Post by Foggy on Jun 3, 2020 0:11:09 GMT
There has been a Bath constituency represented in the Commons almost continuously since the thirteenth century, but it has only sent a single member (as opposed to multiple ones) since 1918. It covers a UNESCO World Heritage city, dating back to the ancient Roman settlement of Aquæ Sulis and its associated spring spa baths from which the modern city takes its name, and is also noted for its Georgian architecture, particularly the Royal Crescent. The shared seat (with Wells) of a Church of England diocese, its social life was mocked by Charles Dickens in his Pickwick Papers, whilst a blue plaque commemorates the fact that Jane Austen lived in the city from 1800 to 1809, although she did not enjoy the experience and produced her best work after leaving it.
One of the last MPs to represent the city as a dual-member constituency was a certain Alexander Thynne, great-uncle of the late Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath and famous owner of nearby Longleat Safari Park. Indeed, the former wasn't the first Thynne to win the seat, and scions of various noble families were returned between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Pitt the Elder was Prime Minister while sitting for Bath for all of five days in 1766 before being elevated to the Lords. This was a record for the shortest length of time a constituency had provided the Prime Minister until it was broken by Sidcup, which held that honour for just 4 days in 1974.
Dual membership was often split between Tories and Whigs, and on two occasions the Radical activist John Arthur Roebuck was even sent to Westminster from here. All of this betrays an underlying nonconformism consistent with the rest of the region, which was always present even when the city looked reliably Conservative for all but one year from the end of World War One until the end of the Cold War. From the end of World War Two until 1970, Labour finished in second place, although there was invariably a Liberal presence on the ballot at all elections bar the snap 1951 poll.
The Liberals narrowly managed to regain second place at the remaining three general elections of the 1970s, the last of which was won by Chris Patten (now Lord Patten of Barnes) as Margaret Thatcher swept to power nationally. Patten went on to serve as the last British Governor of Hong Kong and then as an EU Commissioner. At both general elections in the 1980s, his principal opponent was Malcolm Dean of the Social Democratic Party, who as part of the Alliance successfully squeezed the local Labour vote and turned the seat back into a marginal with a Tory majority of just 1,412.
Then-member of the now-disgraced institution of Avon 'County' Council, Don Foster, emerged as the main challenger for the 1992 general election for the merged Liberal Democrats and pulled off an upset victory by a margin of 3,768 votes. Although Patten was largely credited with masterminding the manifesto and campaign that led to a surprise Conservative majority that night, he had clearly taken his eye off the ball closer to home, but was nonetheless rewarded by Central Office with the aforementioned posting to the South China Sea. Another defeated candidate of note in 1992 was one Alan Sked of the Anti-Federalist League. After receiving just 117 votes, he went on to found UKIP the following year.
Foster then tightened his grip on the constituency as the anti-Tory vote mostly coalesced behind the incumbent, winning majorities just shy of five figures at both the 1997 and 2001 elections, then following a blip in 2005 (when the Greens, remarkably enough, held their deposit), he took 56.6% of the vote and a majority of nearly 12,000 at the 2010 general election. In the ensuing coalition government, Foster served as a junior minister in the local government department, and then as Deputy Chief Whip.
Foster's retirement, alongside a range of local and national factors, allowed the Conservatives to take back the seat on a huge turnout and a massive (but not atypical for a LD-held Tory target at that election) swing of 16.7%. Nonetheless, the changed circumstances of the snap 2017 election gave the Lib Dems every reason to think this would provide them with the opportunity for a fairly straightforward gain, especially as the new MP, Ben Howlett, had already been caught some controversy. However, this task was made more difficult as their PPC pulled out of the running soon after the writ was moved, and Wera Hobhouse had to be drafted in as a replacement.
Hanover-born Mrs Hobhouse had been a Tory borough councillor in Rochdale alongside her husband who defected to the Liberal Democrats over a local planning matter only one year after their election. A decade later they retired from the council and moved to the Westcountry, with Wera standing as a paper candidate for both the local and general elections on the same day in 2015, in the latter case in the North East Somerset constituency. Her elevation to prospective parliamentary candidate for a winnable seat two years later, just weeks before polling day, must have come as a shock to all involved.
Despite this, she succeeded in taking the seat back for the Lib Dems on a swing of 9.8% and effortlessly held on in 2019 with a larger numerical majority than Foster had ever achieved. This was helped in no small part by the fact that the Green party – who had enjoyed a substantial presence on the council for much of the 2010s – had collapsed at the previous local elections and chose to stand down in favour of Hobhouse under the terms of the ill-fated 'Remain alliance'. Hobhouse is party spokesperson for the environment and put herself forward as a rather improbable leadership candidate in the spring of 2020 before withdrawing in favour of the eventual runner-up, Layla Moran.
From 1983 to 1997 and again since 2010, the constituency boundaries have been tightly drawn around the city of Bath itself, and as such it currently consists of the Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) council wards of Bathwick, Combe Down, Kingsmead, Lambridge, Lansdown, Moorlands, Newbridge, Odd Down, Oldfield Park, Southdown, Twerton, Walcot, Westmoreland, Weston and Widcombe & Lyncombe. These borders also make it one of only two constituencies in the country to be the inner part of a 'doughnut', surrounded as it is on all sides by the North East Somerset constituency (the other is York Central, encircled entirely by York Outer).
Bath is unparished and BANES is a unitary authority, so there is only one set of local government data to draw from when determining which areas of the city vote which way. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight seats on BANES council that cover Bath proper were won at the 2019 local elections by the Lib Dems (in line with a very poor Tory performance nationally that May), with the other two being won by independent candidates.
The relatively poorer parts of the seat include Twerton, Odd Down, Weston, Walcot, Moorlands, Fox Hill (in the Combe Down ward), Whiteway and the city centre ward of Kingsmead, which provide the bulk of what little Labour strength persists in the city. In some of these, the Tories are estimated to have finished third behind both the LDs and Labour at the December 2019 general election.
Bath is estimated to have voted by a ratio of more than 2 to 1 for the Remain side in 2016, far higher than the overall BANES result of 57.9% for Remain. At the unexpected 2019 European Parliament election, BANES recorded the second-highest Lib Dem share in the South West and the second-worst Brexit Party result in the region... and yet the LDs still topped the poll by a mere 8% over the Brexit Party, albeit on a low turnout.
The city has a low proportion of benefit claimants, low levels of bad health and a below-average proportion of social renters. Deprivation has increased at a lower rate than in other areas of the country. It is also whiter than the national average, but has a much higher share of 18-to-35-year-olds than the UK-wide mean.
The last of those statistics can be attributed to the presence of two universities: one, on Claverton Down at the eastern edge of the city, which dates back to the Victorian era but only received its royal charter in the 1960s and now has a reputation for sporting excellence; the other, in Newton St. Loe just beyond the western edge of the city (but with most students based inside this seat's borders) as essentially a glorified teacher training college and performing arts centre, which was granted the right to award its own degrees even later, in the 1990s.
Sport isn't just practised at educational establishments, however, as Bath RFC, based at the Recreation Ground right by the river, hold a proud tradition as one of England's most successful men's rugby union sides. Twerton-based Bath City FC have also long been one of the nation's leading male semi-professional teams, with their ground having notoriously been used by then-homeless Bristol Rovers FC for home matches for a decade, from 1986 to 1996 inclusive. As of September 2020, Bristol City FC Ladies are playing home matches at that stadium.
Famous Bathonians by birth include comedian and musician Bill Bailey, baking expert Mary Berry, late physician and prude Thomas Bowdler, children's writer Jacqueline Wilson, actor Kris Marshall, singer and bassist Curt Smith of the band Tears for Fears and, on a more relevant political note, Ann Widdecombe, who grew up in – and later retired back to – Devon, but was best known for representing the Kent seat of Maidstone (then Maidstone & the Weald) as a Conservative from 1987 to 2010.
Among a list of adoptive Bathonians can be found the names of polemical film director Ken Loach, phonographic inventor and early convert to vegetarianism Sir Isaac Pitman, astronomer William Herschel (like Hobhouse, originally a Hanoverian), novelist Mary Shelley (who, similarly to Austen, composed her most revered pieces away from the city), actress Julia Sawalha and even Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, who switched on the municipal Christmas lights in 2009.
