Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
Posts: 11,516
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Post by Khunanup on Sept 21, 2016 16:41:39 GMT
Coastal Eastleigh, Gosport, bottom of Winchester's Lebensraum and Fareham could make a good, coherent authority. Solent, maybe, as the name? The whole of Eastleigh should go in with Southampton, the Hamble is the natural boundary. This was proposed by Labour run Southampton in the mid 90s and Lib Dem run Eastleigh, the Tory run government rejected it. I'd combine Fareham, Gosport, Bishops Waltham, Whiteley and Wickham (plus Shedfield etc) & stick Portchester in with Pompey along with Southwick, Denmead, Havant Borough and Horndean/Clanfield. Two highly coherant authorities that you could even combine if the push was for bigger unitaries.
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Post by longmonty on Oct 14, 2016 19:30:42 GMT
I couldn't bear the split of Chertsey or the Commission's random bite out of Slough. Both can be avoided if they go for the solution they ended up with in the abortive review plus a bit more shuffling between the Berks seats:
(but I bet they won't go for this much change when they don't have to get the numbers right)
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Post by islington on Oct 14, 2016 21:05:00 GMT
Longmonty -
That is a superb plan.
I'm wondering whether you might want to put Swallowfield into the Bracknell seat instead of Barkham. This would mean that Wokingham was slightly less out on a limb in the seat named after it. (The numbers work either way.)
That point aside, I can't fault it.
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Post by islington on Oct 15, 2016 13:50:27 GMT
Ahem ...
Er, actually, on closer scrutiny, I'd like to qualify my rapture slightly because I've just noticed that Longmonty's plan puts Mapledurham ward in Reading W, from which it otherwise cut off by the Thames.
But it can be fixed by swapping Mapledurham and Katesgrove wards between the two Reading seats and then getting Reading E within quota (since this exchange leaves it light on numbers) by adding Shinfield N ward from Wokingham. This ward is really a suburban part of Reading and is separated by the M4 motorway from the more rural Shinfield S ward (which contains the whole of the village of Shinfield).
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Adrian
Co-operative Party
Posts: 1,726
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Post by Adrian on Oct 25, 2016 18:59:01 GMT
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Post by greenhert on Oct 25, 2016 20:24:05 GMT
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Adrian
Co-operative Party
Posts: 1,726
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Post by Adrian on Oct 25, 2016 21:20:26 GMT
Yes, I've seen it. (Interesting how the resulting seats are entirely different!) Islington was the first person to mention the possibility, and I put a map in the East Midlands thread on 25 May. Obviously I still think it's the best option, removing the need for disrupting Leics and Notts.
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Post by AustralianSwingVoter on Oct 25, 2016 22:08:08 GMT
Yes, I've seen it. (Interesting how the resulting seats are entirely different!) Islington was the first person to mention the possibility, and I put a map in the East Midlands thread on 25 May. Obviously I still think it's the best option, removing the need for disrupting Leics and Notts. agreed
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Post by islington on Oct 26, 2016 8:16:37 GMT
Yes, I've seen it. (Interesting how the resulting seats are entirely different!) Islington was the first person to mention the possibility, and I put a map in the East Midlands thread on 25 May. Obviously I still think it's the best option, removing the need for disrupting Leics and Notts. I may have been the first to mention it as an idea, but I don't actually favour it: I think the BCE is well-advised to stick to the regional boundaries, not least because the legislation gives them a very strong hint to this effect.
(Although this does raise an interesting question for the future. The legislation defines the regions as those used for EU elections, which will presumably be a thing of the past by the time of the next review. Or maybe the EU electoral regions will have a kind of ghostly after-life, still used as a basis for Parliamentary reviews even after their primary purpose has become redundant.)
For the E Mids at the present review, I still think it's more logical to link Rutland and Nhants. But I understand why the BCE didn't do this, and I'm not planning to raise any issues about their plans in E Mids.
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Adrian
Co-operative Party
Posts: 1,726
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Post by Adrian on Oct 26, 2016 9:38:42 GMT
I hadn't realised that the Tories had done away with the regions, so to speak, but it's virtually true. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_England I remember the days when there was a huge SE region and small East Anglia region; the redivision into a smaller SE and larger Eastern region was done for convenience - the border between the two makes no sense.
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ricmk
Lib Dem
Posts: 2,279
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Post by ricmk on Oct 26, 2016 22:54:29 GMT
Very interesting - I'd been looking at something similar and independently came up with almost the same as your idea (except Bradwell ward in MK faces into the city centre and shouldn't go into the South Northants seat.) To make the case further I'd mention: 1) Milton Keynes is part of SEMLEP - South East Mids Local Enterprise Partnership. MK's strategic partnerships and regional identity face into the Midlands rather than into the South East. 2) There's no direct road connection between the 2 wards the BCE want to take out of MK, and the Buckingham seat, but there is to Northamptonshire 3) Doing this improves most of the Northamptonshire seats.
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Post by andrewteale on Oct 26, 2016 23:19:16 GMT
](Although this does raise an interesting question for the future. The legislation defines the regions as those used for EU elections, which will presumably be a thing of the past by the time of the next review. Or maybe the EU electoral regions will have a kind of ghostly after-life, still used as a basis for Parliamentary reviews even after their primary purpose has become redundant.) [/p]
[/quote] We're still arguing over Humberside as an electoral unit, twenty years after its abolition.
