Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2020 23:23:45 GMT
Sorry, I've put lots of data in so it's quite a long one.
Bristol South
Bristol South covers the southern third of Bristol, from the South bank of the Avon to the city boundary, excluding a strip down the east of the city which is in Bristol East. It is the most suburban of the Bristol seats, and the only one to lie entirely within the historic area of Somerset. Some of the outer boundaries of Bristol can be quite hard to spot on the ground, but not here, as the built-up suburbs of Withywood and Hartcliffe give way to the green fields of North Somerset.
The city’s position on the mouth of the river Avon allowed it to become a major port and industrial centre. Bristol was already a major shipbuilding and manufacturing hub by the 14th century, and by the Tudor era it was the country’s second most important port, trading with Ireland, Iceland and Gascony. In 1497, John Cabot sailed west from Brtisol hoping to reach Asia but instead landing in North America, probably in Newfoundland although the exact location is uncertain. In the 17th and 18th centuries overseas trade grew in importance and Bristol, along with Liverpool, became a major hub in the triangular Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the railway came to Bristol thanks to engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built the Great Western Railway linking the West Country to London. His Bristol-Built steamships, the SS Great Britain and Great Western, the former of which is now back in Bristol harbour and open to the public as a museum which is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, brought the New World much closer and helped increase Bristol’s importance as a port.
Bristol also has a long history of liberal and non-conformist thought. Not only did its status as a port open it to trade and immigration from all over Europe, but John Wesley opened the first Methodist chapel in the city in 1739. In 1831, the people of Bristol rioted in Queen's Square in protest at the House of Lords' rejection of the reform act at its second reading. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus company was refusing to hire black or Asian bus crews and discrimination in many areas, including employment and housing, was sadly commonplace in the UK at the time. Led by youth worker Paul Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council, residents boycotted Bristol buses for four months. The boycott drew national attention and was endorsed by several prominent politicians including the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. The boycott was successful not only in persuading the company to drop it discriminatory policies but was also likely instrumental in passing the Race Relations acts of 1965 and 68. Little wonder then, with its history of liberalism, protest and progressivism that this city is such a stronghold for the left in UK politics.
This area of the city has never been as industrialised as the city centre areas, although the harbour and the Dry Dock where the SS Great Britain was built are just over the constituency border and several of the workers in Bristol’s industry lived in this seat while working elsewhere. In addition, Redcliffe Caves lie just over the border in Bristol West, and it’s not unlikely that they extend under areas of this seat. These are a series of man-made tunnels dug under the city to produce sand for glassmaking. Started in the middle ages, they were in use until the end of the 19th century. Imperial Tobacco once had an office in Hartcliffe, one of the southern suburbs, although it has now closed down. This seat has a working-class labour profile overall. SOC major groups 1-3, managerial, professional and technical occupations, employ 39.4% in this seat, compared to 47.5% nationally. This figure is higher in some wards, such as Windmill Hill (pre-2016 boundaries), and will be much lower than others, such as Hartcliffe and Withywood. In the old Hartcliffe ward, from before the 2016 boundary changes, that figure is just 20.7%, 18.7 points below the constituency average and a massive 26.8% below the national average. Major group 8-9 – essentially manual labourers – employs 20.1% of the workforce within this seat compared to 16.5% nationwide. Again, there is significant variation within the seat, with this figure at just 14.3% in the old Windmill Hill ward, and 31.4% in Filwood. In terms of the workforce within individual industries, wholesale and retail, education and construction are over-represented while “public administration and security” is under-represented. This might be a suburban seat, but it is not a middle-class one and not really a commuter one.
