Gordon Brown has finally confirmed what we’ve all known for months. We’re facing a general election on May 6th
You can read the Society’s response here. But what could be a better way to get started than to start crunching some of the numbers – on the 382 MPs who’ve already won office, no campaign required. Here’s a taster.
So with the starter’s pistol fired, we know the results in most of our parliament. Well think of it as the parliament within a parliament – and if parliamentary careers are anything to go by, these are the seats held by future residents of Number 10, Number 11, and the big offices in the Treasury and the FO.
We haven’t come across some decent research on the length of parliamentary careers at Westminister. Discussions of resettlement grants for MPs has the average length of service at 8.5 years in 2001, and 8.5 in 2002. Whether MPs in ‘two term marginals’ make up for the decades of undefeated service in safe seats is a subject for another post.
So, we’ve already got this parliament the start with:
Britain’s ‘Safe’ Parliament Party Safe Seats % Con 172 45.03% Lab 165 43.19% LD 29 7.59% PC 2 0.52% SNP 3 0.79% Northern Irish others 11 2.88% TOTAL 382 That’s a pretty hefty slice of the lower House already taken. Regionally the picture is uniformly bad, but with some variations. Where these characters come from is another matter.
Safe Regions Government Office (GO) Region Seats Decided Total Seats % Seats Decided East of England 41 58 70.69% East Midlands 21 46 45.65% London 45 73 61.64% North East 21 29 72.41% Northern Ireland 11 18 61.11% North West 43 74 58.11% Scotland 36 59 61.02% South East 55 84 65.48% South West 24 55 43.64% Wales 24 40 60.00% West Midlands 28 59 47.46% Yorkshire and Humberside 33 54 61.11% TOTAL 382 649 58.86% You can draw your own conclusions from here on where the key battlegrounds are. The PM did make a point of heading straight from Buck Palace to Kent, and two key marginals. Better still, check out the data, and we’ve done it for you. Kent’s a funny one. We’ve had to congratulate their voters today for being lucky enough to buck the local and national trend, and only have just over 1/2 their seats in the bag. That’s pretty good by our standards.
The total population of these safe seats is 25 million. It seems fair to assume that for their voters this is looking like a quiet election. For the rest, particularly those lucky 1 million odd in 3 way marginals there will be a campaign. There’s a case for popping Hampstead and Kilburn in alongside, but we’ve been pretty conservative with our choices, and gave into temptation not to lump the next tranch of pseudo marginals as ‘SAFE’
Name Region County Electorate Incumbent Norwich South EE Norfolk 72,538 LAB Watford EE Hertfordshire 80,013 LAB Derby North EM Derbyshire 71,370 LAB Northampton North EM Northamptonshire 61,749 LAB Ealing Central and Acton LN 69,149 LAB Poplar and Limehouse LN 70,880 LAB Edinburgh South SC 58,811 LAB Ochil and South Perthshire SC 75,576 LAB Brighton Pavilion SE East Sussex 72,234 LAB Bristol North West SW Avon 73,104 LAB Filton and Bradley Stoke SW Avon 68,763 ** York Outer YH North Yorkshire 74,797 ** **new seat
Thursday 8 April 2010
One country, Two Parliaments, Two Elections - from the Electoral Reform Society
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment