Boundary Changes What Wales might look like.

The organisation Democratic Audit has Looked at the potential outcome of the ConLib government plans to cut he number of constituencies in the UK. This is not definitive analysis and the actual  result from the boundary commission due to b published in the Autumn nay be quite  different but they have used the same criteria.

The first interesting thing that emerges is that the biggest losers may well be the Liberal Democrats.

It is ironic that if the AV referendum had succeeded and if the Libdems were to poll anything like the 20%+ vote they have come to expect in a General Election then they would have probably been by far the biggest gainers in Westminster seats. However the plan to cut the number of MP's was coupled with the AV legislation but was not subject to the referendum. So even if the Libdems do not  suffer the same meltdown in votes that they had in the Scottish and Welsh elections they are likely to regret allowing the Conservatives to place this alongside the AV bill.

The analysis by Democratic Audit  also using the Boundary Commissions attempts to give us a possible likelihood of what the new Welsh constituencies may look like.

This of course is based on what would the result have been if the seats had been fought on these boundaries and the same %vote for each party at the  2010 election but it does give us some indication of what the future Welsh Electoral Map for Westminster may look like.

BlogMenai has added a useful critique of the analysis which is well worth looking at (you can use goggle translate if your Welsh like mine is shamefully not up to reading it directly).

As I have said this is largely an hypothesis and it may well see a big difference when we vote again in 2014. Or  we may be voting earlier as the Libdem wake up to the fact that even if they overcome the current toxic effect of being coalition with the Tories and they recovered the percentage of the vote they received in 2010 they are still likely to lose nearly a quarter of their current seats. Indeed in the next few months this may well be the biggest strain on the coalition. However I don't think the public will regard a stand purely on the Libdems self interest to kindly