this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
18 points (95.0% liked)

UK Politics

3100 readers
249 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
all 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

The Labour vote share in my already Labour stronghold has increased? What the fuck? This isn't how it's supposed to work. I was told this was an evil plan by the Tories and the Electoral Commission. FFS!

Jokes aside, my constituency has and always will be Labour by some margin. This has increased it at the expense of Green and LidDem votes. Interestingly the Tory share has also increased but not by as much as Labour.

What is the word for Gerrymandering when it benefits / costs all parties uniformly in the same way according to well understood population statistics?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

That's exactly what gerrymandering looks like, though - group all the labour votes into one weirdly shaped constituency and leave the other 10 in the area solid blue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The Labour vote share in my already Labour stronghold has increased? What the fuck? This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. I was told this was an evil plan by the Tories and the Electoral Commission. FFS!

I am not making any comment on how disreputable these changes are but what you're seeing is exactly what you'd expect if the Tories were trying to load the dice. Gerrymandering can't disappear votes. It has to pack as many opposition votes as possible into as few constituencies as possible, leaving narrow wins for the gerrymanderer in all the remaining ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

They analysis shows that, were the last election fought on the new constituency boundaries, the Conservative majority would be 14 seats larger. It also reveals that the swing to Labour required for the party to achieve an overall majority increases by 0.7 percentage points from 12.0 to 12.7.

So this is less representative. However, you'd be hard pushed to find anything that really looks like clear gerrymandering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

All those additional votes come from areas that were labour but by a smaller margin, meaning they are likely to be Tory next election. Think about it.

Combined with the new photo id law and you have classical voter disenfranchisement.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The next general election in the UK will be fought across 650 new constituencies after boundary changes were approved by parliament.

The research offers people an idea of which parties are competitive in their new constituency, allowing them to consider options for tactical voting.

Seventy-six seats, including for example Clacton, have been extended beyond their current boundaries to ensure they meet the minimum electoral threshold.

Calculations for Scotland by Prof David Denver and those for Northern Ireland by Nicholas Whyte.

They analysis shows that, were the last election fought on the new constituency boundaries, the Conservative majority would be 14 seats bigger.

It also reveals that that the swing to Labour required for the party to achieve an overall majority increases by 0.7 percentage points from 12.0 to 12.7.


The original article contains 354 words, the summary contains 129 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] throw4w4y5 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

my area was almost half tory, and the new area is still almost half tory but instead of a strong labour opposition, it’s now split with lib dem and green party.

so a win for the tories i guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah, people really need to check this map amd vote tactically.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I was gonna vote Green but they're so non-existant in my constituency I may vote Lib Dem who are 4th. It's a Labour safe seat so it's not handing it to the Tories to vote my conscience.

I'm Green economically but Lib Dem socially. Since Lib Dems are higher I'll put my vote there.