Follow us
It looks likely that the Isle of Wight will now remain with just one MP, after Nick Clegg announced he's dropping Lib Dem plans to reform the House of Lords.
The Deputy Prime Minister's accused the Conservatives of breaking the coalition agreement after David Cameron told him that he'd failed to get enough backing from rebel Tory MPs.
In return, the Liberal Democrats are dropping their support for Conservative backed constitutional boundary change.
The Island's MP Andrew Turner had led a cross-party 'One Wight' campaign. Reacting to the news, he told Isle of Wight Radio that the coalition agreement never linked lords reform with fairer boundaries; it said that the Lib Dems would support fairer boundaries if they got a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, which the Lib Dems lost last year.
Mr Turner has called the move "astonishing" - adding that Nick Clegg has argued in favour of fairer boundaries and now is ordering his MPs to vote against them.
In a statement issued to Isle of Wight Radio, Mr Turner said: "Nick Clegg consistently argued in Parliament that it is right that parliamentary constituencies should be of similar size, but he now says that his MPs will vote against legislation that would achieve that.
"The Lib Dems seem to be only in favour of reforms that would benefit their party - that simply cannot be right. The constitution of the United Kingdom does not belong to any one parliament or any one party. If Mr Clegg had been prepared to put these proposals to the public in a referendum I would have respected the result. But having lost the referendum on the Alternative Vote - he wasn't prepared to trust the British people.
"If, as seems likely, the constituency boundaries do not change, the Isle of Wight will remain as one constituency. If that happens, I will continue to work as hard as I can to represent all Islanders as I have over the last ten years," he concluded.
Leave a comment!