Victory celebrations will be short-lived for the three winners of Thursday’s dramatic Commons byelections. With a general election due next year, new legislators do not have long to make their marks. For them, the fight to be re-elected starts immediately. For two of the three MPs, this will pose a big problem. Their newly won seats will disappear at the general election.
Britain’s parliamentary constituency boundaries have been unchanged for the last four general elections. Since 2010, two attempts at reviewing them anew have run into the sand. A third effort, begun in 2020, has now succeeded. Last month, the four boundary commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland submitted final decisions on the new boundaries. The new electoral maps will shortly be confirmed by the privy council.
The commissions have redrawn almost the entire political map of Britain. They have brought almost all electorates into line with a UK constituency “quota” of between 69,724 and 77,062 voters. As a result, only 65 of the 650 Westminster seats will be unchanged at the next election. All the others have been recast, marginally in some cases, more comprehensively in many others. Although five offshore island seats are exempted from the quota, the pre-devolution over-representation of Scotland and Wales at Westminster has now ended. The upshot is that England will gain 10 seats, while Wales will lose eight and Scotland two. Northern Ireland will stay the same.
Two of the bigger casualties in all this are the Somerton and Frome constituency in Somerset and that of Selby and Ainsty in Yorkshire, where two of this week’s byelections took place. The former will be carved into two: Glastonbury and Somerton, and neighbouring Frome and East Somerset (with a tiny transfer to Yeovil as well). Selby and Ainsty will be even more radically dismembered into four new seats, though most of its voters will remain in a new Selby constituency. Of this week’s three byelection seats, only Uxbridge and South Ruislip – or 91% of it – remains largely as it is today.
As in earlier reviews, the centre of electoral gravity has again gradually shifted from industrial cities (mostly Labour voting) to suburbs and towns (mostly Conservative). As the nature of work and settlement has changed, the national constituency map has changed too. In England, the east Midlands, the east, London, the south-east and the south-west will now have more seats than before. The north-west, the north-east and the West Midlands will have fewer, while Yorkshire will stay the same.
Population change is a sleepless process, so the electoral map certainly needs to be regularly updated. Rightly, the process for doing this is determinedly independent. The scope for electoral gerrymandering, US-style, is vanishingly small. But the changes reflect big socioeconomic and cultural shifts nevertheless. In some cases, urban as well as rural, the inflexibility of the quota creates electoral communities with very little other community connection. But that, too, may reflect something of the way we live now.
Initial estimates are that the review will benefit the Conservatives by between five and 10 seats, not all at the expense of Labour. Party campaign strategists must clearly adapt to that. This does not mean that their offers must be exclusively tailored to southern English suburban voters or voters in Tory marginals. But it does mean that it is impossible to ignore these voters. That truth must not be an excuse for caution in response to urgent national needs. The volatility revealed in this week’s byelections shows that voters and constituencies should never be stereotyped. It confirms instead that the current disaffected mood of Britain’s voters can be the seedbed of many opportunities.
