12 January 2017
All the Prime Minister’s Numbers
Will Mrs May wait for the boundary commission?
by J.R.Thomas
Hands up all last week’s British readers who laughed at the absurdities of the American Presidential voting system. Ho ho ho, what sort of Electoral College is it that can turn the loser into the winner? Dear oh dear. Well, not so fast and funny, dear Brits; the UK system can be prone to odd outturns too; and if Mrs May has time to contemplate anything other than you-know-what, she might turn her brilliant mind to her own key electoral figures, starting with a little history.
In 1951 Churchill returned triumphantly to power after his unexpected 1945 rejection by the electors in favour of the Labour Party led by Clement Attlee. (1945 was, incidentally, the first time opinion polling was widely used during a general election campaign. Guess what? No, no, the pollsters got it right – but throughout the campaign nobody, not even the Labour Party, believed them). In 1950 Attlee held on to office by a much reduced majority, just five seats, but with the opinion polls in the autumn of the following year showing recovering support for Labour, he decided to hold a further general election in October 1951. The surprise result, a Conservative victory, giving the 77 year old Winston an effective majority of twenty one, was widely seen as a rejection of control and austerity, a kick back by an electorate shattered and confused by too much change over too short a time. Except they didn’t: Attlee and the Labour Party were supported by a fraction under fourteen million voters, with the Tories three hundred thousand behind. But the constituency system and the collapse of the Liberal Party gave Churchill that all important working majority in the Commons. In 1974, the freakish result went the other way. Edward Heath and the Conservatives asked “Who runs Britain; the Government or the coal miners union?” The result looked as though the electors thought that the answer should be the miners – but in reality Heath had won the popular vote, by a majority of two hundred and thirty thousand votes. But the system failed to deliver the Commons seats he needed – he was four less than Labour, and twenty three less than the hastily assembled Lib/Lab coalition formed by Harold Wilson and Jeremy Thorpe. Heath was out. In October Wilson asked the electorate to vote again – this time he had a million votes more than Heath – but that produced him a majority of just three.
There is no Electoral College to cause trouble in the United Kingdom of course. The distortion in the British system arises from the same fundamental problem though, which is that some constituencies are much larger than others – so some votes matter much more than others, especially those of swing voters in marginal seats, who have a much greater impact on the result. For most of the last eighty years and more that has been to the disadvantage of the Conservatives. The long term movement of the population has been from the dense inner cities (Stepney, we mean, not Belgravia) and industrial areas to green suburbia. Those old residential areas tend to be safe Labour whilst the new utopias are Conservative. The voters who move tend to be more likely to vote Conservative rather than Labour. The effect of this is twofold. Firstly, that all seats become safer and less marginal, a sort of ethnic cleansing by political affiliation – and secondly, that Labour seats are much smaller than Tory ones, half the number of voters in a couple of extreme cases, which means Labour is over-represented in the Commons.
Which brings us to that mysterious quango called the Boundary Commission – there are in fact, four, one for each major bit of the Kingdom, made up mainly, but not entirely, of lawyers. The Boundary Commission is entirely apolitical and periodically proposes, consults upon, and in due course implements, updating of the constituency boundaries. This is not just a process of making sure they are all about the same size, but also tweaking for homogeneity and for physical size – a constituency made up of the western outer Glasgow suburbs and the southern Outer Hebrides might work in terms of numbers but would be remarkably diverse and farflung, and difficult, impossible, to represent.
Population movements tend to be slow but certain, so, although the Boundary Commission has had several attempts at making (for example) more but smaller Home Counties seats and less but bigger east London seats, the problem reappears twenty or thirty years on, and has to be tackled again. One solution, popular with politicians who worry about losing their mandates to sit for safe seats, has been to create extra constituencies. That has caused seat inflation so that the House of Commons now has 650 members – more seats to represent than there are seats to sit in. The last review, in 2011, proposed reducing the number of seats to 600, popular with a D. Cameron, then resident in Downing Street, but unpopular with some of his colleagues, foreseeing a game of taking the political chairs away. In the event nothing happened, thanks to coalition politics, but the review published in September last year renews the recommendation.
The Commission is now in the consultation phase and will publish its final proposals in 2018, with the intention that they will be implemented immediately – or at least before the fixed term general election date in May 2020. That should be high on Mrs May’s to do list when she has dealt with one or two other pressing matters – she has the majority to carry it through the Commons and her party will be the net beneficiary in normal times by around twenty seats, based on the results from the last election. That is in itself a big help with party management matters, enabling winnable seats to be found for all those eager thrusters on her back benches – and the older more mature types on the front – who might otherwise be scrambling for new electors.
Theoretically this should all be an easy win for Mrs M, but the Boundary Commission has to proceed at a stately pace of consultation and publishing its conclusions and making recommendations before the changes will actually be implemented. Change is not always a well appreciated concept at local level, as bits of the electorate finds itself transferred to, maybe, the not quite so posh constituency next door, or loses a long standing and popular MP. And it is not appreciated by the Labour Party, which will be the loser; or by the LibDem’s who don’t like the whole system anyway, and get nervous about existing seats being broken up, the LibDem system being based on localism rather than a big campaigning national party organisation. So all these disgruntled types will be only too happy to hold things up; and if Mrs May holds an early general election, not only does she have to get the Fixed-Term Parliament Act amended first, (another of Mr Cameron’s giveaways for the 2010 coalition) she will be fighting on the old constituency boundaries too. Mrs May is a cautious politician, as is now obvious, and whilst she might think she cannot lose an election at the moment, she might observe the state of the world and have nightmares that maybe she could.
Theresa is not Hillary, by any means, but that lady’s sudden and unexpected demise must be a warning to all politicians who think they have it in the bag. The populus might yet decide Mr Corbyn is a cuddly allotment keeper who might bring peace, fairness, and fresh parsnips to all. So the chances are that Mrs May will keep on with what she has inherited, get the Brexit matter through Parliament, reunite her party, and get the Boundary Commission results sorted. But in these times, who knows what may turn up to disrupt such well laid plans?
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