Canterbury

[yellowperil]

I have promised that the next profile thread I will attempt, to complete my tour of East Kent, will be Canterbury, which promises (threatens?) to be the most "interesting"  of the six- probably the only one where the eventual outcome was in very real doubt. It will be forthcoming over this Easter weekend, probably in stages, and I can imagine there will be a number of folk out there with strong views on this one, and maybe more knowledge than me, so bear with me!

I am going to depart from my usual practice and give the last four general election results first, before turning to the details of the profile. The reasons for this are pretty obvious- the results themselves are the story here, they are simply amazing. Labour go in these 4 stages over those 9 years from a distant third place with 16% of the vote to a comfortable(ish) retention(!) of the seat with over 48% of the vote. Trying to understand how that happened , against the national tide over those years, is going to be the challenge.

[yellowperil]

General Election 2019

29,018  48.3% Lab (R. Duffield)
27,182  45.2% Con (A. Firth)
  3,408     5.7% LD  (C.Malcolmson)
      505     0.8% Ind (M.Gould)

General Election 2017

25,572   45.0% Lab (R .Duffield)
25,384    44.7% Con (J. Brazier)
  4,561       8.0% LD ( J.Flanagan)
  1,282       2.3% GP (M.Stanton)


General Election 2015

22,918   42.9% Con (J.Brazier)
13,120   24.5% Lab (H.Lanning)
   7,289   13.6% UKIP (J.Gascoyne)
   6, 227   11.6% LD    (J.Flanagan)
   3,746       7.0% GP   (S Jeffery)
      165       0.3%  SGB (R.Cox)

General Election 2010

22, 050  44.8% Con (J.Brazier)
16.002     32.5%  LD (G. Voizey)
  7.940      16.1% Lab (J.Samuel)
   1,907       3.9% UKIP (H.Farmer)
   1,137        2.3% GP (G.Meaden)
      173          0.4% MR (A.Belsey)

European referendum 2016

Remain 54.7%
Leave    45.3%

European Election 2019
Brexit Party 37.0%
LD  25.9%
Labour 8.5%
Green  14.2%
Con 7.9%
UKIP 2.0%
ChUK 4.0%
Others 0.5%

[yellowperil]

Canterbury is a very special place. A walled city containing the mother church of the Anglican faith, it is, like Dover, one of the symbols of what it is to be England. Politically, it's pretty special too- there have been MPs for Canterbury since 1295, and it held the record (recognised by Guinness so it must be true),for the longest unbroken record of representation by a single party for any UK constituency, when the Conservatives held it from 1835 until 2017. At the general election of 2017 Rosie Duffield, quite astonishingly, brought that record crashing down as Canterbury went Labour. I can remember there was a hint of this during the campaign when polling revealed this as a possibility, and I well remember the sniggers that went up about just how silly polling predictions could get- Canterbury going Labour? Whatever next will these know-nothings come up with?  But not only did it happen as a one-off but in 2019, still against some  expectations , Ms Duffield not only held on to what she had gained but consolidated on her previously quite slender lead. The seat remains marginal, but no longer super-marginal.

Of course the modern Canterbury constituency bears very little resemblance to that walled city, now normally packed with tourists but not many residents (though there may well be a substantial Labour majority among those that there are!) Canterbury long burst out beyond its walls and much of its population lived in the long established suburbs now forming wards like Westgate, Northgate (the names a bit of a giveaway there), Wincheap and Barton. The old walled city now forms part of Westgate. These were hardly the areas where the Tory strength had been for a long time, In 2007 local elections, for instance, the three wards of Westgate, Wincheap and Barton returned all 9 places to the Lib Dems, although admittedly the Tories that year managed to take the two Northgate seats off Labour. But going further afield the constituency included many rural areas like Chartham and Blean Forest that were quite strongly Conservative, and areas closer to the sea, like Chestfield, Swalecliffe and Tankerton, which were very much more strongly so. Whitstable itself had quite a strongish Labour vote (though again while  Labour hung on in Whitstable Harbour they lost Gorrell to the Tories that year). On the whole, if you look at what Canterbury appeared like in local government in those pre-coalition days, the Tories looked pretty strong, the Lib Dems dominated in Canterbury proper and Labour looked a fading force.The figures for councillors within the constituency in 2007 was 20 Conservatives, LibDems 14, and Labour 2. And when the general election came 3 years later that was pretty well confirmed- just over 22,000 for Julian Brazier compared with 16,000 for the Lib Dem's Guy Voizey, under 8,000 for Labour.  No suggestion there of what was to come from Labour, and no suggestion of general election votes being significantly different from local elections.

