The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
Posts: 39,067
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Post by The Bishop on Jun 28, 2023 10:42:40 GMT
2 constituencies altered in final report. Eastwood Park / St Laurence / St Lukes swapped for Victoria / Milton / Kursaal in Southend 5 renamings Bury St Edmunds -> Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket East Cambridgeshire -> Ely and East Cambridgeshire Rochford and Southend East -> Southend East and Rochford (gains 3 wards, loses 3 wards) Saffron Walden -> North West Essex Southend Central and Leigh -> Southend West and Leigh (gains 3 wards, loses 3 wards) Big difference there  Rather sad to see a historic constituency name (Saffron Walden) ditched for a soulless compass point too. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jun 28, 2023 10:57:44 GMT
Every one of those changes is clearly worse than the revised proposals. Disappointing.
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Post by John Chanin on Jun 28, 2023 11:16:52 GMT
Labour will be disappointed with the reversion in Southend to splitting the town centre in half. Ideal for the Conservatives as it moves just one Labour inclined ward from East into West, leaving both seats very safe, even in the current climate.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 20, 2023 8:04:30 GMT
Finally got the electorate stats to match the known total electorates in the old and new seats. There are two existing constituencies which form the base seats for two others: • Hitchin and Harpenden is the base for both Harpenden and Berkhamsted (50.4%) and Hitchin (56.1%) • Huntingdon is the base for both Huntingdon (67.1%) and for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (43.7%) • South Norfolk is the base for both South Norfolk (80.7%) and for Waveney Valley (40.7%) Note that Lowestoft CC is based on the current Waveney constituency. Waveney Valley does take part of Waveney but it's only 7,103 voters out of 81,070 and makes up only 10.1% of the new seat (70,540 total electorate) - it's the fourth biggest contributor from the five current seats which make up Waveney Valley. Five constituencies are completely unchanged: Epping Forest, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, North East Hertfordshire, Stevenage For the others, the index of change is: | Constituency | Index of Change | | Brentwood and Ongar CC | 0.2 | | Welwyn Hatfield CC | 0.5 | | Peterborough CC | 1.3 | | North Norfolk CC | 1.5 | | Castle Point BC | 2.3 | | Norwich South BC | 2.4 | | Bedford BC | 3.3 | | Rayleigh and Wickford CC | 3.5 | | St Albans CC | 4.3 | | South Suffolk CC | 4.6 | | Chelmsford BC | 5.4 | | Maldon CC | 6.0 | | North West Norfolk CC | 6.1 | | Broadland and Fakenham CC | 6.7 | | Luton North BC | 7.6 | | Cambridge BC | 7.7 | | Harlow CC | 7.7 | | Norwich North BC | 7.8 | | Clacton CC | 7.9 | | Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard CC | 8.2 | | Hertford and Stortford CC | 8.3 | | Lowestoft CC | 8.8 | | Thurrock BC | 8.8 | | Colchester BC | 8.8 | | Suffolk Coastal CC | 9.7 | | Basildon and Billericay BC | 9.7 | | Southend West and Leigh BC | 11.7 | | Witham CC | 11.8 | | North West Essex CC | 11.9 | | South West Norfolk CC | 12.3 | | Hertsmere CC | 14.0 | | Southend East and Rochford CC | 14.3 | | Broxbourne CC | 15.3 | | North East Cambridgeshire CC | 15.7 | | Luton South and South Bedfordshire CC | 16.9 | | West Suffolk CC | 17.1 | | Harwich and North Essex CC | 17.4 | | Braintree CC | 18.2 | | Mid Bedfordshire CC | 19.3 | | South Basildon and East Thurrock CC | 20.7 | | Hemel Hempstead CC | 23.1 | | Mid Norfolk CC | 23.4 | | North Bedfordshire CC | 26.1 | | Central Suffolk and North Ipswich CC | 27.8 | | North West Cambridgeshire CC | 28.9 | | Watford BC | 29.3 | | Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket CC | 33.2 | | South Norfolk CC | 50.4 | | Ely and East Cambridgeshire CC | 54.2 | | South Cambridgeshire CC | 62.2 | | Huntingdon CC | 69.6 | | South West Hertfordshire CC | 76.4 | | Hitchin CC | 88.5 | | Harpenden and Berkhamsted CC | 99.2 | | St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire CC | 111.1 | | Waveney Valley CC | 115.1 |
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Post by afleitch on Jul 26, 2023 8:37:21 GMT
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there appears to be a detached part of Ely and East Cambs containing Cambridge North railway station.
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jul 26, 2023 8:47:59 GMT
Yes, it was noticed and addressed in several submissions, none of which the BCE was interested in following up on. It's not really a change to the status quo, though - in practice that area is already an exclave, because the only border with the rest of the seat is over the river Cam at a point where there are no bridges.
