Post by greenhert on Oct 1, 2023 13:58:17 GMT
The constituency of Salisbury has existed since the Model Parliament of 1295. For this election, it loses the town of Amesbury and the ward of Till Valley, and expands westwards to include the village of Tisbury and the ward of Nadder Valley.
The cathedral city of Salisbury has been a city for centuries, with its cathedral being completed in 1227 (the first Bishop of Salisbury, Herman, was consecrated much earlier, in 1070), and was originally the site of a key Roman fort in the West of England. In fact it sits virtually at the border between the South East and South West of England, and its railway station has very good connections with both regions as well as London. In addition to its famous cathedral Salisbury was the centre of a cutlery industry which was the source of praise from nobility and royalty for centuries until the last cutlery company folded in 1921. Salisbury was home to a gas works and the Friends Life office, both of which are now closed; Salisbury District Hospital is now the largest employer in Salisbury city itself. This constituency also includes Wilton, the former county town of Wiltshire and the home of Wilton carpets, but it will no longer include the site of Stonehenge and the surrounding area for the first time in its history as a result of boundary changes; this will be moved to the new East Wiltshire constituency. Surprisingly for an affluent constituency, Salisbury's housing demographics are average although there is considerable division between the picture-postcard city centre and the suburban estates.
Salisbury has been a Conservative seat since 1924 but it has been made marginal by the Liberals and Liberal Democrats at times. John Lakeman first turned it into a Conservative-Liberal marginal in February 1974, although both Michael Hamilton (February 1974, October 1974 and 1979) and Robert Key (in 1983 after Mr Hamilton retired) rebuffed his efforts on the Conservatives' behalf even though he managed to squeeze the Labour vote to as low as 5.8% in 1983. In 1997, the Liberal Democrats missed a golden opportunity to capture the seat when they fielded a Surrey councillor with no connection to the area, meaning they lost the tactical Labour votes they needed; Mr Key held on with ease and represented the seat for another 13 years. The current MP is former SPAD and management consultant John Glen, who like his Conservative predecessors was privately educated and graduated from Oxbridge (Mansfield College, Oxford in his specific case). The Liberal Democrats had a brief revival in 2010 but only reduced the majority of the new Conservative MP, John Glen, to 5,966, and they crashed in 2015; they regained second place in 2019 but are unlikely to win this seat even on current polling; the boundary changes do not result in significantly different notional results from current boundaries. At a local level, Salisbury contains the only Labour divisions in the unitary authority of Wiltshire (which does not include Swindon, itself a unitary authority), although all of the divisions in Salisbury city are somewhat politically competitive with the winners often polling <40%, although central Salisbury is more conservative in voting terms than outer Salisbury. Wilton is in the Con-LD marginal of Wilton & Wyrylye Valley, but the rural wards are safely Conservative.
The cathedral city of Salisbury has been a city for centuries, with its cathedral being completed in 1227 (the first Bishop of Salisbury, Herman, was consecrated much earlier, in 1070), and was originally the site of a key Roman fort in the West of England. In fact it sits virtually at the border between the South East and South West of England, and its railway station has very good connections with both regions as well as London. In addition to its famous cathedral Salisbury was the centre of a cutlery industry which was the source of praise from nobility and royalty for centuries until the last cutlery company folded in 1921. Salisbury was home to a gas works and the Friends Life office, both of which are now closed; Salisbury District Hospital is now the largest employer in Salisbury city itself. This constituency also includes Wilton, the former county town of Wiltshire and the home of Wilton carpets, but it will no longer include the site of Stonehenge and the surrounding area for the first time in its history as a result of boundary changes; this will be moved to the new East Wiltshire constituency. Surprisingly for an affluent constituency, Salisbury's housing demographics are average although there is considerable division between the picture-postcard city centre and the suburban estates.
Salisbury has been a Conservative seat since 1924 but it has been made marginal by the Liberals and Liberal Democrats at times. John Lakeman first turned it into a Conservative-Liberal marginal in February 1974, although both Michael Hamilton (February 1974, October 1974 and 1979) and Robert Key (in 1983 after Mr Hamilton retired) rebuffed his efforts on the Conservatives' behalf even though he managed to squeeze the Labour vote to as low as 5.8% in 1983. In 1997, the Liberal Democrats missed a golden opportunity to capture the seat when they fielded a Surrey councillor with no connection to the area, meaning they lost the tactical Labour votes they needed; Mr Key held on with ease and represented the seat for another 13 years. The current MP is former SPAD and management consultant John Glen, who like his Conservative predecessors was privately educated and graduated from Oxbridge (Mansfield College, Oxford in his specific case). The Liberal Democrats had a brief revival in 2010 but only reduced the majority of the new Conservative MP, John Glen, to 5,966, and they crashed in 2015; they regained second place in 2019 but are unlikely to win this seat even on current polling; the boundary changes do not result in significantly different notional results from current boundaries. At a local level, Salisbury contains the only Labour divisions in the unitary authority of Wiltshire (which does not include Swindon, itself a unitary authority), although all of the divisions in Salisbury city are somewhat politically competitive with the winners often polling <40%, although central Salisbury is more conservative in voting terms than outer Salisbury. Wilton is in the Con-LD marginal of Wilton & Wyrylye Valley, but the rural wards are safely Conservative.
