Post by Robert Waller on Nov 12, 2023 20:33:15 GMT
Mansfield is the second largest town in Nottinghamshire, by far, and can be considered the ‘capital’ not only of the central part of the county - Nottingham is south, Worksop north - but of the former Nottinghamshire coalfield, which has a dramatic and not uncontroversial history. Mansfield is also notable for a striking (although that might not be the very best word in this case) migration rightwards in political terms, although that movement is not without considerable fluctuation.
The Mansfield constituency was held by Labour from 1918 to 2017, with one aberrant Liberal win in 1922. Yes, that does include their annus horribilis of 1931, when it was one of only 52 seats they held n the whole of the UK – and they did it with a majority of over 5,500, so it was not even close. Although Mansfield is large enough that there were always other industries - breweries, textiles, engineering - Coal was king in economic predominance at that time, and after World War Two the seat settled into a monolithic stability that resembled ‘mining seats’ elsewhere, such as in Yorkshire. On unchanging boundaries between 1955 and October 1974, for example, the Labour majority held steady at between 15,000 and 20,000, usually with minimal swings.
But then divergence became the norm, not only in political but in mining terms. The Nottinghamshire coalfield, much of which in the north of the county had been sunk relatively late, including in the 20th century, became the beneficiary of a differential prosperity and apparently less of a threat of closure than elsewhere. This led to more reluctance to join Arthur Scargill’s strike action in 1984, more working through the subsequent bitter conflict, and the formation of a largely Notts based breakaway union, the UDM, after the strike. Meanwhile Mansfield parliamentary constituency swung by nearly 8% to Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1983 and then further in 1987 (against the national trend, though also the long serving MP Don Concannon had retired and been replaced by Alan Meale) so that Labour held it by only 56 votes. However Meale did hold it with a large positive swing in 1992 and, of course, won easily through the Blair years.
Then came another change in tack in the 2010s. In the 2016 EU referendum, Mansfield, whose pits were all now closed, voted over 70% to leave. Like other such areas the Labour party’s failure unequivocally to push that this be enacted by Parliament was a major feature in a slump in the traditional vote, though in Mansfield the young Conservative Ben Bradley actually gained it in 2017, then saw his majority surge to over 16,000 in 2019. It would now require a swing of 17% back to Labour to regain the Mansfield seat.
There had actually been precursors of this 21st century development in Mansfield politics. After a directly elected mayoralty within the local authority had been established after a local referendum in May 2002, the office was won in its first four contests by Mansfield Independents, first Tony Egginton (October 2022 to 2011 elections inclusive) then Kate Allsop (2015). When she was ousted in Labour’s first mayoral win in May 2019 it was by the margin after transfers in the SV system, of 50.006% to 49.994% - or two votes, 7,930 to 7,928. In regular four yearly all-out Mansfield council elections, the Independents won overall majorities in 2003 and 2007, and in 2019 Mansfield Independents (13) and other Independents (6) won more seats than Labour (17). Given that the Tories only won two council seats (actually an increase of two) just seven months before increasing their majority massively in a seat they already held, there is likely to be a considerable overlap, though not an identity, between their support and that if the Independents in Mansfield.
All this would appear to make it very difficult to establish the internal electoral geography of the Mansfield constituency. However we do have two compensatory advantages. Firstly, the Mansfield (and other) Independents largely failed in the most recent local elections in May 2023, which returning only four of the former and two of the latter. Of the major parties, Labour increased to 25 and the Tories to 5. The second bonus is that Mansfield, unusually, is arranged as 35 small single member wards, which allows results to be scrutinised at a micro-level. These were redrawn for the 2023 elections, which meant that the Boundary Commission had used slightly different versions. But overall patterns can be spotted.
The Conservatives’ greatest area of strength lies in the south and south east of the town, in the traditionally most middle class area of Berry Hill (solid for them as far back as 1979-95, for example, long before the Independents came on the scene) and the more modern private housing states of Thompsons, Kings Walk, and Ling Forest estates, some, like the last named, ironically built on old mine workings. The other Conservative ward in 2023 (if narrowly) was nearer the centre of the town, West Bank, which includes a handful of roads such as Crow Hill Drive, where many of Mansfield’s former professional elite (necessarily of a rather limited number) lived in large solid stone built houses. Many of Mansfield’s neighbourhoods, however, look like they belong to the Labour stronghold it once was. We have Forest Town, originally the pit village for Mansfield Colliery (closed 1988), including its social rented Garibaldi estate in Forest Town Newlands ward. Labour’s strongest showings of all in 2023 were in a block of the smaller wards west of the town centre: Brick Kiln, Wainwright, and Bancroft, all around 60% or more. The Independents won in 2023 only in three Forest Town wards, and with personal votes in Racecourse, Grange Farm and Rufford, scattered across the town.
