Let the great boundary rejig commence

[minionofmidas]

You know, since nobody is going to protest against Blackburn staying whole, and all other alternatives including the commission's own are clearly even worse, Bolton N & Darwen is fairly likely going to come to pass.

Though that exact set of wards, maybe not.

[minionofmidas]

I'll have to look at these things one of these days.

[minionofmidas]

"Port Solent and HMS Victory"

LOL!

[minionofmidas]

Nice pun. "You don't move me".

[minionofmidas]

So where's the Frankfurt map, Al?

[minionofmidas]

So where's the Frankfurt map, Al?

About half done. For some reason I've decided to do the top seven candidates.

Makes sense. Or would if the PARTEI, Pirate and Left map didn't all sort of look alike.

[minionofmidas]

http://boundaryassistant.org/PlanBuilder.htm

I'd just like to say, that playing with that for a few hours really shows you what a difficult task the boundary commission have to do, and how awkward the ward population numbers are in some areas to build sensible constiuencies, (having said that, there's no excuse for Billericay and Dunmow)

Certainly, although:

- It was the English Commission's own decision to refuse to split wards.  The other three Commissions all have split at least one, and I'm sure the English Commission would have done a much better job in certain areas (South and West Yorkshire, north Cheshire, around Birmingham, maybe a few others) if they'd been prepared to do that.

Anywhere with unitaries, basically. And there is no excuse for that decision.

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Unmistakably both.

[minionofmidas]

And that's on the Whole Wales page alone!

[minionofmidas]

What's entertaining is that the English version includes the original m of the Latin era early Celtic form, mutated to a v (f in the spelling) in Welsh. A common process in Welsh, of course, but one wonders if the English form is so old as to predate the mutation (which would mean it can't be much younger than the Norman conquest) or at least coined by speakers aware of the issue (pretty reasonable given the long current false etymology of Caerfyrddin as Merlin's Town/Castle/whatever - caer is of course derived from Latin castrum) . Other than that though, "Carmarthen" is really more of a misspelling than an actual anglicization.

[minionofmidas]

The linguistic divide through Wales, such as there is, runs north-south, not east-west. With umpteen excemptions, of course, but Carmarthenshire is one of the most Welsh speaking parts of the planet. (Which doesn't say all that much, of course.) It makes infinitely more sense than "Clwyd".

[minionofmidas]

The only arguments against seemed to be sentimentality; a misguided belief that other, divisive, cultures should be fostered and nurtured; and Welsh nationalism.

To which it could be claimed that the only arguments in favour of your position are consistent only with being a bigoted cretin.

Or the abuse and the arrogance could be dropped and things could be looked at more reasonably. In which case it would seem obvious that attempts to accommodate the Welsh language (so to speak) are quite reasonable. Bilingualism is the order of the day anyway; there are no monoglot communities left now and no prospect of bringing them back. So why get angry?

Yes, yes. Perhaps only a socialist isolated from realism could in one paragraph accuses his interlocutor of being a 'bigoted cretin' (with a friend below to call me an 'idiot') and then in the next breath make an accusation against the same person of 'abusive arrogance'.

FreedomFighter is just an idiot (or more likely, just a troll), ignore him. You also maybe ought to go read that sentence with "abusive arrogance" in it again, you seem to have misunderstood it.

Along with the terms "multiculturalism" and "integration", of course. Oh well.

[minionofmidas]

There is no logic at all in demanding immigrants to Tower Hamlets learn English but the natives of Britain learn the language of the English immigrants.

Oh wait. A Tory in Stepney. Odds are he arrived long after the Bangladeshis. And suddenly it all made sense. (Also, the renaming would have to be Bethnal Green aur Bow to be at all parallel. Well "aur" is Hindi/Urdu, not Bangla... from some wikiing it *seems* Bangla would be "eor".)

[minionofmidas]

Who was, of course, persecuted for his politics.

[minionofmidas]

As a Bangladeshi, I feel like I should be offended by this.

So what is Bangla for "Bethnal Green and Bow"?

[minionofmidas]

What would be necessary, and indeed sort of logical, but is not going to happen because that is not the way laws work, is for the Commissions to be given new, nonpartisan procedures which to use in order to start from scratch with.
Since the Commissions will be forced to bumble on incompetently, I fully expect Clegg to climb down and meekly enact the gerrymander in the end.

[minionofmidas]

Altering the boundary drawing rules, to make constituencies more equal in size of electorate, is not in itself a gerrymander (as the term is normally understood).

Quite so.

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There are... other reasons beyond that. But apart from that, sure.

