By Sam Macrory - 31st January 2011
With 50 fewer seats up for grabs at the next election, MPs – many of whom have just got their foot in the door – will soon be contemplating the exit. Some will go kicking and screaming, some more willingly, but all will live in fear of their constituency disappearing from the electoral map. Sam Macrory investigates.
MPs beware. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, a ‘known unknown’ will soon be heading in your direction – and the threat it poses to your caree prospects could be terminal.
Assuming compromise can be reached, then the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill should soon pass through the House of Lords, ensuring that the legislation remains on course to hit the statute book in time for the planned referendum on electoral reform to go ahead on May 5. At the same time, the government’s plans to equalise constituency size and cut the number of MPs down to 600 will now move up a gear. Peers and MPs have been busily wrestling over its financial implications, arguing over how the number 600 was settled on, and debating what effect the drop in number would have on parliamentary accountability.
But a rather more human consequence of the bill will soon be played out in the Palace of Westminster. In the last few months, nearly every regional paper has run a story tweaked for their local audience: “Shropshire/East Yorkshire/Manchester could lose MP in boundary shake up/review,” and when asked about their political ambitions in interviews for this magazine, MPs jokingly suggest that they may not even have a constituency to fight in 2015.
With the bill nearing completion, the independent Boundary Commission wonks will be unfolding their maps and sharpening their pencils. “One would like to think that they would have some regard for existing constituencies, and not be totally gung-ho about redrawing the map,” one MP says, but his self-deprecating colleagues will soon stop smiling as sub-editors swap “could” for “will” in their headlines.
Those MPs who earlier signed their own death warrant, perhaps in the hope that their Lordly colleagues would amend the bill and bale them out, can now start to sweat. Constituencies will vanish, and with them one seventh of the MPs currently on the parliamentary payroll.
The maths hurt: 650 into 600 does not comfortably go. Under the bill’s initial proposals, 598 seats – the remote Scottish constituencies of Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles were ruled exempt – will be redrawn so that all are within five per cent of the designated average of 76,000 registered electors per constituency. Recent research suggests that England will lose 30 constituencies, Wales 10, Northern Ireland three, and Scotland seven. The North West, with a cutback of seven seats from its current tally of 75, will be worst-hit, with the West Midlands losing five from 59, and Yorkshire four from 54. MPs who have spent years building constituency bases will, in the word of one, find themselves “back on square minus-one”.
Redrawing of boundary borders has long been a fact of parliamentary life. The 2010 election boundary changes saw the equivalent of 17 constituencies replaced. But this time, when the music stops more will be without a seat.
Labour’s Angela Smith lost her Basildon seat last May after boundary changes saw the constituency take in more traditionally Tory areas. Now in the Lords, Smith recalls the challenge. “It’s very difficult, especially for MPs in marginal seats. You can’t reduce your service to your existing constituents, but you’ve also got an eye on your possible future constituents. There are obviously very strict rules, and people become very sensitive about it.”
While Smith did not have to fight a former colleague for a seat, she has concerns for her former friends in the Commons. “MPs in neighbouring constituencies build
close bonds and friendships. They work together, but suddenly they will become competitors.”
Former MP Dawn Butler saw her Brent South constituency abolished altogether. In 2010 she fought Liberal Democrat Sarah Teather for Brent Central. The memories of an unsuccessful campaign seem fresh: “The boundary changes will change campaigning in the UK, and I think that the next election will be displeasing to the electorate as opposed to empowering,” Butler suggests, before adding: “Liberal Democrats are formidable campaigners, and as MPs fight for seats they will face the grey areas of Lib Dem campaign strategy.”
A survivor of a previous constituency re-jigging is her old party colleague Mike Gapes. After securing a 402-vote victory in Ilford in 1992, a boundary redrawing saw Gapes facing a notional 2,500 Conservative majority in 1997. His timing was fortunate, with Gapes becoming a beneficiary of that year’s Labour landslide. “At least I’d known the basis on which I was working – there was some certainty,” he recalls. “But nobody is clear what is going to happen now – it’s all being run from Nick Clegg’s office.”
Gapes admits there will be a “period of uncertainty, with sitting MPs fighting each other for seats”, mischievously adding that “the Tories have teams who are going around the backbenchers and discussing options – Tory MPs in the South of England will be fighting each other like cats in a sack”.
But Tory MPs won’t be the only ones facing a fight. Current projections suggest the Conservatives will lose 21 seats, Labour 13, and the Lib Dems 12 – a massive fall of 21 per cent on their current total, with ministers Lynne Featherstone, Sarah Teather and David Heath all looking vulnerable with wafer-thin majorities.
A colleague who could offer encouragement is Malcolm Bruce, with the Lib Dem MP for Gordon having faced four boundary re-drawings since his election in 1983.
“If your boundaries change then the biggest problem, self-evidently, is that the benefits of incumbency are weakened,” Bruce explains. “So you need to be ‘seen by the neighbours’ and make sure that your reputation precedes you.” As for the current proposals, Bruce admits that his colleagues are concerned that “there isn’t enough space – the Boundary Commission’s task is very tightly constrained”.
Evidence of the commission’s limited wriggle-room emerged in the form of local complaints from Andrew Turner, the Isle of Wight’s Tory MP, and Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives.
Until amendments were passed in the Lords, the Isle of Wight was set to be split in two, with half of one newly-formed constituency also including parts of Hampshire. Still unresolved are plans which would see a constituency spread across the Devon and Cornwall borders.
One solution that has been mooted is to raise the discretion in average size to plus or minus ten per cent, but Tory MPs grumble that this will hurt them disproportionately. However, the majority of MPs still appear to be complacently assuming that they will be safe if their constituency falls within five per cent of the 76,000 average.
What they forget, however, is that the knock-on effect will be unavoidable once the Boundary Commission starts re-jigging at the higher or lower end of a county or region.
So MPs of all parties should be growing increasingly nervous. Could Labour’s trio of Tessa Jowell, Harriet Harman and Chuka Umunna find themselves squabbling over two South London seats?
Which of Tristram Hunt, Robert Flello and Joan Walley might be the unlucky loser if Stoke-on-Trent loses one of its three constituencies?
Who will survive from the Midlands Tory pair of James Morris and Margot James should James’s seat of Stourbridge vanish?
Big names will not be immune from scrabbling for survival, with their lower profile colleagues often paying the price. For example, at the last election Ed Balls, then education secretary, was forced to relocate after his Normanton constituency was abolished.
Further down the road, Labour backbencher Colin Challen was preparing for the same challenge after his own Morley and Rothwell constituency ceased to exist. “I shall certainly be seeking re-selection,” Challen declared in 2006, but he later complained that he was “forced out” after Balls was chosen to fight the newly formed Morley and Outwood seat.
“It seems to be the case, from my experience, that Boundary Commission proposals are faits accomplis – and it sounds like they will become even more so in the future,” Challen suggests, before questioning how much effort an MP should devote to fighting any redrawing.
“There are benefits to knowing in advance of one’s fate, rather than it being announced on election night,” he says. “It makes the transition to life afterwards much more relaxed, and it helped me sharpen my policy focus in what turned out to be a three-and-a-half year march to the door.”
For many MPs, the time is fast approaching when they too will have to consider life after Westminster. Before then, an almighty squabble looks set to ensue – and for some, the long march towards the door will follow.
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