Mapping out the future

The next general election campaign starts here. It might feel a little early to be thinking about the 2015 poll – coalition ministers have only just settled in, after all – but the process that will ultimately decide which politicians end up in the next Parliament, and even which party ends up in power, is already underway.

The battle over Britain’s electoral map is about to begin. This autumn the Boundary Commissions of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland release their proposed changes, with Wales following in January 2012. Once these maps are published, politicians and their parties will engage in a frenzy of backroom plotting – and conflict.

It’ll be a strangely private kind of turmoil. MPs, wondering whether they’ll find themselves without a seat come 2015, will have to scrabble to get selected in preference to their parliamentary party colleagues if they want to survive. The political parties, wondering whether the changes will cost them the election, aren’t going to let individuals stand in their way.

We’ve had boundary reviews before, of course, but this one is different. The commissioners have the tricky task of cutting the number of seats from 650 to 600. “That’s going to be a big change,” says Tony Bellringer of the English Commission. “It makes it a more constrained process for us.”

Actually, it’s even more complicated than that. In previous reviews, the focus has been on preserving local ties and taking local geography into account. The commissioners will do their best to continue considering these factors. But the legislation is forcing them to make ‘equalising’ constituency sizes their number one priority. Each seat has to have between 72,810 and 80,473 voters, whatever it takes.

Only roughly 25 seats are expected to emerge completely unscathed. This is something of a leap into the unknown. The parties know that boundary changes aren’t going to win or lose the next election; it’s the politics which will ultimately decide the outcome. But when it comes down to what one strategist calls “squeaky-bum time”, as the new 301 target for a majority approaches on election night, every seat matters. As Mark Pack, the Lib Dem blogger who’s leading talks with the Boundary Commission for his party, puts it: “We’ll want to try and avoid situations after the election where we think, ‘If only that boundary was a bit different’.”

The parties will have the chance to have their say over the nitty-gritty of which seat goes where through a consultation process that is likely to take the next six months or so. Hearings will give all those interested a 12-week consultation window to offer their take on the original proposals. There’ll then be an extra four weeks for parties to rubbish the responses of their opponents who are angling for an alternative solution. The commissioners, having weighed up the pros and cons of each argument, will then make their decision.

All sides seem encouraged that the commissioners are taking these hearings seriously. “We genuinely do listen,” Bellringer insists. The Boundary Commission, for its part, is nervous that communities do make their views clear. “It is not unknown for the silent majority to agree and not say anything at the initial consultation stage, and then be surprised when revised proposals are made, based on the views of a vociferous minority,” Bellringer says. “We can only listen to what people are saying if they actually say it.”

In a bid to prepare themselves for the arguments to come, party strategists have spent the summer poring over maps covering the whole country, trying to work out what the likely conclusions of the review will be. Large parts of Britain will remain unchanged – shifting Tory voters from one rural seat to another, for example, really doesn’t make much of a difference – but London, the Midlands, the North West and Yorkshire and Humber could all face big changes. The parties will be doing everything they can to get their way in areas like the Midlands, which are especially rich in marginals.

Each party appears to be approaching the coming struggle with very distinct attitudes. The Liberal Democrats are likely to be keen on preserving the status quo in most cases, because they’re on the defensive. Their seats tend to be isolated, apart from a concentration in the South West. “As soon as you play around with the geography of their rural seats, you extend into solid Conservative hinterland,” says Stuart Wilks-Heeg of Democratic Audit, which has predicted that the Lib Dems will be the main losers in the change process. “It’s even worse in the north,” he adds. Lib Dem prospects in places like Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield are based on specific pockets, often student-based, of support. Outside these, “the Lib Dems just lose”.

For the Tories, it’s all about maximising the number of winnable marginals. Internal projections suggest that if 2010’s voting patterns were repeated again in 2015, under the new system they’d end up about ten MPs short of forming an overall majority. So the key is to maximise their number of notional seats, while looking for as many winnable marginals as possible.

Labour’s strategists appear more pragmatic. They’re preoccupied by the classic ‘sandwich vs doughnut’ question, where a town and its surrounding rural areas have enough voters to make up two seats.