It is also not a rich one: in fact, it is the 73rd most deprived in England, making it more deprived than seats like Redcar, Stoke-on-Trent South, and Birmingham, Selly Oak, and only slightly less so than Hyndburn and Stockton North. 29% of its LSOAs are “highly deprived”, which means they are in the 10% most deprived in England. Paddy Ashdown once described health outcomes in Hartcliffe as “comparable to a third world country”. This includes all bar two of the twelve LSOAs mostly or wholly within Hartcliffe & Withywood ward, and all but three of the nine within Filwood ward. The constituency does especially badly on educational deprivation (28th in England) and crime (21st). It also does worse than its average on deprivation affecting children (68th in England). In terms of income, the average weekly pay here is £537 compared £586.50 in Great Britain. Unsurprisingly, it is Bristol’s most deprived seat. Some areas of Bedminster, Bedminster Down, Knowle and Windmill Hill do better, and very small parts are actively wealthy. Hartcliffe, Knowle West and Withywood are the poorest areas, basically large council estates constructed from the early 1930s to the aftermath of world war 2.
There is a good case to be made that this is Bristol’s most socially conservative seat, although it vies for that title with East, and it’s not really saying much: this is Bristol after all. It voted just 52.9% remain in the referendum, the lowest of Bristol’s constituencies, it somewhat defies its demographics: if this seat were on Wearside or Teeside, that figure would be closer to 40% than 50%. The four most leave wards are in this seat, including the suburban and massively deprived wards of Hartcliffe & Withywood and Filwood, the divided ward of Hengrove and Whitworth Park, and the mixed ward of Bishopsworth. At 66.4%, Hartcliffe & Withywood recorded the highest leave vote in the city. By contrast, the richer ward of Bedminster voted 63.9% remain, the mixed but less suburban Knowle voted 56.1% remain, and the central wards of Southville and Windmill Hill voted 75.9% and 72.8% remain respectively, tipping the seat from leave to remain overall.
This seat has been Labour since 1935, giving it the longest unbroken Labour-voting streak of all the Bristol seats. It has only had a non-Labour MP for four years since 1929, as Conservative Noel Ker Lindsay won it with a 21.8% majority in 1931. Labour won it on large majorities from 1945 until 1983, when it got close again with Michael Cocks holding on by 8.9%. In 1987, a new Labour candidate by the name of Dawn Primarolo won it by 1,404 votes or 2.7%: she would later become minister for public health and then children, young people and families under Gordon Brown. Its MP since 2015 has been Labour’s Karin Smyth. Although the 2010 election was relatively close, with the LibDems finishing second on 28.7% and cutting Labour’s majority to under ten point while the Conservatives managed just 22.9%, the collapse of the LibDem vote has see it become a safe Labour seat again, and Smyth’s current majority stands at 17.8% as she racked up 50.5% of the vote in 2019.
The political geography of the seat is quite interesting. Broadly speaking, the city centre portion is heavily inclined towards Labour, as are the old council estates on the southern edge, and Filwood in the centre of the seat. Bedminster to the west and Hengrove and Whitchurch in the seat’s south east are the Conservative areas, while Knowle and Windmill Hill will be fairly close. The latter would have been ripe for picking for the LibDems before their collapse.
Brexit will clearly have impacted this seat, and Labour’s 9.5% drop in 2019 will have been down to several factors. The Tories will have been the main beneficiaries in the council estates, while the LibDems will have cleaned up in Southville and Windmill Hill, especially the latter. That said, it is unlikely that the political alignments have been changed too drastically.
At local level, only one election has been fought on these boundaries, and only three wards had boundaries that weren’t drastically changed. In 2016, Southville’s 2 seats both went Green, although Labour were just 16 votes away from the second one. The Tories won just 10% (top vote method) and the LibDems 5.8%. Knowle went LibDem, with Labour nearly 20 points behind, and the Conservative slate taking just 6.1%. Hengrove split its three seats 2 LD 1 Lab, although a heavy personal vote looks to have been involved. At general elections, Southville’s Green vote will go Labour, Hengrove’s LibDem vote will go Tory and Knowle’s LibDem vote will split between the two. The Tory slate took 57.1% in Bishopsworth, which will be about right for a GE; every other ward was won by Labour.
Overall, this is a safe Labour seat that shows little sign of long-term change. Labour’s loss of vote share in 2019 still sees them ahead of their 2005, 2010 and 2015 results, and has resulted in a more fragmented rather than a stronger opposition. Even more crucially, the Tories only increased their share by 2%, suggesting thy haven’t managed to take advantage of any brexit dissatisfaction amongst the seat’s Labour-Leave working-class voters.
