Wythenshawe and Sale East
Jul 19, 2020 14:32:35 GMT
Robert Waller, Devil Wincarnate, and 4 more like this
Post by andrewteale on Jul 19, 2020 14:32:35 GMT
With apologies to Devil Wincarnate . I had originally written a piece on this seat for Kris at the time of the 2014 by-election, so I've updated and pimped it up a bit.
The boundary review before the 1997 general election reduced the number of seats in Manchester and Trafford from eight to seven, necessitating a seat crossing the Manchster city boundary and taking in part of Trafford. The result was the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. On the Trafford side of the boundary line is three-fifths of Sale, a town which is dominated by straight lines radiating from Manchester. To the west is the old Roman road from Chester to York, now the A56 and the constituency boundary; in the middle is the Bridgewater Canal; and next to the canal is the Altrincham branch of Manchester's Metrolink tram network.
The Metrolink opened in 1992, taking over a railway line which had existed since 1849 and had turned Sale into a middle-class commuter area. Sale's middle-classness can be inferred not just from its housing but from its sports. The building of a motorway along the Mersey valley between Sale and Stretford led to a large gravel pit being excavated, which was flooded and turned into Sale Water Park, a watersports centre. The Sale Harriers athletics club is long-established and produced the sprinter Darren Campbell, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics as part of the GB sprint relay team. But in possibly the ultimate indication of poshness in the North West, Sale supports a professional rugby union team, Sale Sharks, although due to the lack of a good venue in the town they now play on the other side of the Ship Canal in the new Salford City Stadium at Barton-upon-Irwell. Probably Sale's most famous resident is the physicist James Joule, after whom the SI unit of energy is named; Joule is buried in Brooklands Cemetery.
Nonetheless, Sale (population around 55,000) is outvoted by Wythenshawe (population around 86,000), 11 square miles of council housing built by the City of Manchester from the 1920s as an overspill estate. Wythenshawe is one of the stronger candidates for the perennially contested title of "Europe's largest council estate". Effectively, it's a municipal New Town. Intended as a garden city-type development to attract skilled workers, Wythenshawe turned out to be the exact opposite; it says something that much of the Channel 4 series Shameless was filmed here. There is some local employment from the large Sharston Industrial Estate and from Wythenshawe Hospital, a large teaching hospital associated with Manchester University. However, one of Wythenshawe's wards (Benchill ward, since abolished in boundary changes) came in right at the bottom of the 2000 English indices of multiple deprivation, and the other wards aren't much better.
One thing you might notice from the map of the constituency's wards is that Woodhouse Park ward is much larger than the rest. The ward's population is actually concentrated in the northern corner; the rest of the area (forming the city of Manchester's only parish, Ringway) is almost completely filled by the buildings, apron and one of the runways of Manchester Airport, Britain's third busiest airport and busiest outside London. The Manchester Airport Group - which in recent years has expanded outside the city to take over East Midlands and London Stansted airports - underpins the constituency's economy in more ways than the obvious one, as Manchester city council is the airport's largest shareholder with a 35.5% stoke. The dividends paid by the airport to Manchester and the other nine Greater Manchester boroughs have proved a very useful source of income for the conurbation's local government.
The airport is the best-connected location in a constituency criss-crossed by motorways. The constituency's only railway station is located there, and in recent years the Metrolink people have opened a new tram line connecting Wythenshawe with the airport, Sale Water Park and Manchester beyond. Trams on this route start at the very early time of 4am, in order to get the airport's morning shift into work. If High Speed 2 goes ahead as planned, it will include a Manchester Airport station.
Being on the south side of the Mersey, the whole of this constituency was originally part of Cheshire, and until the Second World War it) was part of the Altrincham constituency which was as safe Tory as you might expect. The growth of Wythenshawe meant that by 1935 Altrincham was twice the size of every other seat in Cheshire; in the general election of that year the Tory candidate, journalist, First World War hero and former Governor of Kenya Lt-Col Sir Edward Grigg, polled over 50,000 votes to 21-and-a-half thousand for Labour. Unsurprisingly this was one of the seats which was split up in the interim 1945 boundary review, with Sale becoming part of the new Altrincham and Sale constituency (which has basically persisted ever since, although with less and less of Sale as time has gone on) and Wythenshawe going into the short-lived Bucklow constituency along with such middle-class towns as Cheadle, Hale and Lymm and a significant rural area (the Bucklow Rural District). In the '45 election Bucklow was comfortably Conservative, returning new MP Lt William Shepherd, director of Manchester Chamber of Commerce and recently returned from the campaign in France, Belgium and the Netherlands; he defeated the Labour candidate by 30165 votes to 22497.
Wythenshawe finally got a seat of its own (as Manchester Wythenshawe) for the 1950 general election. Shepherd moved to the new seat of Cheadle, leaving Manchester city councillor and catering firm manager Eveline Hill to defend Wythenshawe for the Tories; and defend it she did, surviving adverse boundary changes in 1955 to hold her increasingly marginal seat until 1964. This wasn't because Wythenshawe was a particularly Tory area (far from it) but because the seat as then drawn included the rich and (at the time) strongly Conservative suburb of Didsbury on the other side of the Mersey.