It is often suggested that one major reason for the changes in the fortunes of Labour post-2010 lay in the fact that Canterbury has become above all else a student city. As always , one might want to argue that it is more  complicated than that, but the big student vote was undoubtedly a factor to be taken seriously. We may have to remind ourselves that pre-2010 a big student vote was seen as a big plus for the Lib Dems! After coalition and the student fees debacle, no longer so, and Labour were well placed to take advantage. 

Canterbury has two biggish universities, the University of Kent and Christ Church University, an Art College which is a component part of the UCA- the University for the Creative Arts ,a further education college and various other private institutions, crammed into quite a small  urban area with a residential population of about 50,000 - the  "City of Canterbury "district has about 165,000 people but less than  a third of that is in "Canterbury proper"- the continuously built up area. The residential student population is currently about 30,000- it peaked at 30,795 in 2010-11- and they are overwhelmingly in "Canterbury proper".The ward with the highest share of students is St Stephens which is adjacent to  the University of Kent, and a ward which mostly votes Conservative in local government elections ( it actually had voted 2 LD 1 Con in 2007!), but it will be pretty high in all the urban wards.The university campus , with its residential colleges, is actually in Blean Forest ward. The Christ Church campus, together with UCA and the FE college are all in Barton ward. Of course not all students who are resident are registered, and not all of those who are registered vote in local elections , or even in general elections.It has also been suggested that traditionally there was a tendency for southeastern students to go home at weekends, so maybe not to show so much interest in local affairs, or to vote locally. It might be that is changing.

With all that in mind, it may be instructive to look at the local elections from May 2019, for some clues as to the rise in the Labour vote once Canterbury became a Labour constituency, and to see what happened to the Conservatives in those circumstances.  Compared with  2015, in the 29 seats within the constituency,  the Tories fell back 11 seats, from 24 to13, while Labour  went up from 2 to 10, and the Lib Dems from 3 to 6.  Some of that must be down the unpopularity of the Conservative local administration and have nothing to do with national politics, but we can see just where the vote changed. Labour got back their old strongpoints like Whitstable ( Gorrell ward) and Northgate, they took Barton (lots of students there ), which the Conservatives had in turn taken from the Lib Dems on the previous election,  and they even took one of the Tory seats in St Stephens- that might well have been student-related. The Lib Dems hung on to Wincheap, always their heartland, but also have started to take Conservative votes in places where Labour were less likely to advance- two seats in Blean Forest and one in Nailbourne, and even came within 4 votes of taking Tankerton (with Labour there not far behind). Of course some of this change may be less about the student vote and more related to the staff vote. The main centres of population in the rural parts of Blean Forest ward, Tyler Hill and Rough Common  for example, have long been popular with university staff as has the St Dunstans area of the city which also falls into Blean Forest.  I remember years ago going to a planning dispute issue in Canterbury where the Blean locals were up in arms, and a chap getting up and announcing in an exaggeratedly cultured voice that he was there to represent all the Rough Common people - he was indeed a retired university lecturer. There will be resident staff in the colleges on campus of course. 

Of course Canterbury has been changing fast in the last couple of decades and not all of that is down to higher education issues. Another factor is undoubdtedly the arrival of HS 1. Strictly, HS 1 links St Pancras with Ashford International but Southeastern high speed trains continue on conventional rails to destinations beyond Ashford all over East Kent and Canterbury is a principal beneficiary, with about 40 minutes knocked off what would have been roughly a 2 hour journey to London (depending exactly where you were headed).An attractive place to live, it becomes a much more realistic commuter option, if you can afford the £5k season ticket of course, which you may be able to offset against lower house prices, compared with London at least. It certainly opens Canterbury up to a different sort of resident  compared with the old cathedral city image. This change may apply to other places as well as Canterbury proper- some of the villages become more attractive to commuters , and places like Whitstable become decidedly more hip than they used to be, in part because they feel nearer in time to London.

