STV for Lincolnshire and Rutland
And a wee bit of Leicestershire too
I was going to continue with Wales next.. but here we are on the other side of the island.
Lincolnshire isn’t a county much travelled through, and after 2024 is perhaps the most ‘blue’ county in the country, though the shade of blue varies.
Rutland doesn’t have the electorate for one constituency under FPTP. The boundaries commission sometimes places it with parts of Lincolnshire, more often with parts of Leicestershire. This time they excelled themselves and did some of both. but the main town outside the county in its constituency is Stamford in Lincolnshire, so it finds itself in one of my Lincolnshire STV seats.
Lincoln and Mid Lincolnshire (to elect 4 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Gainsborough; Lincoln; Louth and Horncastle; Sleaford and North Hykeham)
South Lincolnshire and Rutland (to elect 4 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Boston and Skegness; Grantham and Bourne; Rutland and Stamford; South Holland and The Deepings)
The Geography
Lincoln is the only place of any size, the only place to make up the bulk of one constituency. Other places like Gainsborough appear as a constituency name but that is a mostly rural seat. The county fits neatly into two 4 MP constituencies with a couple of explanations
My more northerly block here gets called ‘Mid’ because ‘North’ Lincolnshire is now part of a different county, in a different region.
My South Lincolnshire STV constituency stretches all the way over the the edge of Leicester city… for reasons mentioned above.
The Politics
To match the Urban/Rural mix in the ‘Mid’ constituency, Lincoln stands out as an island of red following a gain in 2024, and the Labour vote share did exceed 40%. The Conservatives held the other three but with a vote share in the 30s % after their vote share in each approximately halved. In 2019 they may well have provided 3 of the 4 MPs here; Now they could be certain of only 1, with one each going to Labour and Reform UK. The 4th would be very much up for grabs and depend on transfers.
In the South area, we come to our first ‘Reform’ 2024 win, and thee is little doubt they’d win one of the 4 STV seats here. The Conservative result is similar to in ‘Mid’; They held onto 3 FPTP seats but with vote shares not much more than half of 2019. They’d be good for 1 here for sure now and would start favourite for the spare one. Labour don’t have the vote from Lincoln here but their vote was about 20% across the area so they’d be in with a shout for 1 MP.
As with everywhere, my analysis is based on 2024 voting patterns which could well change under STV
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My musical interlude here was going to be the theme from Hi-di-Hi to celebrate Butlins at Skegness, but it seems the camp in that series was supposedly in Essex. Then I found that Bernie Taupin hails from the county