The 2015 result increasingly looks like a perfect storm that is unlikely to be replicated anytime soon for the Tories, leaving Bath as a little orange beacon of hope in a sea of blue across the neighbouring shire counties. On current poll-based projections at the time of writing, only this seat and Twickenham – both lost in 2015 – would stay in the Lib Dem column at a general election. As for boundary changes: re-adding Bathavon wards was proposed at both the abandoned reviews (with significant knock-on effects for the surrounding area), but the electoral roll at the last general election of 67,804 eligible voters should mean that no further changes should be necessary if the House of Commons is to stay a 650-member chamber as planned.
One of the last MPs to represent the city as a dual-member constituency was a certain Alexander Thynne, great-uncle of the late Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath and famous owner of nearby Longleat Safari Park. Indeed, the former wasn't the first Thynne to win the seat, and scions of various noble families were returned between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Pitt the Elder was Prime Minister while sitting for Bath for all of five days in 1766 before being elevated to the Lords. This was a record for the shortest length of time a constituency had provided the Prime Minister until it was broken by Sidcup, which held that honour for just 4 days in 1974.
Dual membership was often split between Tories and Whigs, and on two occasions the Radical activist John Arthur Roebuck was even sent to Westminster from here. All of this betrays an underlying nonconformism consistent with the rest of the region, which was always present even when the city looked reliably Conservative for all but one year from the end of World War One until the end of the Cold War. From the end of World War Two until 1970, Labour finished in second place, although there was invariably a Liberal presence on the ballot at all elections bar the snap 1951 poll.
The Liberals narrowly managed to regain second place at the remaining three general elections of the 1970s, the last of which was won by Chris Patten (now Lord Patten of Barnes) as Margaret Thatcher swept to power nationally. Patten went on to serve as the last British Governor of Hong Kong and then as an EU Commissioner. At both general elections in the 1980s, his principal opponent was Malcolm Dean of the Social Democratic Party, who as part of the Alliance successfully squeezed the local Labour vote and turned the seat back into a marginal with a Tory majority of just 1,412.
Then-member of the now-disgraced institution of Avon 'County' Council, Don Foster, emerged as the main challenger for the 1992 general election for the merged Liberal Democrats and pulled off an upset victory by a margin of 3,768 votes. Although Patten was largely credited with masterminding the manifesto and campaign that led to a surprise Conservative majority that night, he had clearly taken his eye off the ball closer to home, but was nonetheless rewarded by Central Office with the aforementioned posting to the South China Sea. Another defeated candidate of note in 1992 was one Alan Sked of the Anti-Federalist League. After receiving just 117 votes, he went on to found UKIP the following year.
Foster then tightened his grip on the constituency as the anti-Tory vote mostly coalesced behind the incumbent, winning majorities just shy of five figures at both the 1997 and 2001 elections, then following a blip in 2005 (when the Greens, remarkably enough, held their deposit), he took 56.6% of the vote and a majority of nearly 12,000 at the 2010 general election. In the ensuing coalition government, Foster served as a junior minister in the local government department, and then as Deputy Chief Whip.
Foster's retirement, alongside a range of local and national factors, allowed the Conservatives to take back the seat on a huge turnout and a massive (but not atypical for a LD-held Tory target at that election) swing of 16.7%. Nonetheless, the changed circumstances of the snap 2017 election gave the Lib Dems every reason to think this would provide them with the opportunity for a fairly straightforward gain, especially as the new MP, Ben Howlett, had already been caught some controversy. However, this task was made more difficult as their PPC pulled out of the running soon after the writ was moved, and Wera Hobhouse had to be drafted in as a replacement.
Hanover-born Mrs Hobhouse had been a Tory borough councillor in Rochdale alongside her husband who defected to the Liberal Democrats over a local planning matter only one year after their election. A decade later they retired from the council and moved to the Westcountry, with Wera standing as a paper candidate for both the local and general elections on the same day in 2015, in the latter case in the North East Somerset constituency. Her elevation to prospective parliamentary candidate for a winnable seat two years later, just weeks before polling day, must have come as a shock to all involved.
Despite this, she succeeded in taking the seat back for the Lib Dems on a swing of 9.8% and effortlessly held on in 2019 with a larger numerical majority than Foster had ever achieved. This was helped in no small part by the fact that the Green party – who had enjoyed a substantial presence on the council for much of the 2010s – had collapsed at the previous local elections and chose to stand down in favour of Hobhouse under the terms of the ill-fated 'Remain alliance'. Hobhouse is party spokesperson for the environment and put herself forward as a rather improbable leadership candidate in the spring of 2020 before withdrawing in favour of the eventual runner-up, Layla Moran.
