predict but let's assume the 3 fewer seats takes out 2 Lab and 1 Con
NI - 2 fewer DUP, 1 fewer SF
Wales - 1 fewer each for Con, Plaid Cymru and Lab in Gwynned/Clwyd, guess of 6 fewer Lab, 1 fewer Con in mid and south Wales
Scotland - maybe 6 fewer Lab seats, 1 fewer SNP, 1 fewer LD

So that produces a net impact of:
Lab - 28 fewer MPs
Tory - 14 fewer MPs
LD - 2 fewer
DUP - 2 fewer
SF - 1 fewer
PC - 1 fewer
SNP - 1 fewer

I make that 49 so there's 1 missing somewhere, but the general picture is apparent!

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pedant's corner here: All your "lesses" should be "fewers" as you are referring to a specific number each time. (Slightly mystified as to why you have used both in the same post!)
charlesjfoster@gmail.com

1:51 pm, July 07, 2010

 
Blogger Luke Akehurst said...

Thanks - have corrected.

3:46 pm, July 07, 2010

 
Anonymous Rich said...

Did you expect anything else, you are going to get screwed over electoral reform.

11:25 pm, July 07, 2010

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think this is rather pessimistic. I don't see Labour losing by more than 3:2 and that is against the second worst Labour result in 90 years.

If there is a swing to labour we will gain seats, not lose them.

1:47 pm, July 09, 2010

 

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