South Suffolk

UK Polling Report has produced a pretty amazing guide to the constituencies at the next election. Politics and statistics are two of my great loves and so this guide is providing hours of fun! The boundaries across England have been looked at and revised, and this new guide takes all these changes into account and estimates how the seats would have gone at the last election with the new boundaries. Obviously, I’m most interested in my own constituency, South Suffolk, currently Conservative.

Party	Result in 2005	Notional Result in 2005 with New Boundaries
Conservative	42.0% (20,471)	42.1% (20,569)
Liberal Democrats	28.5% (13,865)	28.4% (13,903)
Labour	24.5% (11,917)	24.5% (11,972)
UKIP	5.0% (2,454)	5.0% (2,461)

As you can see, the boundary changes have hardly affected my constituency at all. Each party gets a few more votes and the Lib Dems’ vote shares drops a tad. In all honesty I don’t think we’re going to win the seat. The Tories have won the seat every election since its creation in 1983 and given that the Tories are doing better in the opinion polls (and the Lib Dems doing not so well) I imagine the Tories will get an increased vote share in 2009, or whenever the election will be held. It’s a shame really: my part of Suffolk is a toss-up between the Tories and the Lib Dems at a local level, but the Tories always do better at general elections. Our local candidate, Kathy Pollard, is a good one (though Mum’s not too fond of her) and I think she’s do a good job as an MP.

I have no idea who’ll win the next election. I don’t think anyone does. All the polls seem to suggest that it’ll be a hung Parliament and I suspect that that’s what might happen. It’s like the nation doesn’t want Labour in power any more, but it’s not really sure that it wants the Tories back in either. That should be good news for us Lib Dems, but we’re not doing so well in the polls at the moment. Ah well... we've got another three years to boost our numbers.