From 1983 to 1997 and again since 2010, the constituency boundaries have been tightly drawn around the city of Bath itself, and as such it currently consists of the Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) council wards of Bathwick, Combe Down, Kingsmead, Lambridge, Lansdown, Moorlands, Newbridge, Odd Down, Oldfield Park, Southdown, Twerton, Walcot, Westmoreland, Weston and Widcombe & Lyncombe. These borders also make it one of only two constituencies in the country to be the inner part of a 'doughnut', surrounded as it is on all sides by the North East Somerset constituency (the other is York Central, encircled entirely by York Outer).
Bath is unparished and BANES is a unitary authority, so there is only one set of local government data to draw from when determining which areas of the city vote which way. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight seats on BANES council that cover Bath proper were won at the 2019 local elections by the Lib Dems (in line with a very poor Tory performance nationally that May), with the other two being won by independent candidates.
The relatively poorer parts of the seat include Twerton, Odd Down, Weston, Walcot, Moorlands, Fox Hill (in the Combe Down ward), Whiteway and the city centre ward of Kingsmead, which provide the bulk of what little Labour strength persists in the city. In some of these, the Tories are estimated to have finished third behind both the LDs and Labour at the December 2019 general election.
Bath is estimated to have voted by a ratio of more than 2 to 1 for the Remain side in 2016, far higher than the overall BANES result of 57.9% for Remain. At the unexpected 2019 European Parliament election, BANES recorded the second-highest Lib Dem share in the South West and the second-worst Brexit Party result in the region... and yet the LDs still topped the poll by a mere 8% over the Brexit Party, albeit on a low turnout.
The city has a low proportion of benefit claimants, low levels of bad health and a below-average proportion of social renters. Deprivation has increased at a lower rate than in other areas of the country. It is also whiter than the national average, but has a much higher share of 18-to-35-year-olds than the UK-wide mean.
The last of those statistics can be attributed to the presence of two universities: one, on Claverton Down at the eastern edge of the city, which dates back to the Victorian era but only received its royal charter in the 1960s and now has a reputation for sporting excellence; the other, in Newton St. Loe just beyond the western edge of the city (but with most students based inside this seat's borders) as essentially a glorified teacher training college and performing arts centre, which was granted the right to award its own degrees even later, in the 1990s.
Sport isn't just practised at educational establishments, however, as Bath RFC, based at the Recreation Ground right by the river, hold a proud tradition as one of England's most successful men's rugby union sides. Twerton-based Bath City FC have also long been one of the nation's leading male semi-professional teams, with their ground having notoriously been used by then-homeless Bristol Rovers FC for home matches for a decade, from 1986 to 1996 inclusive. As of September 2020, Bristol City FC Ladies are playing home matches at that stadium.
Famous Bathonians by birth include comedian and musician Bill Bailey, baking expert Mary Berry, late physician and prude Thomas Bowdler, children's writer Jacqueline Wilson, actor Kris Marshall, singer and bassist Curt Smith of the band Tears for Fears and, on a more relevant political note, Ann Widdecombe, who grew up in – and later retired back to – Devon, but was best known for representing the Kent seat of Maidstone (then Maidstone & the Weald) as a Conservative from 1987 to 2010.
Among a list of adoptive Bathonians can be found the names of polemical film director Ken Loach, phonographic inventor and early convert to vegetarianism Sir Isaac Pitman, astronomer William Herschel (like Hobhouse, originally a Hanoverian), novelist Mary Shelley (who, similarly to Austen, composed her most revered pieces away from the city), actress Julia Sawalha and even Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, who switched on the municipal Christmas lights in 2009.
The 2015 result increasingly looks like a perfect storm that is unlikely to be replicated anytime soon for the Tories, leaving Bath as a little orange beacon of hope in a sea of blue across the neighbouring shire counties. On current poll-based projections at the time of writing, only this seat and Twickenham – both lost in 2015 – would stay in the Lib Dem column at a general election. As for boundary changes: re-adding Bathavon wards was proposed at both the abandoned reviews (with significant knock-on effects for the surrounding area), but the electoral roll at the last general election of 67,804 eligible voters should mean that no further changes should be necessary if the House of Commons is to stay a 650-member chamber as planned.
