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A NEW GOVERNMENT IS BORN
27 May 2010
I would like to thank all those who voted for me on the 6th May for their support. I am delighted to be able to serve the people of South West Bedfordshire again in this new Parliament. It was a great honour to get 52.8% of the votes cast and to double my majority to over 16,000 and I am really grateful for that vote of confidence. I would also like to thank all my staff who work incredibly hard to keep up with the casework that pours into my office on a daily basis. It is only because of their efforts that I can take up the concerns of local people.
The last three weeks have been a real rollercoaster for our country. Thursday the 6th May seemed to stretch out over the next five days as we did not know who was going to govern our country over that time. On Monday the 10th and Tuesday 11th May it seemed that Labour would stay in power in spite of the Conservatives achieving a higher share of the vote than Labour did in 2005. I remember remonstrating very strongly with three Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tuesday morning on just this point.
I think that there is a very serious issue involved here. In my view, we need an absolute political convention that the party leader who gets the highest share of the vote, becomes Prime Minister, either of a minority government or of a coalition. I was receiving very angry emails from constituents about Labour retaining Downing Street and I think there would have been political protests, the like of which we have never seen before, had this come to pass.
A large part of the reason why vote share does translate directly into seats in Parliament is because of the wildly differing numbers of constituents in each constituency. My constituency is in the top 20% in the UK by number of constituents at 77,500. The two Luton seats have only 65,000 and the Milton Keynes seats are close to 90,000. The smallest constituency in the country has under 22,000 constituents and the largest has 110,000 having over five times more constituents than the smallest.
These differences in constituency size are not only profoundly distorting our democracy, but also very unfair to constituents and MPs. If your MP has five times more constituents than another then he or she has less time for your case. The new government will take action to equalise constituency sizes and this is urgently needed.
Our top focus now, after the war in Afghanistan, must be to boost enterprise and to boost jobs as nearly a million young people are not in work, education or training. This is urgent locally and nationally. I want Central Bedfordshire to do everything possible to get businesses into the area and help those here to grow. We need the A5-M1 link bypass to help our whole area and I will speak in the public enquiry in its favour. I am glad that we will work to strengthen family life. I am also delighted that we are no longer being ordered to build 43,000 more houses which was far more than we could have coped with and would have lead to even greater congestion and more stretched services.
Andrew Selous is MP for South West Bedfordshire and can be contacted on 01582 662 821 or selousa@parliament.uk
