Labour to lose 30 seats in shake-up to cut MPs
LABOUR’S woes deepened yesterday after the party was warned it stood to lose up to 30 seats in constituency boundary changes.
The Boundary Commission proposals for reducing the number of MPs could see the beleaguered party’s parliamentary ranks cut by 13 per cent.
It will add to the despair felt within the party which is being torn apart by in-fighting among Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and enemies.
Former shadow chancellor Ed Balls stoked tensions by accusing Mr Corbyn of pursuing an election-losing “Leftist utopian fantasy”.
Tense
He also lifted the lid on his own tense relations with former leader Ed Miliband and Labour’s “astonishingly dysfunctional” election campaign which cost him his seat.
In his memoirs, Speaking Out, published as he prepares to compete on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, he wrote: “Refusing to listen to the electorate has never been a winning formula, any more than Jeremy Corbyn thinking the volume of the cheering from your core supporters is a reliable guide to wider public opinion.
“Caution will not win the day; nor will Jeremy Corbyn’s Leftist utopian fantasy, devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives.” Mr Balls was also scathing about former leader Ed Miliband, who he said kept him “at a distance” in the run-up to the 2015 election and probably only spoke to him twice during the doomed fourweek campaign.
Mr Balls wrote: “That was astonishingly dysfunctional when I compare it to how Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] worked.”
He told of his “disbelief, astonishment, fury and sympathy” on hearing Mr Milband had made the “catastrophic” and electorally disastrous mistake of forgetting to mention the Tory’s budget deficit in his conference speech.
He also accused the former leader of refusing pleas to address the issue of immigration control because he feared putting off former Lib Dem voters.
But Mr Balls admitted being involved in previous Labour mistakes while an aide to Chancellor Gordon Brown.
This included raising the state pension one year by just 75p a week and selling British gold just before world prices jumped.
Tensions in Labour were underlined yesterday when shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry unleashed a furious denunciation of Labour’s ruling hierarchy.
Ms Thornberry said she was “disgusted” at ultimately unsuccessful attempts by “the party hierarchy” to “quash” Mr Corbyn’s leadership by requiring him to get MPs’ backing to stand for re-election as leader.
The squabbles continued as the Boundary Commission prepares to publish proposals to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600 in time for the 2020 general election.
Conservative peer and boundary expert Robert Hayward forecast the Tories would lose between 10 and 15 seats – about 4.5 per cent of their total.
Hopes
But Labour stands to lose between 25 and 30, or up to 13 per cent of their ranks.
The 200 Labour-held seats that would be affected overall represent more than 85 per cent of party supporters.
The uneven result is partly because a high proportion of Labour stronghold seats have fewer than the 75,000 voters that each constituency will have following the overhaul.
Previous published analysis has shown that the process will further boost Tory hopes by putting more Conservative-leaning suburban voters into previously overwhelmingly Labour city seats.