Scotland elects 59 of the seats in the UK parliament at Westminster. The most recent election to the UK parliament took place on the 12th of December The Conservatives were the largest party across the UK as a whole, forming a majority government. The current distribution of the Scottish seats is:. The following chart shows the seats won at each Westminster election since I was born as an arbitrary start point — it does not account for any changes that took place in the middle of a term.
Parties are displayed in their current seat order. Most voters will be familiar with how FPTP works. Scotland is divided into 59 constituencies each containing a roughly equal number of voters. Voters cast their ballot for a single candidate, and the candidate that wins the most votes wins the single seat available. The current set of Westminster boundaries have been in place since , when Scotland dropped from 72 constituencies down to The review is carried out by independent boundary commissioners in each part of the country according to a strict set of rules based on how big each seat should be in terms of population and geographical size.
Aside from island constituencies like Orkney and Shetland, which are protected, each seat should comprise between 69, and 77, voters. Only 18 of Scotland's current constituencies fit this quota, and only nine will be untouched by the review. It was announced in January that the quota for constituency size meant Scotland would have two fewer MPs than under previous boundaries. England would gain ten, while Wales would lose eight.
The proposals from the Boundary Commission for Scotland underline how this could work in practice, with one seat taken from the Glasgow area and another from the area covering Aberdeenshire, Moray and the Highlands. These are not the only changes planned, however, with "significant" alterations needed to adhere to the strict limits on the number of electors in each area and ensure fairness at the ballot box.
Prof Ailsa Henderson - one of the boundary commissioners - pointed out that Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross currently has almost 47, voters - while Linlithgow and East Falkirk has 88, She said this meant that "votes in small constituencies can be worth the equivalent of two votes in the larger constituency", adding: "If everyone is selecting representatives to the same legislature, but their votes are worth more based purely on where they live, then that is obviously a problem.
Redrawing the electoral map is a gloriously complicated business. The boundary commissioners have to sketch out new constituency lines across an incredibly nuanced framework of geographical features, population centres, council wards and historical communities. And, as the eight-week consultation will underline, they also have to think about people.
Past reviews have elicited a vast range of responses, from fury to incomprehension. People invest part of their personal identity into where they're from and indeed where they're not from, and are often suspicious of change. For example, the ultimately binned review attracted a deluge of comments from people in Perthshire and Fife who really didn't like the idea of sharing a constituency - one of whom threatened to leave the country altogether if the changes went through.
There will also be the usual predictable political posturing from parties seeking to paint the non-partisan exercise as some kind of gerrymandering. But at the end of the day, times change and populations are not static. At times the commissioners might have a difficult and seemingly thankless task on their hands - but they argue it is a necessary one to ensure our elections are fair.
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