For part two of our series of posts on the Boundary Commission’s proposals for Parliamentary constituencies in the East Midlands, we turn to Leicestershire and Rutland. The current state of play is shown in the map below.
As described in the post on Northamptonshire, Leicestershire cedes 21,266 electors to the Daventry constituency in the proposals. This leaves the county a little light to retain its current ten constituencies under the rule that only allows a 5% variation from the 76,641 average, so make up for this 33,186 voters come in from Nottinghamshire, from the current Rushcliffe constituency.
The map below shows the proposals, with the current seats in green and the proposals in black. Beneath the map, there is a description of the impact of the changes for each of the proposed seats.
Blaby
Based on current South Leicestershire: loses 12 wards to Daventry and 3 wards to Leicester West, gains 4 wards from Charnwood and 3 wards from Bosworth
The constituency name of Blaby, probably most famous as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson’s seat, disappeared in 2010. Now that its sucessor seat, South Leicestershire, has been carved up that name returns.
South Leicestershire is rock solid Tory: its MP Andrew Robathan sits on a majority of 15,524 (28.4%) over the Liberal Democrats.
South Leicestershire takes 73% of its voters from Blaby district and 27% from Harborough district. It is this Harborough element that transfers wholesale to Daventry. Three wards from Blaby district are moved to make up the numbers in Leicester West. This leaves a rump of 43,490 electors. Added to this are the remaining wards from Blaby district that are currently in the Charnwood constituency, around Glenfield. A further 19,000 voters are then brought in from the southern edge of the Bosworth constituency around the small town of Earl Shilton and Hinckley’s suburb of Burbage.
These changes help the Lib Dems a little: Burbage is good ground for them and they are squeezed out in the Blaby wards transferred to Leicester West. The seat should remain reasonably safe for Robathan though. Our projection of the 2010 results based on these new boundaries is set out below:
Harborough
Unchanged constituency
Only 43% of the voters in the constituency called Harborough actually live in Harborugh district. The remainder come from Oadby and Wigston district, a cluster of Leicester’s suburbs stretching south east from Leicester’s racecourse.
Oadby and Wigston council is run by the Liberal Democrats, whilst the Harborough parts, including the town of Market Harborough itself, are Conservative. It was marginal between those parties in 2005, although that gap widened in 2010. The results last time were:
Rutland and Melton
Unchanged constituency
Rutland and Melton is the safe Tory constituency held by the diminutive Alan Duncan, the libertarian MP who had to return 4 grand in Parliamentary expenses for gardening.
The seat is largely rural, covering all the equally diminutive county of Rutland together with a swathe of eastern Leicestershire, including the Vale of Belvoir. It is also a great place for food production, giving the world the pies of Melton Mowbray and Shilton cheese.
No changes have been proposed to its boundaries. The results last time round were:
Loughborough
Unchanged constituency
Loughborough is a Con-Lab marginal, encompassing not only the university town of Loughborough but the town of Shepshed on the other side of the M1 and surrounding villages.
No changes have been proposed. The result in 2010 was:
Leicester East
Unchanged constituency
In 1983, Leicester East was the Conservatives’ safest seat in Leicester, held by hang’em and flog’em zealot Peter Bruinvels. Labour’s Keith Vaz won it back in 1987 and it is now Labour’s safest seat in the city.
Leicester East is the most strongly Asian seat of the three in the city: almost half its electors are Asian and only 37% describe themselves as Christian.
The result last time around was:
Leicester South
Unchanged constituency
We covered this seat in a lot more detail in the posts for last year’s by-election: here, here and here. The result below is from the 2010 general election – Labour’s margin was larger in that by-election.
Leicester West
Three wards added from South Leicestershire
Leicester West is the more white working class seat in the city. Other than 1931, it has elected a Labour MP in every election since 1922.
However, it is now Labour’s most marginal seat in Leicester. Labour only had a majority of 4,017 (11.2%) in 2010.
It is also the smallest seat in Leicester, with an electorate of only 65,432, and so it needs additional voters to hit the minimum threshold of 72,810. The Boundary Commission has opted to stretch the seat out to take three wards from Blaby district.
This makes some sense as it marries Braunstone town (in Blaby) with Braunstone estate in Braunstone Park ward in Leicester. It has a small electoral impact, but it is minor as the Braunstone wards are where Labour is strongest in Blaby – last year Labour won six of the seven council seats in these wards.
Our projection of the 2010 results based on the proposed boundaries are:
Mid Leicestershire
Based on Charnwood: loses four wards to Blaby, gains three wards from Bosworth
Stephen Dorrell’s Charnwood seat takes in an arc of wealthy towns and villages north of Leicester, and is named after both the Charnwood Forest in the north west of the constituency and the local district council.