One might mention one other aspect of the change from historic Canterbury and the twenty-first century city. The  old Canterbury  had a major role as a military centre, long before it was an educational centre, with the substantial Howe barracks out on the Sturry road (so Northgate ward).  There had been barracks in this part of Canterbury since the 1790's ,and they took various forms and were occupied by different regiments but were primaily associated with the " Buffs", the Royal East Kent regiment . In later years it was the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders that were stationed here before returning to their Scottish roots. This long military association ended finally in 2016 and the site rescheduled for housing. The existing military houses  , about 150 units, have been acquired by the London Borough of Redbridge, who outbid the local city council, so this will in effect be London overspill development. The barracks site is largely cleared, apart from a few community use structures, and some 500 new housing units are going in.  

[Pete Whitehead]

All good, but I don't think the Labour hold in 2019 can be described as 'against all expectations'. The MRP models consistently showed Labour on course to win (and were obviously taken more seriously this time) and I think most of the predictions on this site did not predict a Conservative gain

[yellowperil]

Apr 12, 2020 12:47:18 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

All good, but I don't think the Labour hold in 2019 can be described as 'against all expectations'. The MRP models consistently showed Labour on course to win (and were obviously taken more seriously this time) and I think most of the predictions on this site did not predict a Conservative gain

I take that point and may re-draft, but when I wrote that I was thinking  of the situation  quite late in the day when Labour was clearely heading nationally for a poor result and expectations were being downplayed.  "Against some expectations" might be enough to fix it! 

[yellowperil]

I am intending now to add to the draft above my thoughts about the two major universities in Canterbury and the students thereof, and the impact of that on the psephology of Canterbury. I will add here, but not in the draft, my personal involvement in those two universities, I spent a good few years as a postgrad student and researcher at UKC, as the University of Kent was then known. I was a regular in their library for years and did a lot of work in the economic history department under GE Mingay, who regularly came over to my college at Ashford to give (free) lectures to my own students. Eileen and I both used the community university facilities widely, especially the Gulbenkian theatre and the cinema- so I reckon I know my way round that university pretty well, including sometimes using Eliot College for overnight stays. I also had dealings with Christ Church while it was still a teacher training college and also in its early years as a full university, not least because I then ran access courses for adult students which sent about ten students a year into their undergraduate courses, which meant I spent a lot of time in their SCR talking with the receiving staff. I should make clear this all happened in the last century and I have a lot less first hand knowledge of staff and students in these last two decades.

[timrollpickering]

Apr 12, 2020 9:52:50 GMT yellowperil said:

Canterbury has two biggish universities, the University of Kent and Christ Church University, an Art College ,a further education college and various other private institutions,

There's also a part of the University of the Creative Arts (the product of multiple mergers of art schools across Kent and Surrey) but either it has a large live at home student body or quite a tiny presence in Canterbury going by its accomodation on offer.

The ward with the highest share of students is St Stephens which includes the University of Kent, and a ward which mostly votes Conservative in local government elections ( it actually had voted 2 LD 1 Con in 2007!), but it will be pretty high in all the urban wards.

The Kent campus is in the Blean Forest ward (unless Election Maps is out of date). St Stephens includes the Hales Place estate which is to the south east of the campus and very popular with renting students because of the easy walk.

Of course not all students who are resident are registered, and not all of those who are registered vote in local elections , or even in general elections.

If talking about the student (non) vote it's probably worth noting the impact of the term dates. Kent is unusual in that in the last 15 years the summer term doesn't start until into May and so in the normal course of events it is very rare for a local election to fall in term time. But for the lockdown this year appears to be the first since 2007 (and none again until at least 2026) that the first Thursday in May would be in term time - but as Canterbury has all-out elections this is (would be) a skip year. I think since 2007 the only local election in term time will have been the 2009 county election, held back for the EU Parliament. The 2010 & 2015 general elections were also in vacation.

