ConservativeHome's Seats & Candidates blog

Poll boosts Labour hopes of ousting Heather Wheeler MP on back of Siemens trains deal

By Matthew Barrett
^{Follow Matthew on Twitter}

Derby County football players recently wore 'Save Our Rail Industry' T-shirts in solidarity with local Bombardier workers.

Survation, for the Daily Mirror/Progressive Polling, has new polling out today, showing the impact of the Government's decision not to award a contract to train manufacturer Bombardier. As we reported in early July:

"Last month the Canadian-owned train manufacturer Bombardier lost a tendering process to build 1,200 railway carriages for the Bedford to Brighton 'Thameslink' service. The winner of that bidding process was the German-based Siemens. Today it's been announced that 1,400 jobs will be lost at Bombardier's Derby factories - many of them hi-skilled engineering posts."

Rob Hayward: The boundary reviews. What do we know?

Rob Hayward is an elections analyst and the former Conservative MP for Kingswood. He has been kindly keeping ConHome readers up-to-date with the review. See his previous contributions here and here.

A lot is likely to be said in coming months about alternative plans for the required boundary reviews in relation to each county and country, however given the scale of the change that will arise from the forthcoming changes it is probably worth setting out the basic ground rules which will apply.

Reductions

Across the UK there will be 50 fewer MPs elected at the 2015 General Election than 2010. The reductions will be as follows:

• England -31
• N Ireland -2
• Scotland -7
• Wales -10