Bristol South
Bristol South covers the southern third of Bristol, from the South bank of the Avon to the city boundary, excluding a strip down the east of the city which is in Bristol East. It is the most suburban of the Bristol seats, and the only one to lie entirely within the historic area of Somerset. Some of the outer boundaries of Bristol can be quite hard to spot on the ground, but not here, as the built-up suburbs of Withywood and Hartcliffe give way to the green fields of North Somerset.
The city’s position on the mouth of the river Avon allowed it to become a major port and industrial centre. Bristol was already a major shipbuilding and manufacturing hub by the 14th century, and by the Tudor era it was the country’s second most important port, trading with Ireland, Iceland and Gascony. In 1497, John Cabot sailed west from Brtisol hoping to reach Asia but instead landing in North America, probably in Newfoundland although the exact location is uncertain. In the 17th and 18th centuries overseas trade grew in importance and Bristol, along with Liverpool, became a major hub in the triangular Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the railway came to Bristol thanks to engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built the Great Western Railway linking the West Country to London. His Bristol-Built steamships, the SS Great Britain and Great Western, the former of which is now back in Bristol harbour and open to the public as a museum which is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, brought the New World much closer and helped increase Bristol’s importance as a port.
Bristol also has a long history of liberal and non-conformist thought. Not only did its status as a port open it to trade and immigration from all over Europe, but John Wesley opened the first Methodist chapel in the city in 1739. In 1831, the people of Bristol rioted in Queen's Square in protest at the House of Lords' rejection of the reform act at its second reading. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus company was refusing to hire black or Asian bus crews and discrimination in many areas, including employment and housing, was sadly commonplace in the UK at the time. Led by youth worker Paul Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council, residents boycotted Bristol buses for four months. The boycott drew national attention and was endorsed by several prominent politicians including the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. The boycott was successful not only in persuading the company to drop it discriminatory policies but was also likely instrumental in passing the Race Relations acts of 1965 and 68. Little wonder then, with its history of liberalism, protest and progressivism that this city is such a stronghold for the left in UK politics.
This area of the city has never been as industrialised as the city centre areas, although the harbour and the Dry Dock where the SS Great Britain was built are just over the constituency border and several of the workers in Bristol’s industry lived in this seat while working elsewhere. In addition, Redcliffe Caves lie just over the border in Bristol West, and it’s not unlikely that they extend under areas of this seat. These are a series of man-made tunnels dug under the city to produce sand for glassmaking. Started in the middle ages, they were in use until the end of the 19th century. Imperial Tobacco once had an office in Hartcliffe, one of the southern suburbs, although it has now closed down. This seat has a working-class labour profile overall. SOC major groups 1-3, managerial, professional and technical occupations, employ 39.4% in this seat, compared to 47.5% nationally. This figure is higher in some wards, such as Windmill Hill (pre-2016 boundaries), and will be much lower than others, such as Hartcliffe and Withywood. In the old Hartcliffe ward, from before the 2016 boundary changes, that figure is just 20.7%, 18.7 points below the constituency average and a massive 26.8% below the national average. Major group 8-9 – essentially manual labourers – employs 20.1% of the workforce within this seat compared to 16.5% nationwide. Again, there is significant variation within the seat, with this figure at just 14.3% in the old Windmill Hill ward, and 31.4% in Filwood. In terms of the workforce within individual industries, wholesale and retail, education and construction are over-represented while “public administration and security” is under-represented. This might be a suburban seat, but it is not a middle-class one and not really a commuter one.
It is also not a rich one: in fact, it is the 73rd most deprived in England, making it more deprived than seats like Redcar, Stoke-on-Trent South, and Birmingham, Selly Oak, and only slightly less so than Hyndburn and Stockton North. 29% of its LSOAs are “highly deprived”, which means they are in the 10% most deprived in England. Paddy Ashdown once described health outcomes in Hartcliffe as “comparable to a third world country”. This includes all bar two of the twelve LSOAs mostly or wholly within Hartcliffe & Withywood ward, and all but three of the nine within Filwood ward. The constituency does especially badly on educational deprivation (28th in England) and crime (21st). It also does worse than its average on deprivation affecting children (68th in England). In terms of income, the average weekly pay here is £537 compared £586.50 in Great Britain. Unsurprisingly, it is Bristol’s most deprived seat. Some areas of Bedminster, Bedminster Down, Knowle and Windmill Hill do better, and very small parts are actively wealthy. Hartcliffe, Knowle West and Withywood are the poorest areas, basically large council estates constructed from the early 1930s to the aftermath of world war 2.