Although the seat is fairly tightly focused on Mansfield itself, there are also other distinctly communities within the borough and constituency. One is Mansfield Woodhouse (population 18,000, the site of Sherwood Colliery (closed 1987) and the other, further out in the Meden Valley is Warsop (12,000) which includes Church Warsop, Market Warsop, Meden Vale and Warsop Vale, and covers four of the wards in Mansfield council, having been an urban district on its own up to 1974. All four Warsop wards were won by Labour in 2023; indeed these had been among the most loyal through the Independent years of success, with Meden ward only electing them partially in 2003 and in no other year. Market Warsop only once and Warsop Carr never. Mansfield Woodhouse also elected a clean sweep of Labour candidates in 2023.
There are only minor boundary changes. Mansfield was slightly over quota, with an electorate of 77,137 in 2019. After initial proposals which would have switched a few thousand voters in the western Grange Farm and Brick Kiln neighbourhoods to the Ashfield constituency, it was decided after enquiry to move a similar number instead within the Pleasley ward in the neighbourhoods of Pleasleyhill, Radmanthwaite and Bull Farm – again, to Ashfield. The Pleasley ward is close to the Derbyshire border (Pleasley itself is in that county and the Bolsover constituency) has been solidly Labour with a couple of partial exceptions in 2003 and 2007, but the Bull Farm area has a stronger Independent tradition. A very small part of Berry Hill ward is also placed in Ashfield, but only 271 voters are involved. Overall there will be no significant effect on the political balance within the Mansfield constituency.
Although all the mines in the county have closed, the last one in 2015, and the town's economy now has diversified with significant employment in retail and healthcare, for example, Mansfield remains a very working class constituency indeed. Applying the detailed 2021 census statistics on new boundaries, it had the 12th highest proportion of routine and semi-routine workers of all 575 constituencies in England and Wales, 34.7%. This reaches a peak of 42% in the central Newgate & Carr Bank and over 45% in Town Centre & Broomhill MSOAs. But this figure is distinctly lower only in the Berry Hill, King’s Walk & Oakham MSOA on the town’s south western edge, where it is a mere 20%. Grange Far & Ladybrook (west Mansfield) and the whole of Warsop are between 35% and 40%, as is the area within the Oak Tree & Southwell wards on the south eastern periphery, which has the highest social rented housing concentration anywhere in the seat, nearly 50%. Mansfield also has one of the 25 lowest percentages with academic degrees in England and Wales. The proportion without any educational qualifications is fairly evenly spread across the constituency, a little higher in the Warsop section (27%), the south eastern council estates (28%) and the town centres (SOAs (29.5%), but everywhere at least 20% except for the Berry Hill section in the south of the town. There are no significant concentrations of ethnic minority residents anywhere in the constituency.
What this means is that Mansfield will be an acid test of how far Labour can recover its electoral popularity with the white working class in England. That they can do this in local elections is demonstrated by the Mansfield council results in May 2023 (that add up to 42.6% Labour, 24.5% Conservative along with 33% Independent) – plus the latest mayoral contest, when Andy Abrahams increase his majority from that mere 2 votes to over 4,000 (or 19%) with a Conservative in second place. The next question is whether they can repeat this is an election for the Parliament and hence executive government of the UK – either achieving this in one mighty surge in 2024, or moving substantially along the route back; or is the transformation going to prove permanent?
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 19.5% 277/575
Owner occupied 64.5% 324/575
Private rented 19.3% 241/575
Social rented 16.2% 241/575
White 94.9% 193/575
Black 1.0% 327/575
Asian 2.0% 388/575
Managerial & professional 23.9% 510/575
Routine & Semi-routine 34.7% 12/575
Degree level 21.9% 550/575
No qualifications 24.3% 60/575
Students 4.4% 519/575
General Election 2019: Mansfield
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Ben Bradley 31,484 63.9 +17.3
Labour Sonya Ward 15,178 30.8 -13.7
Liberal Democrats Sarah Brown 1,626 3.3 +1.9
Independent Sid Pepper 527 1.1 -4.2
Independent Stephen Harvey 458 0.9
C Majority 16,306 33.1 +31.0
2019 electorate 77,137
Turnout 49,273 63.9 -0.6
Conservative hold
Swing 15.0 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Mansfield consists of
96.5% of Mansfield
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/east-midlands/East%20Midlands_027_Mansfield_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
The Mansfield constituency was held by Labour from 1918 to 2017, with one aberrant Liberal win in 1922. Yes, that does include their annus horribilis of 1931, when it was one of only 52 seats they held n the whole of the UK – and they did it with a majority of over 5,500, so it was not even close. Although Mansfield is large enough that there were always other industries - breweries, textiles, engineering - Coal was king in economic predominance at that time, and after World War Two the seat settled into a monolithic stability that resembled ‘mining seats’ elsewhere, such as in Yorkshire. On unchanging boundaries between 1955 and October 1974, for example, the Labour majority held steady at between 15,000 and 20,000, usually with minimal swings.
