Bound, But Not Gagged

The whole of the existing Lanchester ward is to be transferred into the parliamentary constituency of North Durham on no grounds whatever, but so cut up for local government purposes that Maiden Law will be in Consett North for no apparent reason. The bus will leave this newly single-member ward as you left Lanchester for Maiden Law, but re-enter it as you passed from Maiden Law into Burnhope.

Yet the Boundary Commission has also gone through with its madcap scheme to move the Lanchester ward in its present form into the North Durham parliamentary constituency, of which it would therefore comprise one tenth of the population but more than half of the land area. This is an act of pure partisan spite.

As is the abolition of the North West Durham seat. That is a shameful capitulation to the right-wing Labour machine's petulant insistence that if it could no longer have this seat, then the seat itself must cease to exist. The failure to open the Labour selection process here suggested inside knowledge of the Commission's machinations. Our boundaries might always have had a sense of "Oh, well, what else could we have done?", but now we are to be split four ways. Yes, four.

The proposed new constituency of Blaydon and Consett is a crude gerrymander that should have been laughed out, although the considerable body of Independents in the Consett area, as well as in the Burnopfield and Dipton that are ridiculously going to be put into this thing, should give the smug and entitled Labour Party a run for its money, either in one of their own persons, or behind a Conservative candidate who might very well be Richard Holden.

The redrawn Bishop Auckland constituency will not only be ludicrously large, but it will not contain North West Durham wards that, if this carry on had to be done at all, would belong in that rather than in the Durham City to which they have been reallocated. And here in Lanchester, because no one ever knows what to do with us, we are to be put into North Durham, which is of a piece with many decades of official attempts to force Lanchester people to go to Stanley for things. That is nothing against Stanley. But it is not naturally our town. Why is there such a determination to treat it as if it were?

Although we have not yet finished, some of us have spent many years fighting very hard to restore even part of the situation whereby Lanchester was well-served by public transport. The buses to and from Consett, which are from and to Durham, run twice as often as the Stanley buses during the day, and run later in the evenings. Distances on the Internet are as the crow flies; anyone with any local knowledge will take it as a given that in practice it took less long to reach either Consett or Durham from Lanchester than it took to reach Stanley.

The previous Labour administration on the County Council cut the buses as an expression of its Blairite belief that economic, social, cultural and political life should be strictly reserved for the able-bodied affluent. Politically, Lanchester has been told that again by being placed in a parliamentary constituency that contained neither Durham city centre nor Consett town centre.

Moreover, the present Lanchester ward includes Castleside, which is an integral part of the Consett area, and the North Durham constituency is not centred on Stanley, but on Chester-le-Street, which is not, and has no cause to be, directly linked to Lanchester. It beggars belief that, being in this ward as presently constituted, Castleside will not be in a constituency with the word "Consett" in its name, but rather in one that was centred on Chester-le-Street.

At best, although that would still be saying almost nothing, Burnhope should be in North Durham, Castleside should be in Blaydon and Consett, and Lanchester should be either in that or in City of Durham. The Burnopfield and Dipton ward, however, is indeed to be in Consett and Blaydon, despite having been in North Durham in the past.

The addition of the Lanchester ward is the only proposed change to North Durham, yet Electoral Calculus claims that that would quadruple the Labour majority from 4,742 to 16,077, higher than it had been at any of the last four General Elections, with Labour wildly improbably predicted to win every ward. Look them up. If Labour intended to run a campaign smugly based on that, then I would take great pleasure in giving it a run for its money despite the near-total lack of mine. By the way, I do not know why my lowly 414 votes are blamed, although not by Laura herself, for the defeat of Laura Pidcock. Richard's majority was 1,144, and 1,173 people voted Green.

At Blaydon and Consett, the predicted Labour majority is 15,265, with a clean sweep of wards the suggestion of which is downright laughable, since it bears no resemblance to the results in Consett over the last 20 years. With the support of the Independents, and assuming a Liberal Democrat paper campaign, then Richard, whose office is already prominent in Consett town centre, would stand every chance against an MP whose office was prominent in the centre of Blaydon.