UK fantasy boundaries; retaining the old counties

[Gary J]

This is an interesting approach but the Scottish parliamentary boundaries, after the Union and before 1832, were less tied to shire boundaries than in England and Wales. Some district of burgh constituencies included towns in more than one county. Some counties were paired and each county in the pair was represented in alternate parliaments. Orkney and Shetland continued to be linked in a single constituency, as they had been in the Scottish Parliament before the Union.

Boundary changes, in 1832, eliminated the absurdity of representation in alternate parliaments. However an increasing number of county seats included two counties, which did not happen in England until Rutland was combined with part of Lincolnshire in the 1918 redistribution. In the Scottish redistributions from 1868 more seats crossed county boundaries, until there was the three county Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles constituency.

Have you considered an approach which apportions seats between the traditional Scottish counties, with each county having at least one seat of its own. Such an approach would increase inequality between constituencies and produce a number of particularly small seats, but giving Orkney and Shetland individual seats in the Scottish Parliament really concedes t the principle. Why should the mainland counties be represented on a less generous basis than the northern island groups?