But then divergence became the norm, not only in political but in mining terms. The Nottinghamshire coalfield, much of which in the north of the county had been sunk relatively late, including in the 20th century, became the beneficiary of a differential prosperity and apparently less of a threat of closure than elsewhere. This led to more reluctance to join Arthur Scargill’s strike action in 1984, more working through the subsequent bitter conflict, and the formation of a largely Notts based breakaway union, the UDM, after the strike. Meanwhile Mansfield parliamentary constituency swung by nearly 8% to Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1983 and then further in 1987 (against the national trend, though also the long serving MP Don Concannon had retired and been replaced by Alan Meale) so that Labour held it by only 56 votes. However Meale did hold it with a large positive swing in 1992 and, of course, won easily through the Blair years.
Then came another change in tack in the 2010s. In the 2016 EU referendum, Mansfield, whose pits were all now closed, voted over 70% to leave. Like other such areas the Labour party’s failure unequivocally to push that this be enacted by Parliament was a major feature in a slump in the traditional vote, though in Mansfield the young Conservative Ben Bradley actually gained it in 2017, then saw his majority surge to over 16,000 in 2019. It would now require a swing of 17% back to Labour to regain the Mansfield seat.
There had actually been precursors of this 21st century development in Mansfield politics. After a directly elected mayoralty within the local authority had been established after a local referendum in May 2002, the office was won in its first four contests by Mansfield Independents, first Tony Egginton (October 2022 to 2011 elections inclusive) then Kate Allsop (2015). When she was ousted in Labour’s first mayoral win in May 2019 it was by the margin after transfers in the SV system, of 50.006% to 49.994% - or two votes, 7,930 to 7,928. In regular four yearly all-out Mansfield council elections, the Independents won overall majorities in 2003 and 2007, and in 2019 Mansfield Independents (13) and other Independents (6) won more seats than Labour (17). Given that the Tories only won two council seats (actually an increase of two) just seven months before increasing their majority massively in a seat they already held, there is likely to be a considerable overlap, though not an identity, between their support and that if the Independents in Mansfield.
All this would appear to make it very difficult to establish the internal electoral geography of the Mansfield constituency. However we do have two compensatory advantages. Firstly, the Mansfield (and other) Independents largely failed in the most recent local elections in May 2023, which returning only four of the former and two of the latter. Of the major parties, Labour increased to 25 and the Tories to 5. The second bonus is that Mansfield, unusually, is arranged as 35 small single member wards, which allows results to be scrutinised at a micro-level. These were redrawn for the 2023 elections, which meant that the Boundary Commission had used slightly different versions. But overall patterns can be spotted.
The Conservatives’ greatest area of strength lies in the south and south east of the town, in the traditionally most middle class area of Berry Hill (solid for them as far back as 1979-95, for example, long before the Independents came on the scene) and the more modern private housing states of Thompsons, Kings Walk, and Ling Forest estates, some, like the last named, ironically built on old mine workings. The other Conservative ward in 2023 (if narrowly) was nearer the centre of the town, West Bank, which includes a handful of roads such as Crow Hill Drive, where many of Mansfield’s former professional elite (necessarily of a rather limited number) lived in large solid stone built houses. Many of Mansfield’s neighbourhoods, however, look like they belong to the Labour stronghold it once was. We have Forest Town, originally the pit village for Mansfield Colliery (closed 1988), including its social rented Garibaldi estate in Forest Town Newlands ward. Labour’s strongest showings of all in 2023 were in a block of the smaller wards west of the town centre: Brick Kiln, Wainwright, and Bancroft, all around 60% or more. The Independents won in 2023 only in three Forest Town wards, and with personal votes in Racecourse, Grange Farm and Rufford, scattered across the town.