Is it better to keep the town as one safe Labour seat, with two rural seats surrounding it, like a doughnut, or split the town in half and have two half-urban, half-rural marginals? The final decision will depend on a difficult judgement call by the party’s strategists, based on local circumstances.

Take Luton, for example, where two Labour MPs are isolated by a sea of blue in surrounding Bedfordshire. These two seats are too small to remain as they are, so one must extend out into the countryside, while the other takes some of its safe Labour wards.

The Tories believe there are two equally viable options on offer. If Luton North spreads into nearby built-up areas like Dunstable, Kelvin Hopkins’ safe seat could become very marginal. Instead of two safe Labour seats, the Tories would have the prospect of two very winnable constituencies.

The alternative is Luton South expanding southwards into leafy Hertfordshire, possibly even taking in as many as 20,000 voters from extremely middle-class Harpenden. If that happens, Luton South becomes a safe Tory seat, while Luton North becomes an even safer Labour one.

Two winnable marginals, or one safe gain: which will the Tories prefer? If they back the “banker”, as one local campaigner puts it, Luton South’s new MP, Gavin Shuker, could find his fledgling parliamentary career cut short in 2015. He’s already pledged to defend his seat, regardless.

Shuker believes he can fight off the Tories if they decide to go for the ‘two marginals’ solution, so his focus is on thwarting the potential Tory-backed redesign of his seat. How he shapes his arguments reflects the arguments we can expect to hear across the country in the coming months.

“I’ve always believed MPs should represent real places,” he says. “Grouping together two places as diverse as Harpenden and Luton South doesn’t appeal to me massively – and I suspect it won’t appeal to residents, either.”

Deprived Luton and affluent Harpenden couldn’t be more different. Under the Boundary Commission’s rules, there’s a chance Shuker’s ‘local ties’ point might make a difference. “We’re very well aware that political parties will be thinking what’s to their best advantage,” Bellringer says. “Our task is to ask ourselves: what is the best way to take into account the views of the whole community?”

Shuker could seek to harness Harpenden’s desire to avoid being associated with Luton. The problem is that, even if he gets his way, no solution is ideal. If Luton ends up with two marginal seats, as Labour might prefer, it’ll be much harder for them to win back Bedford in 2015.

This reflects an unfortunate truth: even the smallest bit of tinkering on one part of the map has a knock-on effect. Ironically, the minister behind the changes, Mark Harper, is affected by this. His Forest of Dean seat needs to find an extra ward from somewhere. The easiest approach would be to annex one from Gloucester – but, alas, this happens to be the ward containing the historic town centre. ‘Local ties’ arguments would probably block this. The Tories expect they’ll have to take a ward from another seat, which will then need to take a ward from a third constituency, which will then have to take a ward from... you get the idea.

The Boundary Commissions, dealing with these headaches too, are more likely to be won over by an argument that doesn’t treat a single seat in isolation. Proposing different groupings of local authorities which “ultimately offer a better outcome at the granular level of constituencies”, as Bellringer puts it, stand a decent chance of success. This approach will certainly be needed to deal with one of the biggest headaches of all – Stockport. Its ward sizes are rather awkward, averaging around 10,000 people. Adding one won’t be enough. Adding two will push the electorate over the upper limit. Something has got to give.

So the bigger picture, which Labour says is “particularly complicated”, comes into play. Where should those extra voters come from? Adding 15,000 voters from “unbelievably Conservative” Cheshire would only help the Tories’ prospects. Labour would prefer to make up the numbers from Manchester. Stockport Borough Council is part of Greater Manchester, after all – yet another ‘local ties’ argument we can expect to crop up during the hearings process.

Whether Luton, the Forest of Dean, Stockport or wherever, it’s not just the parties that will be calculating their best course of action. MPs, too, are going to have to deal with the consequences of radically new constituency boundaries up and down the country. The areas of intensely complex change will see the most acute conflict between parties and their MPs.

Every MP will be watching the way the parties’ strategy games play out in their region. Many will feel intensely nervous. “Standing for election and winning a seat is difficult enough anyway,” one MP’s campaign manager says. “Dealing with all these other issues is tough, believe me.”
The first goal has to be winning reselection. If a seat is split into two or even three, there’s no guarantee the incumbent MP will get first pick of which to run in. In some cases, they may have to take on MPs from their own party who had previously been their neighbour, creating the prospect of some grim behind-the-scenes struggles for selection.

