Let the great boundary rejig commence

[ObserverIE]

7.  Limavady & Mid Ulster (75,083).  Compared with current Mid Ulster, loses territory to seats 4 and 5 above; gains the whole of Limavady district and three southern wards of Coleraine district.  Anybody fancy naming this?

The Sperrins (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrins).

[ObserverIE]

7.  Limavady & Mid Ulster (75,083).  Compared with current Mid Ulster, loses territory to seats 4 and 5 above; gains the whole of Limavady district and three southern wards of Coleraine district.  Anybody fancy naming this?

The Sperrins (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrins).

I thought of that, but wasn't sure whether it was accurate enough.  However, it's quite a nice name, and the other one is horrible, so I'll adopt it for now.

Any comments on the rest of it?

It's not ideal in that it spreads beyond the Sperrins themselves, but it's the only name you could really give to it, barring perhaps "Limavady, Magherafelt and Cookstown". Anything involving "Londonderry" isn't really appropriate, given that it will be a strongly nationalist/republican seat once Coleraine and its environs are out of the picture, and using "Derry" will cause palpitations on the other side.

[ObserverIE]

Northern Ireland's proposals are out. Quite sensible geographically. Demographically though...

from Nicholas Whyte's site http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1816829.html.

Unnecessary fiddling with Newry/Armagh, South Down and Upper Bann, all of which are already within the quota and don't need to be changed.

I'd go with a different set of wards to add to Fermanagh/South Tyrone, and "Mid Ulster" is a better name than "Mid Tyrone".

The one really daft seat is Mid Antrim. Ballymena has much better communication links with Antrim town to its south than to Larne. East Antrim could largely be left intact with the addition of an area around Ballyclare, and with the rural area to the south of Antrim town being added to Lagan Valley instead.

In Belfast, the Lagan might make a more natural boundary between the new South East and South West, with attendant shuffling around of wards in Castlereagh and Lisburn.

The casualties will be the SDLP in Belfast South and the DUP in the old East L'Derry (once you take out Coleraine town and points east you remove the Unionist majority in the seat).

[ObserverIE]

Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report has calculated detailed 2010 notionals for the English seats here.

The effects of the changes seem to be to insulate the Conservatives to swings against them while not making much difference to swings towards them:



However, the swing calculations don't seem to take account of a likely slump in the Lib Dem vote.

[ObserverIE]

Swing calculations can't really do that.

I know...

Playing around with the figures, the bigger the collapse for the Lib Dems the better it is for the Tories.

On an English breakdown of Con 41 Lab 41 Lib Dem 10 Others 8, the figures give 253-245-3-1. For 36-36-20-8, the figures are 233-240-28-1.

[ObserverIE]

That Moray seat is a complete eyesore.

Charles Kennedy to fall on his sword and retire for Danny Alexander?

I'd have thought that putting Kennedy up as candidate would be the Lib Dems' only hope of holding the seat.

[ObserverIE]

What the polls seem to be saying is Con -2% on the general (in essence virtually unchanged), Labour are +9% and the Liberal Democrats -13%. The majority of that -15% is from Lib Dem to Lab, but the SNP, UKIP and Greens are also up (SNP +2%, Green +2%, UKIP +1%) with the BNP and the Others -1%. This suggests to me that in Lib Dem seats with a majority of less than 22%, the Lib Dems will lose the seat. In 2010, there were only eight Lib Dems elected with a majority of more than 22% (Bath, Fife North East, North Norfolk, Orkney, Ross, Hallam, Westmorland and Yeovil) and of those eight only Bath, North Norfolk, Orkney, Yeovil remain in place and only Orkney is forecast to remain Lib Dem on a national uniform swing.

Surely they're more than 11% ahead of the Conservatives and 22% ahead of Labour in the other three at least? (11% being the required lead given that the Conservatives are down -2%.)

I know that they're facing a combination of massive unpopularity in Scotland and severe disruption to most of their safer seats in England, but 1 seat being left is overstating it for the moment.

