The UK's New Electoral Boundaries Could Mean a Lifetime of Tory Rule

Granted, it doesn't sound all that fascinating, but there's a very simple reason why you should care about how the UK's political map is being re-drawn before the 2020 election. If boundary changes go ahead as planned, there is even more likelihood – if you could actually imagine such a thing – that we will be ruled by the Conservatives for a really, really long time, with Labour consigned to wailing from the sidelines without a hope of ever winning an election.

Decades of May and Gove. Perma-Tories. Boris Johnson having ample time to rebuild his career. It's enough to make anyone young and smart enough consider a move abroad. Except that's probably going to be more difficult than ever before, of course. Suburban Brexit nans have screwed you there, and they will continue to screw you if these boundary changes happen.

The changes are, on the surface, administrative and dry. They happen periodically to redraw the constituency map of the UK, because as the population changes – and people move in and out of cities – the number of people an MP represents needs to change, too.

In 2011, after the expenses scandal, MPs voted to reduce the number of MPs by 50 – what seemed like a pretty significant act of altruism in a parliament whose members generally vote to protect their own interests. Having 650 MPs was way too expensive in an age of austerity; in those cost-cutting, post duck-house times, not even democracy could be spared.

Of course, not everything was that simple: turns out a reduction in the number of MPs will end up significantly benefitting the Tories.

Why? Well, first you have to look at the current state of play. At the moment, the number of people in each constituency – which, crucially, is calculated by the number of registered voters, not the population – is unequal, so the number of votes an MP needs to receive to be elected varies by constituency. The boundary system has historically been skewed in Labour's favour. Take the 2005 election: Labour won a majority of seats in parliament with just a 3 percent majority of the overall number of votes. At that election, the Tories would have needed an 11 percent lead over Labour to have won an overall majority.

The Tories tend to win in high-voting suburban and rural heartlands of the Home Counties – nans, granddads and people who care about pensions and cars. Labour tend to win in the inner cities of the north-east and north-west of England, and London. Their supporters are historically poor, young, black and minority-ethnic people who are significantly more likely to be fucked over by the Tories, and significantly less likely to vote.

The proposed boundary changes will see urban constituencies expand outwards into the countryside, taking on more suburban and rural Tory voters. Traditional Labour safe seats will either dissolve or become marginal seats. That's a good thing for the Conservative party and its fans, and a bad thing for everyone else.

Then there's the issue of the 2.5 million new voters who registered to vote in the EU referendum who are quietly not included in the boundary changes – because the calculations were made based on an electoral register from December of 2015. So the new seats aren't actually designed on the basis of how many people live in them, but on figures from an old electoral register.

On top of this, in January of 2016, a new system of voter registration effectively wiped hundreds of thousands of people off the electoral register – disproportionately young people and students, and likely mostly Labour supporters.

So this is bad for Labour. The Tories may lose some big names – George Osborne and Boris Johnson will be fighting for demolished seats. But the winners are suburban, rural Tories; the losers, inner city and young people. And just as a kicker, Jeremy Corbyn – who currently enjoys the support of a whopping 40 of his MPs – could use the changes to purge his detractors by changing Labour Party rules that give them an automatic right to stand again.

We could be fucked for even longer than we thought.

@jenny_stevens

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