My alternative constituencies: Cheshire

Let me be clear: the River Mersey is a boundary between Cheshire and Lancashire, not a 'unifying estuary' of any kind. In fact other large rivers often served to determine the county lines within Britain. Therefore, I am counting the Wirral as part of Cheshire for this exercise.

The Boundary Commission has been rather careless with many of its proposals here, despite taking the wise move of reuniting the Wirral with Cheshire. 'Bebington & Heswall' does not even contain Bebington itself, but a seat can be created based on Wirral West which actually contains Bebington. I also desire to separate Runcorn and Widnes, and Warrington and Lymm, but unfortunately the strict limits on deviance from the average electorate make this unviable. Warrington should also be rearranged, not only due to Warrington North being under quota and Warrington South being over quota but also due to the links within these current constituencies.

One main problem is that further reorganisation, which created the current authorities of Cheshire West & Chester and Cheshire East, means that most wards in Cheshire are now large in both population and geographical size; the old districts, whilst not perfect by any standards, were better in this regard. This means that realistically one ward split is needed to create sensible constituencies.

Part of Greater Manchester needs to extend into Cheshire-there is no realistic way to avoid this given the quotas the BCE must use. However, there should only be one constituency crossing the border between Greater Manchester and Cheshire-not two or three. The outskirts of Altrincham, once part of the old Knutsford constituency, is the best place for such a constituency.

My alternative constituencies in Cheshire are therefore:



Wirral South is abolished.
Bebington & The Wirral succeeds Wirral West.
Widnes & Runcorn succeeds Halton.
Northwich & Winsford succeeds Eddisbury, which was called Northwich from 1950-1983.
Warrington West succeeds Warrington South in practice.
Warrington East succeeds Warrington North in practice; within Hatton, Stretton, and Walton ward it has polling districts SKC and SKD (comprising Walton) making its actual electorate 71,305 and the changed Weaver Vale's actual electorate 75,746.
Wilmslow succeeds Tatton.
City of Chester is unchanged apart from internal ward adjustments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more

On the Spanish regional elections of 2023-a warning for progressives

The Spanish regional elections of 2023, especially those in the "Empty Spain" regions far west of the federal capital of Madrid and prosperous yet famously rebellious Catalonia, resulted in a sharp shift towards conservatism and conservative populism. Both Partido Popular (PP, Spain's equivalent of the Conservatives) and Vox (the Spanish equivalent of Reform UK/UKIP) made sweeping gains in all regions, notably taking overall control in Madrid (normally an impossible feat under Spain's PR system), more than doubling their seat total in Valencia to top the poll there, and wresting control of Asturias, La Rioja, and Cantabria from the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE, Spain's equivalent of Labour) and the Cantabrian Regionalist Party respectively. Under the tenure of Pedro Sanchez, the current PSOE-Podemos coalition is floundering and has not done much to ensure Spain's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic since the last restrictions ended in 2021, and P
Read more