[ObserverIE]

While the Alliance shows it is the party of non-Republicans without leave of their wits:

"While having significant reservations about the rules which the Commission is obliged to
follow under the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, Alliance is
broadly content with the Commission's Provisional Proposals. In particular, the decision to
reduce Belfast to three seats and the three western counties to four seats are appropriate
ways of reducing the total from 18 to 16 seats." Exactly.

A cynic might point out that:

a) adding large chunks of currently SDLP-voting but potentially tactical Alliance supporters from the south Belfast suburbs to East Belfast suits Alliance perfectly, and
b) that other than the more salubrious parts of Coleraine/Portrush/Portstewart, Alliance has negligible support in the said three western counties.

[ObserverIE]

Well, true enough and I have thought of the first point myself. It's part of the reason why DUP are angry. That and Glenshane being hardly a safe unionist seat. (Wait, Alliance has any support west of the Lough?)

Strictly speaking, Portstewart, Portrush and most of Coleraine town are east of the river.

As for Glenshane, once you take out Coleraine and its surrounds, it's nigh impossible to draw a Unionist-majority seat in Co. Derry. Similarly, the only way to make FST winnable for Unionism would be to extend it into the north Armagh countryside (though not as far north as the lough shore). And a seat stretching from Belleek to Tandragee would fatally stretch credulity.

[ObserverIE]

Oooh, and the mayor of Ballymoney:

"There is an elephant in the room which I am not allowed to mention, about the makeup of Glenshane and the North Antrim constituency, but everything else was said." North Antrim being a red herring here, of course.

That elephnt being the unionist/nationalist balance?

Quite. The elephant being the effective net elimination of two unionist seats (counting the old Belfast S and the new Belfast SE as neutral/undependable but the old Belfast E as dependably unionist despite the shock 2010 result).

It's clear from Assembly election results that South Belfast is really no longer a unionist seat and would have become even greener over time because of demographics. North Belfast and Fermanagh/South Tyrone are trending away as well but not to the same degree.

You're seeing one nationalist seat (Mid Ulster) and one gradually transitioning seat (South Belfast) disappear, with the ripples flipping East Derry/Londonderry. Each side being one down is fair enough in my opinion (though obviously not in Jim Allister's).

[ObserverIE]

Bringing this subject back to the topic at hand, the seat based on Carmarthen has been called Carmarthen (or Carmarthen Boroughs, or West Carmarthenshire) since Wales got Parliamentary representation - for any passing Americans on this thread that's twice as long as they've been a nation.

If we're going to start on the antiquity line, Welsh was in use in Caerfyrddin/Carmarthen long before the Anglo-Saxons learned the skill of long-distance sailing and left the bogs of northern Germany and Jutland for greener pastures. Get over it.

[ObserverIE]

Are you capable of seeing my point, or is it that all Tories are arrogant bigots and cretins and idiots in your eyes, or what?

"All"? No.

At least one? Definitely.

[ObserverIE]

"Bethnal" appears to derive from "blithe hall", so...I would have to think about it.

Oh, I wouldn't bother with an etymological approach. It doesn't demonstrate the proper spirit of the British empire.

Just transliterate the English pronunciation (or something approximating it) into Bengali and then transliterate it back again. Better still, choose Bengali words which sound similar even if the meaning is completely different. There are plenty of Leamhchoills (elm wood) in Ireland which got "translated" to Longfield, or Fuarchoills (cold wood) which got transformed into Forkhill or Forthill.

[ObserverIE]

Norn Iron revised fantasy proposals released.

The biggest changes are in Antrim, where the initially proposed Mid Antrim would have linked Ballymena and a long stretch of countryside to its west to Larne and Carrickfergus along a glorified boreen and South Antrim would have been stretched from Toomebridge to the sea and the outskirts of Carrickfergus town.

This is replaced by a more logical arrangement whereby the old East Antrim constituency is recreated, and Ballymena joins Antrim town in South Antrim (to which it's connected by a motorway rather than a cart-track).

Elsewhere, Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Mid Tyrone are cleaned up so as to conform with local government boundaries (FST goes back to its pre-1997 configuration). Both the previous and the current fantasy Fermanagh and South Tyrones have been made much safer for Sinn Féin.