Post by BossMan on May 1, 2020 18:10:41 GMT
WAKEFIELD
Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire with a population of around 100,000 people. However, it is not a compact urban seat as the name might suggest. Geographically, it only makes up the north eastern part of the constituency which takes its name, and the city’s southern ward has been in the Hemsworth constituency since 1997. In the latest boundary changes of 2010, the Wakefield seat lost the Kirklees wards of Denby Dale and Kirkburton to Dewsbury, but gained Ossett from the abolished Normanton constituency.
Wakefield’s traditional trade was in corn, coal mining and textiles. The National Coal Board was at one time the largest employer in the city.
The best wards for Labour in the city are Wakefield East and Wakefield North, both containing ex-council estates such as Flanshaw, Portobello and East Moor. Wakefield West has become reliably Labour since 2012, but used to be won by the Conservatives when they were in Opposition.
The small town of Ossett and a smaller town of Horbury are to the west of Wakefield. Ossett is a little too large to make up a ward, so there is an Ossett ward, and a Horbury and South Ossett ward. Both are keenly fought between the Conservatives and Labour nowadays; the Lib Dems previously had strength in Ossett but haven’t won the ward since 2007. There was also one UKIP win there in their heady days of 2014.
The southernmost ward in the constituency is Wakefield Rural, which includes the villages of Netherton, Criggleston, Chapelthorpe, West Bretton and Woolley – as well as the National Coal Mining museum. It is a Conservative inclined ward, but Labour can win it in a good year.
In the 1932 by-election, Labour re-gained the constituency having lost it in their electoral disaster the previous year, and went on to hold it continously for 87 years. Over time, the coal mining tradition declined and the patterns of trade diversified, which in turn led the seat to become less of a stronghold but increasingly marginal. Labour’s majority here at their high point of 1997 (14,604) was about the same in percentage terms as it had been in the much closer election October 1974 (12,806), to take an example. The Conservatives always did have a respectable pool of support here in this time period, even in their worst years, but they always ended up falling short, missing out by just 360 votes in their 1983 landslide.
More recently, the Wakefield constituency voted 63% in favour of leaving the European Union at the 2016 referendum. This was very much at odds with the Labour MP Mary Creagh, who was first elected in 2005 and was a frontbencher under Ed Miliband (but not Jeremy Corbyn). She voted against the triggering of Article 50 and backed a second EU referendum. In 2019, the Conservatives, fighting the general election under a “Get Brexit Done” slogan, finally had their long-awaited breakthrough, and their candidate Imran Ahmed-Khan unseated Mary Creagh by 3,358 votes on a 6.1% swing.
Labour no longer enjoys Wakefield constituency’s unswerving loyalty, but this does remain a marginal seat. The main beneficiaries of Labour’s 10% decline in 2019 were the Brexit Party, who polled 6% of the vote while the Tories rose by a fairly modest 2%. Imran Ahmed-Khan may well enjoy an incumbency boost in 2024, but Wakefield is a prime target for Labour if things start going their way nationally again.
Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire with a population of around 100,000 people. However, it is not a compact urban seat as the name might suggest. Geographically, it only makes up the north eastern part of the constituency which takes its name, and the city’s southern ward has been in the Hemsworth constituency since 1997. In the latest boundary changes of 2010, the Wakefield seat lost the Kirklees wards of Denby Dale and Kirkburton to Dewsbury, but gained Ossett from the abolished Normanton constituency.
Wakefield’s traditional trade was in corn, coal mining and textiles. The National Coal Board was at one time the largest employer in the city.
The best wards for Labour in the city are Wakefield East and Wakefield North, both containing ex-council estates such as Flanshaw, Portobello and East Moor. Wakefield West has become reliably Labour since 2012, but used to be won by the Conservatives when they were in Opposition.
The small town of Ossett and a smaller town of Horbury are to the west of Wakefield. Ossett is a little too large to make up a ward, so there is an Ossett ward, and a Horbury and South Ossett ward. Both are keenly fought between the Conservatives and Labour nowadays; the Lib Dems previously had strength in Ossett but haven’t won the ward since 2007. There was also one UKIP win there in their heady days of 2014.
The southernmost ward in the constituency is Wakefield Rural, which includes the villages of Netherton, Criggleston, Chapelthorpe, West Bretton and Woolley – as well as the National Coal Mining museum. It is a Conservative inclined ward, but Labour can win it in a good year.
In the 1932 by-election, Labour re-gained the constituency having lost it in their electoral disaster the previous year, and went on to hold it continously for 87 years. Over time, the coal mining tradition declined and the patterns of trade diversified, which in turn led the seat to become less of a stronghold but increasingly marginal. Labour’s majority here at their high point of 1997 (14,604) was about the same in percentage terms as it had been in the much closer election October 1974 (12,806), to take an example. The Conservatives always did have a respectable pool of support here in this time period, even in their worst years, but they always ended up falling short, missing out by just 360 votes in their 1983 landslide.
More recently, the Wakefield constituency voted 63% in favour of leaving the European Union at the 2016 referendum. This was very much at odds with the Labour MP Mary Creagh, who was first elected in 2005 and was a frontbencher under Ed Miliband (but not Jeremy Corbyn). She voted against the triggering of Article 50 and backed a second EU referendum. In 2019, the Conservatives, fighting the general election under a “Get Brexit Done” slogan, finally had their long-awaited breakthrough, and their candidate Imran Ahmed-Khan unseated Mary Creagh by 3,358 votes on a 6.1% swing.
Labour no longer enjoys Wakefield constituency’s unswerving loyalty, but this does remain a marginal seat. The main beneficiaries of Labour’s 10% decline in 2019 were the Brexit Party, who polled 6% of the vote while the Tories rose by a fairly modest 2%. Imran Ahmed-Khan may well enjoy an incumbency boost in 2024, but Wakefield is a prime target for Labour if things start going their way nationally again.