Boundary reforms

What if we re-run the Boundary Commission for 650 MPs, 18 in Northern Ireland?

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Rumours started last week suggesting that the newly re-elected British government now plans to drop the current Boundary Commission proposals to cut the House of Commons to 600 MPs, and to start a new revision process which would keep the number of MPs at 650. It was always going to be a stretch to get 50 MPs to vote for their own abolition, so I am not at all surprised that this is where we will end up. Remember that …

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Boundary Commission – the detailed projections

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So, the Boundary Commission’s report is finally out, as already discussed by Mick and commentators here. As ever I have done some number-crunching; details below but here are the headlines. At Westminster level, five currently DUP-held seats are squashed into four – East Londonderry is replaced by the new seat of Causeway; most of North Antrim becomes Mid Antrim; South Antrim is split several ways, and the new seat with that name actually has more of the old Lagan Valley …

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So just before you discount those Westminster seats?

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Dewi was pretty hot off the starting gun (he either gets up earlier than the rest of us, or stays up much later) with the boundary change news. Nicholas Whyte’s analysis on the BBC is also well worth reading. But so too are these cautionary words from the gentlemanly Michael White: …cutting the number of MPs to save a theoretical £12m a year is likely to prove a trivial, possibly bad, reform where the laws of unintended consequences will have …

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