Even high profile MPs are vulnerable. Ed Balls and Hilary Benn’s seats look threatened, and north of the border Charles Kennedy and Danny Alexander’s constituencies are expected largely to be merged. The Stockport changes could even affect chancellor George Osborne’s Tatton seat. No one, it seems, is safe.

Even when they do win their own party’s selection, they still won’t be protected from the impact of the boundaries shake-up. MPs are accustomed to basking in the glow of incumbency, using their status to boost their re-election hopes. Not in 2015. Many MPs will find themselves robbed of that advantage, as they’re forced to take on another Westminster politician for a single seat.

Some may be tempted to ignore their constituents, according to Labour backbencher Ian Lavery, whose north-eastern seat may end up being split three ways. “I was elected to represent Wansbeck constituency for a parliamentary term,” he says. “I can understand some people might be taking their eye off the ball, but I’ll not be one of those.”

There are strict rules about encroaching on another MP’s patch when it comes to casework, but that might not be enough to stop it happening. “It’s going to be messy,” says Plaid MP Jonathan Edwards.

What happens when an MP tells a voter he won’t be able to help them find a house, but the other candidate assures them she would have been able to? “People are going to get really touchy and angry,” Edwards predicts.

One person who knows about the frustrations of running against another sitting MP is Labour’s Dawn Butler, who lost her seat to Lib Dem Sarah Teather last year.

That race was thought to be the only instance when two sitting MPs ran together in the 2010 campaign, so she has an unusual insight into the problems this peculiar situation can pose.

Butler wants to see there being a general mailout to all constituents affected, letting them know about the changes. Confused voters still come up to her, thinking she’s their MP. “I basically played by the rules,” Butler says. “I think MPs will find it increasingly difficult to do that when their opponent doesn’t.”

Labour politicians like Butler have no choice but to comply with the rules, but they’re still feeling bruised that the changes went through at all. The reduction in the number of MPs to 600, an arbitrary number, continues to cause resentment. “We still think this is a very bad Act of Parliament,” says Willy Bach, one of the filibustering opposition peers who nearly scuppered the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act earlier this year. Worst of all, he says, it “takes no account of the many millions who are not on the register at all”.

Chairman of the Commons political and constitutional reform committee Graham Allen agrees. He’s dubious whether this sort of constitutional change being pushed through for the sole purpose of holding a government together is legitimate. “Had Robert Mugabe decided to cut the number of MPs arbitrarily, every editorial in the land would have been jumping up and down,” he says. “The coalition has undermined, sadly, its own case for democratic reform.”

The perils of the boundary redrawing process might open the eyes of previously loyal government backbenchers, who might realise that this isn’t going to be the last time this happens. The experts think the enormous upheaval we’re seeing this time around will be repeated before every general election in the future.

“The fluctuation in just one year makes an enormous difference,” Wilks-Heeg explains. He predicts that, over a five-year period, constituency boundaries will becomes very fluid. “Once this has been done a couple of times, I think MPs might start to rebel against these rules.”
Allen thinks MPs might remember their consciences on constitutional grounds after the next election. Any kind of change that is politically motivated eventually leads to “resentment and antagonism”, he says.

The reckoning could come earlier than that. All this resentment, all these frustrations, pose a real threat to the entire process.
The legislation may have been passed, but the Boundary Commission’s final changes won’t be a certainty for the 2015 election until they’re voted through by the Commons. Parliamentary approval must be secured by October 2013.

“Why would a Lib Dem MP vote for these proposals?” Edwards wonders. “All the evidence suggests they’re going to be hit hard. Like all the small parties, their politics is largely based on incumbency – where we win, we hold.”

One Tory analyst closely connected to the process thinks this vote is the biggest threat to the coalition going the full five-year distance. The crunch vote will come at a time when British politics is starting to look towards the next election, he argues. The value of staying in power will be diminishing by the hour. Why will MPs abandoned by their party, who haven’t been found a seat, voluntarily sign their own political death warrant?
‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’ is a phrase we might find spilling again and again from the mouths of rebels in a couple of years’ time.