Super-sized voters

Some UK MPs serve 51,000 voters and some over 100,000.

All voters are not the same. Some voters living in a marginal Scottish seat are much more important within Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system than a voter in a safe English seat.

‘Super-sized voter’ status does not depend upon fast food gross-outs but on two features of the voter’s local parliamentary constituency - its size and its marginality.

The varying size of Britain’s parliamentary constituencies

The average voter living in England is a MiniMe compared to the super-sized voters of Wales or Scotland. The average size of an English constituency is nearly 70,000. But 11,000 fewer residents of Wales and 17,000 fewer residents of Scotland are required to elect an MP. This gives Wales and Scotland many more voices in Parliament per head of population.

Various Tory politicians have vowed to correct this bias – not least because the smaller Welsh and Scottish constituencies tend to elect very, very few Conservative MPs. Getting Britain's 659 MPs to reduce their number – the only tenable option – would be a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, however.

The marginality of constituencies

The other factor determining super-sized status is marginality of the local constituency. There are only 51,000 electors in David Blunkett’s Sheffield Brightside constituency – under half as many as live in the Isle of Wight constituency. But the votes of the Isle of Wight’s 103,000 electors are more potent because it is a marginal constituency, whereas Mr Blunkett sits on a huge Labour majority.

The super-super-super-sized voters

But voters wanting their vote to count most of all do not have to move themselves and their families to ultra-marginal seats like Cheadle (LibDem majority of just 33 in 2001). The most super-sized of all voters are members of constituency selectorates. The MP for many ‘safe’ seats is not decided by local voters. In seats like Tory-held Huntingdon or Tony Blair’s Sedgefield, local voters can be relied upon to elect almost anyone that the local party chooses to pick as their candidate. Real super-sized status depends, therefore, on being one of the local party members that turn up once every few years, at a local village hall or working men’s club, to select their candidates. In every constituency these super-sized voters are numbered in tens or hundreds – rather than thousands.

Comments

[Cllr Iain Lindley]

Editor surely the Scottish section of this was out-of-date before it was even written, due to the Westminster boundary changes introduced this year?

If the Scottish average is lower now, it is only because of the geographical necessity of having smaller constituencies in the isolated northern islands.

The Welsh discrepancy still remains, however.