The four Boundary Commissions, one each for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, were established in the mid-1940s and have now been responsible for creating five new maps of Parliamentary constituencies. Despite their importance in British political life, very little has been written about the Commissions and how they work, and much that has been written focuses on the short-term issues of the electoral impact of a new set of constituencies. This volume is a study of the Commissions, involving in-depth interviews with all major interest groups and individuals alongside scrutiny of all relevant documents and statistical analyses of the outcomes.

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Without 'a Dog's Chance' is the first major study of the role of northern nationalists' in the Boundary Commission between 1920 and 1925, that they and their allies in the Irish Free State had hoped to use to end partition and destroy the new northern state. For northern nationalists, the partition of Ireland was an intensely traumatic event, not only because it consigned almost half a million nationalists to a government that was not of their choosing, but also because they regarded partition as the mutilation of their Irish citizenship and nationhood. Without 'a Dog's Chance' fills an important gap in the history of this period by focusing on the complex relationship between partition-era northern and southern nationalism, and the subordinate role northern nationalists had in Ireland's post-partition political landscape. Feeling under-valued, abandoned and exploited by their peers in the south, northern nationalists were also radically marginalised within the new Northern Irish state, which regarded them with fear and suspicion. The book also examines the critical role of the Irish News in providing a platform for Joe Devlin's unique Belfast-centred brand of anti-partitionism. With December 2020 marking one hundred years since partition, this timely book is essential reading.