Boundary Review: Massive changes for Somerset

The long awaited report from the Boundary Commission has been published today, I should be fishing in the Channel Islands and unable to comment, but Hurricane Katya has forced us to postpone for 24 hrs and so there is no escape!!!!

However, the afore mentioned report has thrown up quite a few changes to the local Parliamentary Constituencies, so I thought I would just comment on the proposals so far. As part of the coalition agreement to hold a referendum on the voting process earlier this year, leading to the resounding No vote against the Lib Dem Alternative Vote proposal, the government pledged to reduce the number of MP's in Parliament to 600 from the current 650 and at the same time even up the sizes of each constituency in terms of voter numbers.

The last Labour government had successfully gerrymandered the constituencies to the point where they had a 6% benefit in their favour, in other words, the Conservatives would have to get at least 6% more of the popular vote, just to remain level with Labour in terms of seats!!!
The new proposals eliminate this inbuilt bias in favour of Labour, and means that all seats, except those on the Isle of Wight, have an electorate in the 73,000 to 77,000 range. Previously some Labour strongholds only had 40,000 voters and some Conservative seats had over 100,000, hardly fair I think you would agree.

So what does this mean locally? Well overall, the number of seats in this immediate region remains the same at 10, the South West as a whole loses 2 seats. However the boundaries of the seats have changed radically.

The new "North East Somerset" seat includes Shepton Mallet, Frome, Midsomer Norton, Radstock and Paulton, which is in effect part of the old Wells seat, part of the Somerton and Frome seat, both in Mendip, and part of Jacob Rees Mogg's seat in Bath and North East Somerset (BANES).

The rest of the old Somerton and Frome seat is now in a new "Wincanton and Glastonbury" seat, which includes Somerton and Ilminster. Finally the old Wells seat has changed radically, losing both Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury/Street and gaining parts of North Somerset to compensate.

Further afield Taunton Deane loses many of its surrounding villages and is proposed to be renamed Taunton, Bridgwater will be amalgamated with parts of West Somerset, leaving very little as it was.

These proposals are now subject to a 12 week consultation process, however, with the amount of work that has gone into this review, I would suspect and changes to boundaries will be fairly minor, though changes to Constituency names more likely. It will be interesting to see how our local MP's act over the coming months, if the complexion of the new seat doesn't look favourable, you will see a number trying to jump ship elsewhere.

Right that’s my lot until next week, The sign on the door says “Gone Fishin’ “and this time I mean it.

More woes for Labour.

Things have been far from well with Her Majesty’s Opposition for many years, lack of leadership, wrong leaders elected, thieving MP’s sent to prison, a new scandal gets added to the increasing list almost daily. Then there is the political positioning, having taken a gigantic lurch to the left with the appointment of Brown, followed by the hapless Milliband, they find themselves on the wrong side of just about every argument from the Economy, to Human Rights, to Education and this week Policing and Sentencing. The shadow Foreign Secretary managed to jump onto the wrong side of the Libiyan bandwagon and Milliband has the less than enviable ability to jump in with both feet on the wrong side on just about every occasion.

Then just when the Labour party thought it couldn’t get much worse, the former Chancellor and traitor, Alistair Darling, comes up with the obligatory book charting his time as puppet to Brown. The explosive revelations that Gordon Brown was a psychopathic bully and control freak won’t come as any surprise, but the internecine warfare going on within the party is now exposed for the rest of the world to see.

All the way through the financial crash, that was made much worse by the already profligate spending put in place by Brown when he was Chancellor under Blair, the Labour government were more interested in fighting each other than they were in trying to sort out the problems of the country.

There was absolutely no trust between PM and chancellor, to the extent that Brown’s chief bully boy’s wife was sent to the treasury to keep an eye on Darling, what a state of affairs. Smug thug Ed Balls, chief deficit denier, and his pernicious wife Yvette Cooper, spent most of their time scheming and plotting to oust Darling as chancellor, only to find that levering Balls into the position would have been so unpopular within the Labour ranks, it would have toppled the already mortally wounded Brown.

So they were left in a position where the Chancellor was too weak to introduce the measures that were desperately needed and a Prime Minister too weak to sack his chancellor, what a sorry state of affairs!!

The truth of the disastrous Labour years is beginning to emerge a piece at a time, Blair describing dealing with Brown as “like having a tooth extracted without anaesthetic”, the decision to make Brown PM was not taken because he was the best man for the job, but instead because he plotted and schemed against anyone that may have stood against him, with Balls foremost in the scheming stakes.

Then after choosing the wrong brother as leader, and an innumerate as Chancellor, we get Balls back at the helm once again, pulling the strings and getting his own way.

And what a tour de force he has been, in the few short months that he has been shadow Chancellor, Labour have reversed every policy that they had proposed to try to deal with the huge deficit that they left behind.  The last Darling plan was for the deficit to be halved over the lifetime of the parliament, the coalition plan is more ambitious than that; however the difference between the two plans is fairly marginal. For every £8 of savings promoted by the coalition, the former Labour plan would have saved £7, however now, Labour have no plan whatsoever to deal with the huge debt mountain that the country is struggling under, in the last week, the final proposed saving of 12% in the police has been dropped.

So Balls continues his “too far too fast “mantra about the coalition deficit reduction plan, without any sort of plan at all to deal with it. His course of no action would mean that this country would lose its credit rating, borrowing would be more expensive, and we would rapidly find ourselves in the same position as Greece and Portugal having to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout. The man has no shame and no ideas.

So where are we with the current Labour party, its donors have deserted it in droves, it is more or less bankrupt and only survives because the Unions pump money into it so that they can hold the strings of their puppet MP’s, they have no policies worth repeating, and the internecine warfare continues.  They now face a cap on donations, which if implemented by Parliament, will limit how much any Union can bribe their MP’s with. Each individual union member will have to donate separately, and we will easily see just how small their support is when that comes through.

Just to cap things off, we hear that former MP and Blair babe Jaqui Smith, possibly the worst Home Secretary in history, whose husband put porn films on her expenses, is not satisfied with fleecing the taxpayer to the tune of £116,000 by claiming that her sisters spare bedroom was her “main residence” so she could claim for all the expenses for her actual home in Redditch, has been found to have invited convicted felons into her home, whilst serving prison sentences, to carry out some light re-decoration, free of charge of course!

Perhaps they watched some of her husband's porn collection while they were there!