The next election just got (even) harder for Keir Starmer – because of new constituency boundaries

The new constituency boundaries mean Labour will start from an even lower base than the record low number of seats it won last year, says John Rentoul

Labour already needed the biggest swing in votes since the war – bigger even than the 10 per cent swing recorded by Tony Blair in 1997 – to win a majority in the House of Commons at the next election. That meant the Labour share of the vote had to go up by more than 10 percentage points from the 33 per cent the party won last year, and the Conservative share had to go down by the same amount. 

That was before yesterday. At 1.07pm on Monday, the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 received the royal assent and became law. At a stroke, the next election became even harder for Keir Starmer to win. 

This is not a wicked Tory plot to gerrymander seats in their favour. In fact, the Tory party has fought the last few elections at a disadvantage, because out-of-date boundaries mean that their seats tend to have larger electorates than Labour ones.