Boundary Review: Kent

Kent is one of only two counties in the South East to lose a constituency in this review (the other being Hampshire).

Every constituency in the county bar Ashford and Folkestone & Hythe is below the electoral average and those two are substantially above it. That means that it's very unlikely that many of the county's seats will survive unaltered - in the option above only Sittingbourne & Sheppey remains unchanged at all.

Because the Conservatives hold every seat in Kent right now - and all pretty comfortably too - the seat that's going will be a Tory net one. But as with most southern battlegrounds where Labour was wiped out last May, the Conservatives will be in the game of what in the US is called incumbency protection, while Labour strategists will be doing all they can to make some seats a bit easier without pushing others held until 2010 too far beyond reach.

The same dynamics that determine who is likely to represent a seat anywhere apply here: the more urban, more densely-populated a seat the more chance Labour has; the more rural or suburban, the far stonger are the Conservatives' prospects. The thing about Kent is it's quite easy to draw seats both ways. For example, both Thanet seats are Conservative-held at present because they both take in more Labour urban areas around Margate, Ramsgate and Cliftonville, but also rural Tory strongholds like Sandwich (in the case of South) and Thanet Villages in the case of North.

An urban Margate and Ramsgate seat would at worst be highly marginal and may well even have stayed Labour in 2010; with knock-on (favourable) consequences for seats like Dover (that could, as one example, be combined with Folkestone to create a Labour-Lib Dem marginal).

Tonbridge & Malling is the most likely candidate for abolition (though Canterbury ought not be discounted either); not least because Sir John Stanley MP is arguably long overdue for retirement and a prominent southern "bedblocker" as young Tory aspirants style such parliamentarians. On the idea above, Tonbridge goes into a new Kent Weald seat - almost a doughnut surrounding a much more compact (and competitive) Maidstone seat; while Malling goes in with Aylesford.

Along the Kent coast, Dartford would become a lot more marginal if the rural ward it gets from Sevenoaks is replaced by Swanley. Or it could be made more Conservative by adding in even more rural Sevenoaks. Likewise, Gravesham becomes very slightly better for Labour (though not much) if it's brought up to size by taking a couple of urban (but Tory voting) Dartford wards, rather than stretching south towards Aylesford. Both Rochester & Strood and Gillingham will also probably become a bit better for Labour as they need to expand into Chatham, but the Conservative majorities here are huge at the moment - far more than any boundary change could overcome.

And therein lies the underlying message that will run through the boundary review in the south: ultimately Labour cannot rely on the shape of constituencies to win: so-called "unwinnable" seats like Gillingham fell in 1997 because southern voters felt Labour was the party for them; and they stayed with the party until 2010.

There is not a Conservative flood-defence plan in existence that could stop a repeat of that electoral avalanche if Labour is again speaking the language of southern voters. Likewise, successfully piecing together more Labour-favourable constituencies through this process will not see the re-election of Labour MPs in Kent unless as a party we get the message right again. The results of May's local elections (with a very few exceptions) tell us that that process has barely begun.