As far as I can tell that exclave dates back to the expansion of the city borders in 1935, when East Chesterton ward was expanded to take it the sewage works but presumably the intention was to avoid taking in the travellers encampments in the exclave. This was presumably also the reason why it was never rationalised in the succeeding decades, whilst in recent years proximity to the Science Park meant that minor alterations to the city boundary would have had an immense impact upon the distribution of business rates between Cambridge and South Cambs.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 26, 2023 8:55:20 GMT
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there appears to be a detached part of Ely and East Cambs containing Cambridge North railway station. Yes. We had noticed. It's because of a detached part of Milton parish, which appears to have been created by the 1934 enlargement of the City of Cambridge. |
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Post by afleitch on Jul 26, 2023 8:56:55 GMT
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there appears to be a detached part of Ely and East Cambs containing Cambridge North railway station. Yes. We had noticed. It's because of a detached part of Milton parish, which appears to have been created by the 1934 enlargement of the City of Cambridge. Thanks. I had time to waste and was trying to find them! |
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Post by johnloony on Jul 27, 2023 0:54:12 GMT
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there appears to be a detached part of Ely and East Cambs containing Cambridge North railway station. Oh yes. Not least because Cambridge North station is on my regular route on the journey to and from Norfolk when I go to visit my mother sister brother-in-law nephew dog dog horse horse. From now onwards, indefinitely, it will always be in the back of my mind whenever I go there. On the general principle, I am entirely relaxed about there being exclaves. One point that people sometimes make is that if a detached part exists, then the MP - travelling from A to B within their constituency - has to go out of their constituency, through another one, and back into the constituency before they get to B. As if that is somehow a problem (?). It’s not as if there is suddenly a barrier or a Berlin Wall to block their journey. The oppount is sometimes made, even if there is not a detached part but just a bottleneck with restricted access of roads in and out. A similar but different phenomenon is that in Croydon, out of c.150 polling districts, there were (some years ago, but I think not now) about 4 or 5 polling districts in which the polling station was not actually within the polling district it served. My problem was (but isn’t any more) that in order to vote, I had to walk 11 minutes to get to my polling station, doing a journey which involved walking straight past a different polling station which served the nextdoor polling district. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Apr 16, 2024 11:12:52 GMT
There was discussion on another thread about the former Braintree constituency, which combined the eponymous town with Witham, so I thought I would look at the consequences of trying to recreate that. In doing so, I ended up creating what is probably the maximal Labour gerrymander for Essex that you could get a Boundary Commission to take seriously for five minutes. The basic rules I set myself were that if I was splitting a town relative to the current map I had to unite another one, any ward splits had to be identical or less disruptive than existing ones proposed and that for every bad see I drew I had to be able to justify it by pointing out an equivalently bad seat elsewhere in the country.  Thurrock 73347 Brentwood & East Thurrock 76983 Basildon 77530* Castle Point 69309* Southend West 76637 Southend North East & Rochford 70281 Rayleigh & Wickford 76422 Billericay 75349 Mid Essex 75375 Epping Forest 76555 Harlow & Epping 73646 Saffron Walden 74499 Braintree 75622 Maldon 73139 Colchester 74520** Harwich & North Essex 77161** Clacton 75959 *Shift North Benfleet to Castle Point, as in the actual proposals **Shift Braiswick into Colchester, as in the actual proposals, but keep Lexden Starting off with the seats designed to make Labour competitive, Thurrock is exactly the same as the actual proposals. Basildon is the entire New Town south of the A127. Southend West matches the revised proposals, whilst Colchester is the same as the initial proposals bar the ward split. Braintree is similar to the 1997-2010 seat but loses a few rural wards (and if the numbers were less tight I'd remove some more.) Harlow adds Epping partly because of the possibility that the LD vote in Hemnall in local elections might not all go Conservative in general elections, but mostly to try to keep the electorate down. Lets move on to the bad seats. Fairly clearly Brentwood doesn't do well out of this scheme. I managed to keep all the wards with Brentwood or Hutton in the name in the seat, but Shenfield and Pilgrims Hatch are obviously part of the urban area and they're separated. My defence is that the same thing has happened to Basildon for years, but I accept a commission would be unlikely to accept that. Mid Essex (I considered calling in Dunmow & Ongar, but you can't polish a turd so I thought I might as well be honest) contains four local authorities, which is normally a no-no. I think it's justifiable because Wetherby & Easingwold also contained four local authorities at the time it was proposed. There is an alternative arrangement which has no seat containing parts of more than three local authorities, but it does that at the cost of more local authority crossings so I think this is a less bad option. Harwich & North Essex has a detached part, but it did before so that's not really a strike against it relative to the actual plan. The interior links in the Saffron Walden seat are admittedly very bad. In the category of seats that look good even though I wasn't that bothered against them I'd put the Billericay and Maldon seats, both of which are arguably better than the present situation. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jun 10, 2024 10:57:19 GMT
The whole Holden kerfuffle put me back onto my familiar hobby-horse of how terrible the boundaries are for Labour around Basildon, but in doing so I realised that there is actually a solution to this that puts the entirety of the New Town in one seat, but is nevertheless quite elegant: you can pair East Thurrock with Canvey Island instead (plus part of Pitsea SE ward, as with the ward split we've already got.) Technically this isn't contiguous by road, as the A13 passes through Nethermayne ward for a few hundred yards, but nobody lives south of the road so it's not a meaningful problem. This does force a fairly awkward arrangement of wards in Southend and you have to split Rayleigh along the railway line*, but it nevertheless feels considerably more elegant than what we actually got. Am currently kicking myself for not having realised this and proposed it. Map (not including the ward split, because Boundary Assistant is playing up at the moment):  Thurrock 73347 Canvey & East Thurrock 71119 (includes Bowers Gifford and all housing south of the A13) Basildon 75449 Hadleigh & Leigh 70973 Southend Central 76622 Rochford & Southend North 75991 Billericay & Wickford 74344 *You can actually avoid both of these and draw a very satisfying map where all seats are coherent, but it requires you to pair Essex and Suffolk (with a cross-border seat between Halstead and Sudbury). |
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Post by John Chanin on Jun 10, 2024 15:11:39 GMT
While it would be nice to get a proper Basildon seat, this is truly horrible.
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Post by mattb on Jun 17, 2024 10:29:01 GMT
While it would be nice to get a proper Basildon seat, this is truly horrible.is either of these any better? (if crossing estuaries is allowed  )   |
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