In my day (1998-2002) the undergraduates with accommodation in the university's colleges & attached buildings could only stay during term time with a chuck out for each vacation (a small number could get alternate rooms for the vacation). Those in the self-catering village and the postgraduate block could stay for the vacations but a higher proportion were international students.

ADDITIONAL: In fact in my day it was quite noticeable how quiet the campus got at weekends and during the vacation. In those days a lot of students were from Kent, Sussex, Surrey and south London and so it was easy for many to make trips home. Nowadays High Speed 1 means a much greater area is within easy travelling distance.

[neilm]

Apr 12, 2020 16:59:35 GMT timrollpickering said:

ADDITIONAL: In fact in my day it was quite noticeable how quiet the campus got at weekends and during the vacation. In those days a lot of students were from Kent, Sussex, Surrey and south London and so it was easy for many to make trips home. Nowadays High Speed 1 means a much greater area is within easy travelling distance.

The same was true of the University of Essex during my era (2001-5): the place was empty at the weekend because they all went home to London. Less so now as there are more students.

[yellowperil]

Apr 12, 2020 16:59:35 GMT timrollpickering said:

Apr 12, 2020 9:52:50 GMT yellowperil said:

Canterbury has two biggish universities, the University of Kent and Christ Church University, an Art College ,a further education college and various other private institutions,

There's also a part of the University of the Creative Arts (the product of multiple mergers of art schools across Kent and Surrey) but either it has a large live at home student body or quite a tiny presence in Canterbury going by its accomodation on offer.

The ward with the highest share of students is St Stephens which includes the University of Kent, and a ward which mostly votes Conservative in local government elections ( it actually had voted 2 LD 1 Con in 2007!), but it will be pretty high in all the urban wards.

The Kent campus is in the Blean Forest ward (unless Election Maps is out of date). St Stephens includes the Hales Place estate which is to the south east of the campus and very popular with renting students because of the easy walk.

Of course not all students who are resident are registered, and not all of those who are registered vote in local elections , or even in general elections.

If talking about the student (non) vote it's probably worth noting the impact of the term dates. Kent is unusual in that in the last 15 years the summer term doesn't start until into May and so in the normal course of events it is very rare for a local election to fall in term time. But for the lockdown this year appears to be the first since 2007 (and none again until at least 2026) that the first Thursday in May would be in term time - but as Canterbury has all-out elections this is (would be) a skip year. I think since 2007 the only local election in term time will have been the 2009 county election, held back for the EU Parliament. The 2010 & 2015 general elections were also in vacation.

In my day (1998-2002) the undergraduates with accommodation in the university's colleges & attached buildings could only stay during term time with a chuck out for each vacation (a small number could get alternate rooms for the vacation). Those in the self-catering village and the postgraduate block could stay for the vacations but a higher proportion were international students.

ADDITIONAL: In fact in my day it was quite noticeable how quiet the campus got at weekends and during the vacation. In those days a lot of students were from Kent, Sussex, Surrey and south London and so it was easy for many to make trips home. Nowadays High Speed 1 means a much greater area is within easy travelling distance.

Thank you. All points duly noted and where necessary I will edit the text to incorporate your corrections or to add the supplementary points. On the point about the students being decanted from the colleges during vacation, yes I was well aware of that- I was one of those sometimes getting a room in Eliot out of term time!

My mistake about the ward boundary between Blean Forest and St Stephens- I made an assumption without checking. If all the colleges are in BF that makes quite a difference I suppose. And I was too sniffy/ out of date on the art college/ UCA, which I did know about but had forgotten! Anyway , good to get the pov of a former actual undergraduate and that will be more recent than my time as a postgrad there!

[yellowperil]

After my faux pas about where the ward boundaries actually fell relative to the University of Kent I have been studying the map closely! I have absolutely no excuse - the Canterbury city website is one of the best I've seen for showing zoomable ward maps ( carefully gerrymandered in favour of the Conservatives compared with the pre-2011 version!) as they now are and once I had mastered that I was away! If in doubt look at that website. I hope to do a rewrite of the current text of the profile later today.

