My Constituency: Folkestone and Hythe

To start my political education, I thought I would do some research into my constituency.

I thought this would helped quite considerably by the My Constituency app provided by the UK Parliament. However it is one of the worst designed apps I've ever attempted to use, almost impossible to get any information from (at least the Android phone version).

Much more useful was the Voter Power Index which ranks your constituency against others to see how powerful your vote is.

According to this, Folkestone and Hythe has 82,000 registered voters, compared to an average of 69,178. The seat has been Conservative since 1950, which helps define it as a non-marginal seat as it is not expected to change hands and in the 2010 election, 49.4% of votes were for losing candidates. All of this the website adds together to give a voter power score of 0,152, This means that a vote in my constituency is only worth 15% of a vote elsewhere. The UK average score is just over double at 0.305.

The average voters per seat actually varies across different parts of the UK. The Office of National Statistics says that the averages per country are:

England: 72,400
Scotland: 69,000
Northern Ireland: 66,800
Wales: 56,800

So our seat has a higher number of voters compared to the average for England as well. The Boundary Commission for England is an independent body which reviews constituency boundaries to recommend any changes prior to each general election.

Prior to the boundary setting, the four National boundary commissions agree based on a formula how many MPs each country is entitled to. The Parliamentary Constituency Act 1986 sets out the criteria for defining the boundaries.

There is set compulsory criteria regarding the size (no more than 13,000 square kilometres) and population (the electorate must be within 5% of the UK electoral quota) of each constituency, although there are exceptions in the outlying islands for practical reasons.

The Conservatives have suggested that they want to reform the boundaries so that each constituency will have the same number of voters, although this has been criticised as being too radical.

My constituency was created for the 1950 general election which was won overall by the Labour party led by Clement Atlee with 46.1% of the vote and 50.4% of the seats. Since the constituency was created, it has been held by the Conservatives with 4 different MPs - Harry Mackeson (1950-1959), Sir Albert Costain (1959-1983), Michael Howard (1983-2010), Damian Collins (2010-present).

The graph below shows the share of the votes per party at each of the elections. What we can see is that in 12 of the 17 elections, the Conservative candidate has received over 50% of the votes cast. Their lowest vote share was 39% in 1997 when the Liberal Democrats received 27%, Labour 25% and the Referendum Party 8% of the vote.

The smallest majority was in the following election, in 2001, when they still had 5,907 more votes than the Liberal Democrats.

Other than that, it is clear to see why it is classified as a safe Conservative seat.

Looking at the stats behind the election turnouts, as summarised in the graph below, we can see that the turnout percentage (the blue line) has been on a downward trend since the 83% turnout in 1950 when the constituency was created, down to 66% in the 2015 election. Whilst the turnout percentage has been decreasing, the total turnout has actually increased from 41,000 to 55,000 due to the increasing size of the constituency (from 49,000 to 84,000).

This raises the discussion of proportional representation. I have never voted Conservative and therefore my voice has never been heard. Is this feeling of impotence what has driven the reduction in voting turnouts? Perhaps. I also feel that a lack of engagement in the political system and distrust of politicians may have had more of an impact.

I do get annoyed when I read pieces which demonise those on the left for attempting to be heard by protesting, or for being bad losers. I accept that the largest number of people (£11.3m) voted for the Conservative party. However, this is only around a quarter of the population and now they have a majority government. The 75% of people who aren't represented by this government deserve to be able to have a say in how our country is run, and demonising them for attempting to do so is making a mockery of living in a democracy.

But this is a discussion for another time, as at the moment, I am just trying to understand the makeup of my constituency.

This has been a look at the voting trends in Folkestone & Hythe. I will also be looking at the social breakdown of the constituency in the near future, probably using Constituency Explorer to mine for data.