Although the seat is fairly tightly focused on Mansfield itself, there are also other distinctly communities within the borough and constituency. One is Mansfield Woodhouse (population 18,000, the site of Sherwood Colliery (closed 1987) and the other, further out in the Meden Valley is Warsop (12,000) which includes Church Warsop, Market Warsop, Meden Vale and Warsop Vale, and covers four of the wards in Mansfield council, having been an urban district on its own up to 1974. All four Warsop wards were won by Labour in 2023; indeed these had been among the most loyal through the Independent years of success, with Meden ward only electing them partially in 2003 and in no other year. Market Warsop only once and Warsop Carr never. Mansfield Woodhouse also elected a clean sweep of Labour candidates in 2023.
There are only minor boundary changes. Mansfield was slightly over quota, with an electorate of 77,137 in 2019. After initial proposals which would have switched a few thousand voters in the western Grange Farm and Brick Kiln neighbourhoods to the Ashfield constituency, it was decided after enquiry to move a similar number instead within the Pleasley ward in the neighbourhoods of Pleasleyhill, Radmanthwaite and Bull Farm – again, to Ashfield. The Pleasley ward is close to the Derbyshire border (Pleasley itself is in that county and the Bolsover constituency) has been solidly Labour with a couple of partial exceptions in 2003 and 2007, but the Bull Farm area has a stronger Independent tradition. A very small part of Berry Hill ward is also placed in Ashfield, but only 271 voters are involved. Overall there will be no significant effect on the political balance within the Mansfield constituency.
Although all the mines in the county have closed, the last one in 2015, and the town's economy now has diversified with significant employment in retail and healthcare, for example, Mansfield remains a very working class constituency indeed. Applying the detailed 2021 census statistics on new boundaries, it had the 12th highest proportion of routine and semi-routine workers of all 575 constituencies in England and Wales, 34.7%. This reaches a peak of 42% in the central Newgate & Carr Bank and over 45% in Town Centre & Broomhill MSOAs. But this figure is distinctly lower only in the Berry Hill, King’s Walk & Oakham MSOA on the town’s south western edge, where it is a mere 20%. Grange Far & Ladybrook (west Mansfield) and the whole of Warsop are between 35% and 40%, as is the area within the Oak Tree & Southwell wards on the south eastern periphery, which has the highest social rented housing concentration anywhere in the seat, nearly 50%. Mansfield also has one of the 25 lowest percentages with academic degrees in England and Wales. The proportion without any educational qualifications is fairly evenly spread across the constituency, a little higher in the Warsop section (27%), the south eastern council estates (28%) and the town centres (SOAs (29.5%), but everywhere at least 20% except for the Berry Hill section in the south of the town. There are no significant concentrations of ethnic minority residents anywhere in the constituency.
What this means is that Mansfield will be an acid test of how far Labour can recover its electoral popularity with the white working class in England. That they can do this in local elections is demonstrated by the Mansfield council results in May 2023 (that add up to 42.6% Labour, 24.5% Conservative along with 33% Independent) – plus the latest mayoral contest, when Andy Abrahams increase his majority from that mere 2 votes to over 4,000 (or 19%) with a Conservative in second place. The next question is whether they can repeat this is an election for the Parliament and hence executive government of the UK – either achieving this in one mighty surge in 2024, or moving substantially along the route back; or is the transformation going to prove permanent?
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 19.5% 277/575
Owner occupied 64.5% 324/575
Private rented 19.3% 241/575
Social rented 16.2% 241/575
White 94.9% 193/575
Black 1.0% 327/575
Asian 2.0% 388/575
Managerial & professional 23.9% 510/575
Routine & Semi-routine 34.7% 12/575
Degree level 21.9% 550/575
No qualifications 24.3% 60/575
Students 4.4% 519/575
General Election 2019: Mansfield
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Ben Bradley 31,484 63.9 +17.3
Labour Sonya Ward 15,178 30.8 -13.7
Liberal Democrats Sarah Brown 1,626 3.3 +1.9
Independent Sid Pepper 527 1.1 -4.2
Independent Stephen Harvey 458 0.9
C Majority 16,306 33.1 +31.0
2019 electorate 77,137
Turnout 49,273 63.9 -0.6
Conservative hold
Swing 15.0 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Mansfield consists of
96.5% of Mansfield
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/east-midlands/East%20Midlands_027_Mansfield_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
Con | 30718 | 64.3% |
Lab | 14471 | 30.3% |
LD | 1571 | 3.3% |
Inds | 985 | 2.1% |
Con Majority | 16247 | 34.0% |