[Pete Whitehead]

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/election-maps/gb/

[J.G.Harston]

Apr 13, 2020 6:45:22 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/election-maps/gb/

Not as good as when the base map was the 1:50,000 Landranger mapping.

[timrollpickering]

Apr 12, 2020 17:47:40 GMT yellowperil said:

Thank you. All points duly noted and where necessary I will edit the text to incorporate your corrections or to add the supplementary points. On the point about the students being decanted from the colleges during vacation, yes I was well aware of that- I was one of those sometimes getting a room in Eliot out of term time!

I'd be interested to see if the wider departure over vacations by students who could stay in their existing accommodation is still a thing. In the pre HS1 days both a quick visit and a full decamp back home were at about the same range. But HS1 isn't moving friendly so the wider range of students who found the university easy to get for open days (and for nipping back to the parental home at the weekend) may not be as ready to take it all and be away during the election campaign and/or polling day. (There is also the reported phenomenon of some final year students basically abandoning their term time accommodation for the final, exam only term and only coming in for the exams themselves.)

More generally HS1 has transformed the accessibility of Canterbury. That goes well beyond the student body (and I have no doubt you'll be covering that in how Canterbury as a whole has changed so rapidly) but even amongst it there will be a wider range than previously when it was from predominantly Conservative areas.

[yellowperil]

I have now now done an extensive rewrite of the Canterbury profile, and hope I have taken account of comments from@timrollpickering and others. I thank you all for your contributions , but the errors , as they say, are still all mine. 

[timrollpickering]

Just to add, digging out my posts from 2017, but Canterbury has also been changed heavily in recent years by the closure of barracks and the consequential use of the land and also by a growing secularisation in society that is now changing even cathedral cities. The middle class lefty arts scene is another sign of the direction things have gone in. All in all this is a seat where a lot of changes have all happened in a short space of time and it took a sudden election to bring them altogether.

[yellowperil]

Apr 13, 2020 17:20:44 GMT timrollpickering said:

Just to add, digging out my posts from 2017, but Canterbury has also been changed heavily in recent years by the closure of barracks and the consequential use of the land and also by a growing secularisation in society that is now changing even cathedral cities. The middle class lefty arts scene is another sign of the direction things have gone in. All in all this is a seat where a lot of changes have all happened in a short space of time and it took a sudden election to bring them altogether.

Yep,I 'd forgotten the barracks closure when I wrote it up but I was thinking about the barracks at some point when contemplating Northgate.

[yellowperil]

Apr 13, 2020 10:17:41 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Apr 13, 2020 6:45:22 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/election-maps/gb/

Not as good as when the base map was the 1:50,000 Landranger mapping.

nor as easy to use as  on the local authority website.I find election-maps a bit clunky- is it just me?

[yellowperil]

I have now added a further para to the profile re the Howe barracks site. Hope I haven't made too many solecisms as I have tried to summarise a complicated subject in a short para and I know some people here are quite keen on the Buffs- they are Buffs buffs so to speak.

[carlton43]

Apr 14, 2020 8:57:04 GMT yellowperil said:

I have now added a further para to the profile re the Howe barracks site. Hope I haven't made too many solecisms as I have tried to summarise a complicated subject in a short para and I know some people here are quite keen on the Buffs- they are Buffs buffs so to speak.

Your Buffs point being?

Look up Leros Barracks and do a thorough job!!

[yellowperil]

Apr 14, 2020 8:59:26 GMT carlton43 said:

Apr 14, 2020 8:57:04 GMT yellowperil said:

I have now added a further para to the profile re the Howe barracks site. Hope I haven't made too many solecisms as I have tried to summarise a complicated subject in a short para and I know some people here are quite keen on the Buffs- they are Buffs buffs so to speak.

Your Buffs point being?

Look up Leros Barracks and do a thorough job!!

I knew this would happen hence my comment! I've tried looking up Leros and find it difficult to avoid fb and I'm not going there. If there is a point to be made perhaps you would like to make it?