There is a good case to be made that this is Bristol’s most socially conservative seat, although it vies for that title with East, and it’s not really saying much: this is Bristol after all. It voted just 52.9% remain in the referendum, the lowest of Bristol’s constituencies, it somewhat defies its demographics: if this seat were on Wearside or Teeside, that figure would be closer to 40% than 50%. The four most leave wards are in this seat, including the suburban and massively deprived wards of Hartcliffe & Withywood and Filwood, the divided ward of Hengrove and Whitworth Park, and the mixed ward of Bishopsworth. At 66.4%, Hartcliffe & Withywood recorded the highest leave vote in the city. By contrast, the richer ward of Bedminster voted 63.9% remain, the mixed but less suburban Knowle voted 56.1% remain, and the central wards of Southville and Windmill Hill voted 75.9% and 72.8% remain respectively, tipping the seat from leave to remain overall.
This seat has been Labour since 1935, giving it the longest unbroken Labour-voting streak of all the Bristol seats. It has only had a non-Labour MP for four years since 1929, as Conservative Noel Ker Lindsay won it with a 21.8% majority in 1931. Labour won it on large majorities from 1945 until 1983, when it got close again with Michael Cocks holding on by 8.9%. In 1987, a new Labour candidate by the name of Dawn Primarolo won it by 1,404 votes or 2.7%: she would later become minister for public health and then children, young people and families under Gordon Brown. Its MP since 2015 has been Labour’s Karin Smyth. Although the 2010 election was relatively close, with the LibDems finishing second on 28.7% and cutting Labour’s majority to under ten point while the Conservatives managed just 22.9%, the collapse of the LibDem vote has see it become a safe Labour seat again, and Smyth’s current majority stands at 17.8% as she racked up 50.5% of the vote in 2019.
The political geography of the seat is quite interesting. Broadly speaking, the city centre portion is heavily inclined towards Labour, as are the old council estates on the southern edge, and Filwood in the centre of the seat. Bedminster to the west and Hengrove and Whitchurch in the seat’s south east are the Conservative areas, while Knowle and Windmill Hill will be fairly close. The latter would have been ripe for picking for the LibDems before their collapse.
Brexit will clearly have impacted this seat, and Labour’s 9.5% drop in 2019 will have been down to several factors. The Tories will have been the main beneficiaries in the council estates, while the LibDems will have cleaned up in Southville and Windmill Hill, especially the latter. That said, it is unlikely that the political alignments have been changed too drastically.
At local level, only one election has been fought on these boundaries, and only three wards had boundaries that weren’t drastically changed. In 2016, Southville’s 2 seats both went Green, although Labour were just 16 votes away from the second one. The Tories won just 10% (top vote method) and the LibDems 5.8%. Knowle went LibDem, with Labour nearly 20 points behind, and the Conservative slate taking just 6.1%. Hengrove split its three seats 2 LD 1 Lab, although a heavy personal vote looks to have been involved. At general elections, Southville’s Green vote will go Labour, Hengrove’s LibDem vote will go Tory and Knowle’s LibDem vote will split between the two. The Tory slate took 57.1% in Bishopsworth, which will be about right for a GE; every other ward was won by Labour.
Overall, this is a safe Labour seat that shows little sign of long-term change. Labour’s loss of vote share in 2019 still sees them ahead of their 2005, 2010 and 2015 results, and has resulted in a more fragmented rather than a stronger opposition. Even more crucially, the Tories only increased their share by 2%, suggesting thy haven’t managed to take advantage of any brexit dissatisfaction amongst the seat’s Labour-Leave working-class voters.
