With all the attention naturally focused on the awful Covid-19 death toll, the pathetic posturing of the DUP about the 11-plus and the astonishing news that Edwin Poots has at last discovered that Brexit is disastrous – there’s a slow learner – one item was pushed to the back. The north’s constituency boundaries are to be redrawn.
The Speaker’s Office made a number of announcements: the number of MPs stays at 650, the north is to keep 18 seats, and the number of voters in each constituency here will be 73,392 or as near as possible. Here’s where we get into very interesting territory. You may not know this but, needless to say, the north is exceptional in several ways as far as redrawing and voter registration goes and they’re not all desirable.
First, the NIO oversees the running of the Electoral Office here unlike in Scotland and Wales. As a notoriously partisan unionist body the NIO should have nothing to do with the Electoral Office. Pick any of the dreadful proconsuls of the last decade and you won’t have any difficulty listing their biased unionist statements. Responsibility should be devolved immediately.
Secondly, and here’s where you lot at the back need to pay attention, the 1986 Parliamentary Constituency Act contains a number of rules the north’s Electoral Commission must follow in drawing boundaries. The rules state there must be “fairness and consistency in terms of the size of the electorate” in each seat. It’s called the ‘parity principle’. Rule 5 provides a list of criteria to be adhered to, like geographical considerations and local ties that might be broken.
A certain amount of leeway is provided to cater for application of these rules, 5 per cent of the 73,392 quota, except, wait for it, uniquely in the north where Rule 7 can be applied which allows a constituency to deviate by 7 per cent; that is from 68,313 to 77,062. There’s no good reason for that, except of course that it made it easier for unionists to gerrymander. So why is it still there? Why are MPs here elected to the same parliament on a different basis from in Britain? Obviously if you’re in a constituency with the big number your vote carries less weight than a voter’s in the small constituency.
Thanks to a case brought to the Court of Appeal by a very smart west Belfast voter in 2019 this anomaly will be mitigated.
The court found in June this year that the Boundary Commission, after stating in their preliminary report that Rule 7 should not be applied, nevertheless in their final report applied it, but did not give any reasons for doing so. The outcome produced a constituency map remarkably similar to the DUP’s meticulously prepared submission. In a stunning victory for the west Belfast voter the court’s judgment completely stuffed the Boundary Commission. The court quashed their final report. More important, a commission in the future must give reasons for using Rule 7: that should be fun. You can feel judicial reviews coming on.
Much more needs to be done to reform the Electoral Office practice here, especially about registration where the office’s emphasis is on accuracy rather than completeness. The result of that obsession, mainly to make it as difficult as possible for postal and proxy votes, has meant thousands of people being deleted from the register over recent years. That applies mainly to people in precarious accommodation who move house or flat often and disproportionately favours stable, secure income voters.
The new boundaries won’t come into operation until the 2024 British general election, but the new boundaries must be in place by July 2023. Watch out for the DUP proposing North Belfast is extended to Carrickfergus and East Derry to Ballymoney, using Rule 7 of course. Only kidding, but bear in mind the Westminster constituencies form the basis for assembly constituencies, and as a consequence who is first minister.