It currently includes four wards from Blaby district, which will now join the seat of that name under the proposals. To make up for this loss, three rural wards come in from Bosworth.
Despite the proposed seat actually covering a bit more of Charnwood Forest than the current seat, the Boundary Commission have opted to rename it the more prosaic, if more readily identifiable, Mid Leicestershire.
The proposals will not make much change to the Conservative lead here. Charnwood had a Tory majority of 15,029 (28.1%). Our projection of the 2010 results based on the proposed boundaries are:
Bosworth
Loses three wards to Blaby and three wards to Mid Leicestershire, gains ten wards from North West Leicestershire
‘Bosworth’ is a slightly odd name for this constituency. The largest town in the current seat is Hinckley, and the local district is called Hinckley and Bosworth. Market Bosworth itself has a population of only 2,000, compared to Hinckley’s of over 40,000. Historians’ love of the battle where Richard III lost his crown to the even more despotic and unpleasant Henry VII still seems to hold sway in the latest proposals.
Bosworth was held by Labour between 1945 and 1970, but has been Conservative ever since. It is now the Liberal Democrats, who run the local council, that are in second place, cutting the Tory lead to 5,032 votes (9.3%) in 2010.
The proposals trim around the edges of the seat, handing three Toryish rural wards to Mid Leicestershire, and the Conservative small town of Earl Shilton and more Lib Dem inclined Hinckley suburb of Burbage to Blaby.
To make up the numbers, the seat now stretches northwards along the western edge of the county to include Ashby-de-la-Zouch from the North West Leicestershire constituency. That seat is also Conservative, but was held by Labour between 1997 and 2010. Ashby has Conservative councillors, although some of the surrounding old mining villages return Labour councillors.
Despite these significant changes, the seat still gets called Bosworth rather than say Hinckley and Ashby.
This merging of a Con-Lib seat and a Con-Lab one serve to open up that Conservative margin a bit more. Our projection of the 2010 results based on the proposed boundaries is:
Coalville and Keyworth
Based on North West Leicestershire: loses ten wards to Bosworth, gains ten wards from Rushcliffe
Labour held North West Leicestershire between 1997 and 2010, but lost it by a fairly hefty 7,511 votes (14.5%) to the Conservatives in that year (not helped by the death of its Labour MP David Taylor in late 2009). Its marginal status comes from its combination of former mining areas (such as Coalville) and more conservative rural territory, including rock dinosaur territory Castle Donington.
The seat gets split almost in half in the proposals, with the larger eastern part around Coalville holding 55% of the electors.
This is now linked to the southernmost part of Nottinghamshire, with 33,186 electors coming over the county boundary from Ken Clarke’s Rushcliffe seat. This takes in the large villages of Keyworth, Ruddington, East Leake and Cotgrave, and reaches the fringes of Nottingham’s southern suburb of West Bridgford.
Cotgrave and Ruddington are close between the Conservatives and Labour, whilst Keyworth is a Conservative-Lib Dem tussle. Over all though, the Tories dominate in the parts of Rushcliffe coming in.
All this makes Coalville and Keyworth a fairly safe Conservative seat, although winnable by Labour in a 1997 style landslide. Our projection of the 2010 results based on the proposed boundaries is:
Summary
The summary map below shows the margins, based on the 2010 results, in these proposed constituencies. No seats would change hands, but Bosworth and Coalville & Keyworth are both a lot safer for the Conservatives than their predecessors whilst Leicester West becomes a little more marginal. Labour is likely to focus its efforts in the county on winning back Loughborough.
HERO
PRAT
VILLAIN
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Bruinvels’ 1983 majority was under a thousand, so “safest seat in Leicester”, whilst no doubt mathematically true, is perhaps a tad misleading.
As to Bosworth, I don’t think the Commission are that fussed about names. If there’s clearly a local demand to rename it, that’ll probably happen. The Commissioners were probably influenced by the fact that there’s been a seat called Bosworth for nearly a century (if you believe Wikipedia, that is…)
Thanks Mike.
My point on Leicester East was really to point out the swap in position of Leicester East and West as safest and least safe constituency and the role of the ethnic make up in both seats in this. I agree that Leicester East was far from being a safe Tory seat in 1983.
On the Bosworth name, it might be one of those things that people aren’t that worked up about locally, although they did press for Hinckley to be acknowledged in the district’s name. Whether this still holds with the addition of Ashby-de-la-Zouch remains to be seen.
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