Welsh Assembly 1979 onwards

[cibwr]

If by some twist of fate Labour had made getting the Wales and Scotland bills through the House of Commons without a referendum a matter of confidence and the statute had remained on the books what would the Assembly have looked like?

The act stipulated that the first Assembly election would take place at a time designated by the Secretary of State for Wales, assuming that the government hadn't fallen we can assume that this would take place on the third Thursday in March 1979. The act stipulated that initially Westminster constituencies were to be used to elect members by first past the post, 2 from most constituencies but three in whose electorate was 125% or more of quota. As there were 36 Welsh constituencies for Westminster the number elected would be 79 - Barry, Flint East, Monmouth, Newport, Pembroke, Pontypridd and Wrexham being more than 125% of quota. Subsequent elections would be on a single seat basis, the boundary commission dividing each Westminster constituency into 2 or three, with the usual stipulation of trying to keep within local authority boundaries, but each Assembly seat lying wholly in a Westminster seat.

With a bit of a hand wave and based on the 1979 general election, and taking the vagaries of fptp into account I think the result would be as follows:

Aberavon 2 seats - 2 Labour

Aberdare 2 seats - 2 Labour

Abertillery 2 seats - 2 Labour

Anglesey 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Labour

Barry 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Bedwellty 2 seats - 2 Labour

Brecon & Radnor 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Labour

Caernarvon 2 seats - 2 Plaid Cymru

Caerphilly 2 seats - 2 Labour

Cardiff North 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Cardiff North West 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Cardiff South East 2 seats - 2 Labour

Cardiff West 2 seats - 1 Labour 1 Conservative

Cardigan 2 seats - 1 Liberal 1 Conservative

Carmarthen 2 seats - 1 Plaid Cymru 1 Labour

Conway 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Denbigh 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Ebbw Vale 2 seats - 2 Labour

Flint East 3 seats - 2 Labour 1 Conservative

Flint West 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Gower 2 seats - 2 Labour

Llanelli 2 seats - 2 Labour

Merioneth 2 seats - 2 Plaid Cymru

Merthyr Tydfil 2 - 2 seats Labour

Monmouth 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Montgomery 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Liberal

Neath 2 seats - 2 Labour

Newport 3 seats - 3 Labour

Ogmore 2 seats - 2 Labour

Pembroke 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Pontypool 2 seats - 2 Labour

Pontypridd 3 seats - 2 Labour

Rhondda 2 seats - 2 Labour

Swansea East 2 seats - 2 Labour

Swansea West 2 seats - 1 Labour 1 Conservative

Wrexham 3 seats - 3 Labour

Giving us Labour 46, Conservative 26, Plaid Cymru 5, Liberal 2. A comfortable Labour majority of 13 over other parties.

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

[piperdave]

Well you learn something every day! I never knew what the electoral provisions were had the 1979 referendums succeeded more emphatically. Similar rules were in place for Scotland, apart from Orkney & Shetland being given discrete representation. I make it that there would have been 152 seats using the 1979 general election electorates.

71 constituencies with 2 members each at least gives you 142. 10 constituencies would all have 3 members being over 125% (Aberdeen South, Aberdeenshire West, Ayrshire Central, Clackmannan & East Stirlingshire, Dunbartonshire East, East Kilbride, Midlothian, Renfrewshire West, Stirling-Falkirk-Grangemouth, and West Lothian) Midlothian should have had a fourth at 194.9% but would have had to wait for the boundary review to get it.

5 constituencies were at less than 62.5% of the quota and so you could have argued that they should only get one member. These were Caithness & Sutherland, Glasgow Central, Glasgow Govan, Glasgow Shettleston and the Western Isles.

I'm interested, cibwr, in how you decided when constituencies would have split representation? I would expect that the overwhelming majority of constituencies, perhaps with the exception of very rural parts of the country, would have voted 1 and 2 (and 3) for candidates of the same party.

