Boundaries
The Isle of Wight forms a single constituency of the House of Commons. The constituency covers exactly the same land area as the ceremonial county of the Isle of Wight, and the area administered by the unitary authority, Isle of Wight Council.
With an electorate of 110,924 (as of 2010), the constituency has by far the largest electorate in the UK, more than 50% above the England average of 71,537. This is five times the size of the smallest electorate (Na h-Eileanan an Iar, formerly known as the Western Isles), despite the Isle of Wight having some of the same problems as an island constituency. Successive Boundary Commissions have considered the possibility of splitting the island into two constituencies (or possibly having a constituency crossing the Solent onto the mainland) but with a distinct lack of local enthusiasm for either option it was felt that the island would be better represented by a single MP. One repeated problem has been the difficulty of dividing the island in two in a way that would be acceptable to all interests.
Read more about this topic: Isle Of Wight (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word boundaries:
“Not too many years ago, a child’s experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries that parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child’s life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)