STV for Gloucestershire
and so, bringing South West region to completion
Gloucestershire borders Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, both in different Electoral regions - of all the counties in the South West it’s the most connected to the rest of England .
The area covered here includes most of South Gloucestershire, that has been a Unitary Authority for a while and covers area just outside Bristol which could have been suburbs of that city. It also includes a little of North Wiltshire that was included in a Gloucestershire constituency in the last review. That small part of South Gloucestershire not included was covered in the last post.
Cheltenham and Gloucester (to elect 4 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Cheltenham; Forest of Dean; Gloucester; Tewkesbury)
Gloucestershire South and The Cotswolds (to elect 5 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Filton and Bradley Stoke; North Cotswolds; South Cotswolds; Stroud; Thornbury and Yate)
Geography
The population of Gloucestershire is not evenly distributed. That’s true of most counties, but here most people live in Cheltenham, Gloucester and the area around Bristol. In between and surrounding are the beautiful countryside of the Cotswolds and the less well known Forest of Dean, also well worth a visit.
Cheltenham and Gloucester must always provide a headache for the Boundary Commission because both are worth about one and a quarter FPTP constituencies. Tewkesbury constituency takes in the leftovers from both Cheltenham and Gloucester, along with its own town. This makes it a good fit here. I did wonder if the Forest of Dean should be included in the name. Its an area without much degree of Freedom for boundary changes, hemmed in by the border with Wales and the upper Severn estuary.
The rest of the county, plus North Wiltshire, gives us the other constituency of 5 MPs, covering the two areas of the Cotswolds and the near-Bristol Suburbs like Filton and Kingswood.
Politics
The Conservative Party held all nine of these seats before the 2024 election. Now they hold one. In my Cheltenham and Gloucester STV constituency they lost all four, two each to labour and the Liberal Democrats. The lost of Cheltenham was the least surprising but had one of the lower swings away from them - Moderate Alex Chalk only lost 12% of his vote. But they retained 2nd place across the board and only lost Forest of Dean by a whisker. Anti-Conservative voters gravitated to the party most likely, but here is a case of the Conservatives losing out to FPTP. Under STV, all three parties would take a seat, with the fourth up for grabs. Reform UK, who got their average mid-teens here, could be in with a shout.
The South and Cotswolds area also saw two Conservative losses to Labour and two to the Liberal Democrats, but there are five constituencies here and the fifth they did hold onto. Again I’d have to predict one each for the main three parties with two now up for grabs. With 5 places available that should be of more benefit to Reform UK to pick up one but they were running a little below their national average here of low double figures. The Greens would have a shout at picking one up too. They are quite strong in Stroud and as I keep saying, voting patterns could easily change under STV.
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I had to do a bit of digging to find a musical interlude for this page, but quite quickly found Joe Meek comes from the county