[Pete Whitehead]

Mar 28, 2016 14:06:43 GMT cibwr said:

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

So the next thing is to speculate what these constituencies would have looked like. Presumably they would have been based on the 1983 Westminster seats with each being split in two for a total of 76 seats (I don;t suppose any of these seats would have been 125% above quota, though one or two would have been well under)

[Deleted]

Mrs. Thatcher might have had it abolished.

[cibwr]

They were where I split the representation they were just judgement calls, usually based on there being the probability of personal votes getting otherwise losing candidates above the line, such as Gwynfor in Carmarthen. I based the results primarily on the 1979 general election.

I am not sure Thatcher could abolish it, by the time she got round to it, it would have been too firmly embedded and Labour would have defended it. It wouldn't quite be the GLC and Thatcher didn't abolish that until 1986. Abolishing councils was one thing - abolishing a national representative body quite another.

[cibwr]

Mar 28, 2016 19:03:07 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Mar 28, 2016 14:06:43 GMT cibwr said:

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

So the next thing is to speculate what these constituencies would have looked like. Presumably they would have been based on the 1983 Westminster seats with each being split in two for a total of 76 seats (I don;t suppose any of these seats would have been 125% above quota, though one or two would have been well under)

Indeed and that would be an interesting exercise in fiction, anyone have ward maps from 1983, 1987, 1991 etc? To say nothing of election results for those periods?

[Pete Whitehead]

Well of course we have the results here www.electionscentre.co.uk/?page_id=2400
Not sure on wards but my impression is that they haven't changed all that much in a lot of places. I do in any case have ward and civil parish monitors from the 1991 census which include ward maps and think these were all the same as those in use in the 1980s

[cibwr]

Thanks for the link most useful, if you have the ward maps they would be a great help, thanks!

[Deleted]

Mar 29, 2016 9:27:32 GMT cibwr said:

They were where I split the representation they were just judgement calls, usually based on there being the probability of personal votes getting otherwise losing candidates above the line, such as Gwynfor in Carmarthen. I based the results primarily on the 1979 general election.

I am not sure Thatcher could abolish it, by the time she got round to it, it would have been too firmly embedded and Labour would have defended it. It wouldn't quite be the GLC and Thatcher didn't abolish that until 1986. Abolishing councils was one thing - abolishing a national representative body quite another.

As we know, Labour could have tried to defend something as much as they liked in the Eighties, it wouldn't have stopped Mrs T. Had a referendum approved the establishment of a Welsh Assembly, it would have been more difficult to justify abolition. But if Labour had simply established it without a vote, she could have claimed it lacked legitimacy.

[cibwr]

She could have but it wasn't a council, it was a national body, I would have thought that abolition after the 1987 UK general election would have been difficult for them, after all they were not very popular by then in Wales and she couldn't really claim a mandate. After all the met counties were a thorn in her side and they didn't go until 1986.

[Devil Wincarnate]

cibwr, what do you think happens to Plaid?  Do they take advantage of a bigger stage on a smaller scene, or does FPTP stifle them in a more embarrassing way?

[cibwr]

I think you will see differential turn out of Plaid supporters, as you do now, and that Plaid will do better given the spotlight. Yes FPTP will be a break but they will have a respectable vote and will gain some seats outside Y Fro. Much will depend on where the lines are drawn with the new FPTP constituencies, and of course you can't simply project what happened in Our Time Line to this one, butterflies etc. And for the purpose of the exercise lets assume that sanity prevails and Thatcher does not try to abolish the Assembly, now comfortably housed in a revamped and renewed Cardiff Coal Exchange.

[cibwr]

Time I updated this and had the next election results, will try and produce a sensible map (though it will mainly be based on current warding structures but that should be reasonable enough for the purpose) again this will all be guesswork.

[cibwr]

Another project worth looking at I think.... splitting the constituencies will be a bugger.

[cibwr]

Mar 31, 2019 17:00:59 GMT cibwr said:

Another project worth looking at I think.... splitting the constituencies will be a bugger.

Well now I have boundary assistant back I can make some maps - though using current boundaries, which will be approximate to the ones that I think we would use.