- Tuesday, May 07, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
It seems the rise of Rishi Sunak as the prime minister of Britain has failed to provide answers to the ruling Conservative Party’s political problems as some of the Tory lawmakers are reportedly planning to leave their seats for safer constituencies at the next general election fearing heavy losses for the party, Bloomberg reported.
According to the report, Conservative members of parliament (MPs) have been informing their local associations and party headquarters in recent times about whether they plan to contest the next election, due in early 2025. With a large number of MPs likely to step down, the possibility of swapping seats has become a key point of discussion, even more so in the recent years, as per MPs and officials who are informed about those talks.
Bloomberg also reported that the regular process of boundary adjustments that will come into force during the next election is another reason for some of the MPs to swap seats.
“The changes this time are brutal for some Tories, compounded by the dire state of the polls, meaning that even some relatively safe seats are now under threat,” the report said.
It also said that the mood witnessed among Tory MPs in marginal constituencies this week suggests that there is less optimism that Sunak will be able to turn around the Conservative Party’s poor poll rating in two years’ time.
It was during the end of John Major’s premiership in the 1990s that Tony Blair’s Labour opposition called the Conservative MPs’ fighting to secure safer seats as “chickens” and the process became notoriously famous as the chicken run.
British parliamentarians who plan to swap seats tend to justify that they take such steps out of necessity because of factors such as boundary changes — the regular alterations that the border of seats see because of demographic changes. But according to critics, the chicken run is nothing but an ultimate panic move by career politicians.
At the 2019 election, for example, Tory minister Mims Davies ditched her Eastleigh in Hampshire seat — typically a Liberal Democrat marginal — for the more affluent Mid Sussex, which has been Conservative since the beginning.