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Actually, no, sense as it would make. As it happens the period between reviews has been changed only once since periodical automatic reviews were introduced by the war coalition, to the much longer, by the 50s Tory government, and had not been touched since.

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Heh, I'd actually idly wondered why that one took so long. Learn something new every day.

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The United States has far faster population distribution changes and is also not in any way or form a model to look up to in these issues.

The devil with the Cameron law is in the detail; the attempt to preserve those current constituencies so oversized as to be still legal after the seat reduction whether they still make sense on the ground or not was written in at a late stage (on backbench pressure maybe?) and is responsible for a fair bit of havoc in places (some of the extra awfulness of Mersey Banks for instance.) The whole semi-abolution-of-consultation thing serves to give the Commissions more power (and could have been used to speed up the process of redistricting itself, but wasn't) - and the Commission for England happen to have not a clue of the geography of working class England. This is clearly at least partially deliberate. It is also well described as

pained attempts to remove Labour bias, whilst retaining their own

As to the decision not to split wards, without stopping to wonder for one second whether wards of 15,000 people and wards of 1500 (that are usually grouped into County Electoral Divisions for more important elections) can be seriously considered as equivalent... ugh. Yeah. That was at least technically not the lawmakers' doing. Though they warmly encouraged it, of course.


None of which changes the fact that I used the term "gerrymander" in a less-than-serious fashion. It's hyperbole. Obviously.

[minionofmidas]

despite what you said above about faster population changes in the states, I do think we should do the reviews every ten years based on census data rather than the electoral roll,

You could do 'em once a year, strictly speaking, revising only those areas now violating some tolerance threshold (though this makes little sense if you want to keep the size of parliament fixed.) In the US - unlike the UK, might I add - every ten years is really far too late.

[minionofmidas]

despite what you said above about faster population changes in the states, I do think we should do the reviews every ten years based on census data rather than the electoral roll,

You could do 'em once a year, strictly speaking, revising only those areas now violating some tolerance threshold (though this makes little sense if you want to keep the size of parliament fixed.) In the US - unlike the UK, might I add - every ten years is really far too late.

Australia does this without any problem.

Australia has no intermediate units of the approximate relative size, traditional importance, or even (even though it's nothing to write home about in Britain either) political power of British Counties. Redistribute seats constantly to fairly even populations, with a fixed number of seats, and you'll be breaching these boundaries a lot.

[minionofmidas]

Some minor tweaks plus redid the rediculous Dundee map - now with one constituency holding the bulk of the city (named "Dundee West") and a donut ("Angus West & East Perthshire" despite including parts of Dundee). No good write-up of why the changes.

[minionofmidas]

Ah, I'd looked at some of the appendices but they were merely submitted maps. Overlooked the "papers" they are appendices to.

[minionofmidas]

Angus Council had suggested "Strathmore & Sidlaw" which suffers from the same problem as the name now adopted, ie excluding the Ferry. Some wiseguy from the public suggested reviving "North Tayside" which was once a constituency that covered a similar area in Angus and a territorially larger part of Perthshire but with much the same populated areas (but no part of Dundee).
With the examples of "Angus East & Kincardine" and "Stirling & Crieff" in mind, "Angus West, [insert random place in East Perthshire here] & Broughty Ferry"?

Paper 2012/15 actually states they'd probably go with "Dundee" if (actually, it sounds more like when but still, the decision is listed as needing to be taken separately by the Commission) they decide to adopt the alternative proposal. Names suggested by those who made the proposal were "Dundee" or "Dundee City", which is the official name of the local government district and one that the Commission rejected outright. "Dundee West" is listed in paper 2012/15 as an alternative, apparently suggested by the Assistant Commissioner.

[minionofmidas]

Ah, gotta love the public.

"a member of the public (48) supports East Renfrewshire and Hairmyres constituency in the belief that it will improve schooling in Hairmyres".
"Portobello Community Council (92) believes mistakenly that the Initial Proposals put Portobello in a constituency with part of East Lothian, and opposes this."

[minionofmidas]

Fresh outrages planned for 16th October!

[minionofmidas]

One way to fix the bill may be to establish regional boundary commissions before the next review.

[minionofmidas]

One way to fix the bill may be to establish regional boundary commissions before the next review.

I don't see how that would improve matters to be honest - we already have four regional boundary commissions.

Three regional boundary commissions, two of which are working as well as the bill framework permits. And an overwhelmed group of codgers sent to deal with the entirety of England who're making even the third one look good.

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YL and me would do a better job. Though I suppose we could add you to the panel.