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YL
Non-Aligned
Either Labour leaning or Lib Dem leaning but not sure which
Posts: 4,280
Member is Online
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Post by YL on Oct 27, 2016 7:20:45 GMT
The trouble with proposing crossing the regional boundary is that so much of the process is built around using the regions. The consultation process is based on them, and furthermore the actual allocation of seats is based on using them. If you transfer Milton Keynes from the South East to the East Midlands and do the Sainte-Laiguë method again, do you get the right number of seats for the two regions? (Alternatively, you could try it with Northamptonshire transferred to the South East, or just merge the two regions together in one enormous region.)
Breaking England up into more manageable units for this process also seems to me to be the right thing to do, even if you can debate some of the details of the regional boundaries.
That said, I do see why some people want to cross the MK/Northants border. It does make the rest of the East Midlands easier, and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting a very satisfactory seat containing two wards of MK and the rest of north Buckinghamshire. If you rule out split wards in the rest of the Borough and don't want to split Bletchley, then there aren't going to be many alternatives to what the Commission actually proposed. Being prepared to split a ward in the rest of the Borough would allow more flexibility as to which two wards to take out, but is there actually a good choice? Looking at a map, the MK/rest of Bucks border seems weakest in the east, around the Brickhills, so I might try Danesborough & Walton and perhaps then Monkston, but I'm not feeling very convinced and you'd still need to work out how to split up the rest of the Borough...
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Post by greenhert on Oct 27, 2016 15:26:35 GMT
Very interesting - I'd been looking at something similar and independently came up with almost the same as your idea (except Bradwell ward in MK faces into the city centre and shouldn't go into the South Northants seat.) To make the case further I'd mention: 1) Milton Keynes is part of SEMLEP - South East Mids Local Enterprise Partnership. MK's strategic partnerships and regional identity face into the Midlands rather than into the South East. 2) There's no direct road connection between the 2 wards the BCE want to take out of MK, and the Buckingham seat, but there is to Northamptonshire 3) Doing this improves most of the Northamptonshire seats. Does not Milton Keynes also face into Bedfordshire, in the East of England region? You can easily go from Bedford to Milton Keynes by train, after all, not to mention the Bedfordshire town of Leighton Buzzard.
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Foggy
Non-Aligned
Long may it rain
Posts: 5,507
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Post by Foggy on Oct 28, 2016 2:25:25 GMT
The trouble with proposing crossing the regional boundary is that so much of the process is built around using the regions. The consultation process is based on them, and furthermore the actual allocation of seats is based on using them. If you transfer Milton Keynes from the South East to the East Midlands and do the Sainte-Laiguë method again, do you get the right number of seats for the two regions? Yes. This is easily checkable by subtracting/adding 169,933 on the Boundary Commission's Sainte Lague spreadsheet. It's ' Sainte-Laguë' – there's a hyphen and a diaeresis, but no second 'i'. On the topic at hand: a tenth 'central England' region is needed at least for these purposes, to be carved out of bits of East of England, South East and East Midlands that don't quite fit anywhere.
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Post by greenhert on Oct 28, 2016 20:50:28 GMT
@jamesdowden, I presume that was a joke West Anglia would be a more appropriate name, as a counterpart to East Anglia (Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk).
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Oct 28, 2016 20:51:41 GMT
Sounds too much like a train company.
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Foggy
Non-Aligned
Long may it rain
Posts: 5,507
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Post by Foggy on Oct 28, 2016 21:00:36 GMT
@jamesdowden , I presume that was a joke West Anglia would be a more appropriate name, as a counterpart to East Anglia (Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk). 'Anglia' in the name 'East Anglia' refers to England as a whole, though? Even 'Greater Northamptonshire' might meet with some objection in Beds, north Bucks, Rutland and southwestern Lincs. Mind you, Peterborough should be fine with that name.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Oct 29, 2016 8:48:03 GMT
@jamesdowden , I presume that was a joke West Anglia would be a more appropriate name, as a counterpart to East Anglia (Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk). 'Anglia' in the name 'East Anglia' refers to England as a whole, though? Not really - the name was derived from the East Angles who occupied roughly that area. East Anglia was the Kingdom of the East Angles just as Essex was the kingdom of the East Saxons. The kingdom of the West Angles was Mercia. All of the area being discussed was part of Mercia, but a relatively small part of the whole, so the name would not be totally inappropriate.
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Oct 30, 2016 12:13:44 GMT
In the seventh century, you do find references to the Middle Angles as a people, occupying more or less the northern Home Counties. So that might work if you wanted a name.
Mind you, if you're getting rid of the European regions, you're probably best off just going back to assigning seats to preserved counties. Nobody actually likes the cross-county seats and it'd be an easy amendment to say that you can have more than 5% deviation where numbers allow it, but under those circumstances deviation has to be as low as reasonably possible.
I suspect a lot of the Cameroon desire for cross-county seats stemmed from several shire counties just missing out on seats in the Fifth Review whilst a lot of Mets just kept them. As memories of that fade, it's liable to be less of a sticking point.
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