British Elections 1885-1918

[IceAgeComing]

I've seen your maps on Vote UK and they're interesting - it's a shame that imgur block this place because Dave doesn't send a single email to let them know that we're a forum

[IceAgeComing]

Seats like Stirling and Falkirk Burghs in Scotland were a legacy of the Act of Union and having to adapt the way that Scotland elected its MPs to the new British Parliament.  Basically what they did was rather than have every Scottish Burgh electing an MP they were merged into fourteen District of Burghs seats which were non-contiguous with the other shire areas not in a Burgh elected a County MP (unless you lived in the six smallest counties which were seen to be too small to deserve to elect an MP in their own right so rather than merge them for Parliamentary purposes they made it so that they paired them up and have them elect MPs for alternate parliaments; with each being unrepresented half the time).  Prior to the Great Reform Act these were... dodgy even considering the state of Parliamentary elections; the Burghs elected Commissioners who'd meet to decide who the MP for the District should be so it wasn't really a proper election.  The Great Reform Act fixed a few things (direct elections for all MPs the main one) but the basic system of pairing small burghs together into a non-contiguous seat continued on in Scotland until 1950 with it spreading to Wales with the Caernarfon Boroughs seat (I think; could have the County wrong) which was basically the same thing as the Scottish seats.  The 1885 and 1918 Reform Acts created more modern constituencies in some areas but the District of Burghs survived in lots of Scotland until 1950 with the Dunfermline Burghs and Kirkcaldy Burghs (abolished 1974) and the Stirling and Falkirk Burghs (abolished 1983) lasting a little longer.

The old East Dunbartonshire was because the old boundaries of the county of Dunbartonshire weren't contiguous; you had a section which contained Kirkintilloch and Cumbernauld cut off from the rest of Dunbartonshire by Stirlingshire and Lanarkshire and because the rules at the time emphasised following county boundaries and the Boundary Commission weren't going to consider cross-border County Constituencies unless they absolutely had to they just drew a non-contiguous seat.  Honestly the 1973 Local Government Reforms were probably needed in Scotland, as much as the old ones are nice and historic and good for basic things they were a bit awful at what they were meant to do plus having councils that represent disconnected areas strikes me as being dumb.

In Scotland the parliamentary map was basically transformed in 1983: unlike English which retained lots of its old County boundaries (which are the building block of seats) in Scotland and Wales the change was total; the old Counties and Burghs were gone and the new Regions and Districts eliminated all of the weird inconsistencies (like the Dunbartonshire thing) and were entirely different and the Boundary Commission used the opportunity to just rip things up and start anew especially in the Central Belt.  The same thing also happened in 2005 after the second (and totally not needed and very harmful) local government reform; although that's mainly because they were eliminating 15 seats so they had to start from scratch in the very majority of places since the old seats were far too small.