The Labour candidate who defeated Hill was Alf Morris, brother of another Labour MP for Manchester and uncle of Estelle Morris, an Education secretary under Tony Blair. Having seen his father die a long and lingering death as a result of First World War injuries (losing a leg and a eye, and being gassed), Morris became a tireless campaigner for disability rights: in 1970 he successfully negotiated through Parliament the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, the world's first legislation giving rights to the disabled, and in 1974 Morris was appointed by Wilson as the world's first ever Minister for the Disabled. After his first election, Morris was never seriously threatened at the ballot box and bequeathed a large majority upon his retirement in 1997.
That large majority was inherited by Paul Goggins, a Salford city councillor whose career had been in childcare and children's charities, and who claimed to have been from the family which inspired the character of Mrs Goggins in the Postman Pat stories. With Labour now in government nationally Goggins got onto the junior ministerial ladder, serving in the Home Office as prisons minister and later in the Northern Ireland office.
Paul Goggins died aged just 60 at the start of 2014, after collapsing while running. The resulting by-election in February 2014 safely returned new Labour candidate Mike Kane, who is very much from the same mould as Goggins: history in local government (in this case Manchester city council), Roman Catholic, Man City fan. Like Goggins, Kane has gone down the ministerial route, although in a shadow capacity; he was the shadow schools minister throughout the Corbyn era, and Keir Starmer has appointed Kane as a shadow minister for regional transport.
Kane's majority has been above 10,000 votes in all three general elections since the 2014 by-election, with the December 2019 general election giving him a 53-30 lead over the Conservatives. If local election results are any guide, then the local Conservatives are in trouble as they are now down to just one local councillor in the constituency: in Sale's Brooklands ward, which was safely Conservative up until the EU referendum of 2016, voted Labour in 2018 for the first time ever and the party won a second seat in 2019. Priory ward (covering Sale town centre) is safe Labour; Sale Moor is traditionally more marginal but hasn't voted Conservative since they entered government.
As you might expect, things are far more dire for Conservatism in Manchester. The last time the Tories won a ward within the city boundaries was in 1992; in this century they have targeted Manchester's Brooklands ward a few times but would appear to have basically given up. The other four Manchester wards within the constituency boundary were all safely Labour in May 2019 with the party consistently polling between 50% and 60%. Labour have had a full slate of Wythenshawe councillors since 2014, when the last Lib Dem holdout in Northenden ward was defeated.
So it would appear that Mike Kane has a safe seat for as long as he wants it. Whether Wythenshawe can shake off its Shameless reputation by the end of his term is quite another question.
The boundary review before the 1997 general election reduced the number of seats in Manchester and Trafford from eight to seven, necessitating a seat crossing the Manchster city boundary and taking in part of Trafford. The result was the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. On the Trafford side of the boundary line is three-fifths of Sale, a town which is dominated by straight lines radiating from Manchester. To the west is the old Roman road from Chester to York, now the A56 and the constituency boundary; in the middle is the Bridgewater Canal; and next to the canal is the Altrincham branch of Manchester's Metrolink tram network.
The Metrolink opened in 1992, taking over a railway line which had existed since 1849 and had turned Sale into a middle-class commuter area. Sale's middle-classness can be inferred not just from its housing but from its sports. The building of a motorway along the Mersey valley between Sale and Stretford led to a large gravel pit being excavated, which was flooded and turned into Sale Water Park, a watersports centre. The Sale Harriers athletics club is long-established and produced the sprinter Darren Campbell, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics as part of the GB sprint relay team. But in possibly the ultimate indication of poshness in the North West, Sale supports a professional rugby union team, Sale Sharks, although due to the lack of a good venue in the town they now play on the other side of the Ship Canal in the new Salford City Stadium at Barton-upon-Irwell. Probably Sale's most famous resident is the physicist James Joule, after whom the SI unit of energy is named; Joule is buried in Brooklands Cemetery.
Nonetheless, Sale (population around 55,000) is outvoted by Wythenshawe (population around 86,000), 11 square miles of council housing built by the City of Manchester from the 1920s as an overspill estate. Wythenshawe is one of the stronger candidates for the perennially contested title of "Europe's largest council estate". Effectively, it's a municipal New Town. Intended as a garden city-type development to attract skilled workers, Wythenshawe turned out to be the exact opposite; it says something that much of the Channel 4 series Shameless was filmed here. There is some local employment from the large Sharston Industrial Estate and from Wythenshawe Hospital, a large teaching hospital associated with Manchester University. However, one of Wythenshawe's wards (Benchill ward, since abolished in boundary changes) came in right at the bottom of the 2000 English indices of multiple deprivation, and the other wards aren't much better.
One thing you might notice from the map of the constituency's wards is that Woodhouse Park ward is much larger than the rest. The ward's population is actually concentrated in the northern corner; the rest of the area (forming the city of Manchester's only parish, Ringway) is almost completely filled by the buildings, apron and one of the runways of Manchester Airport, Britain's third busiest airport and busiest outside London. The Manchester Airport Group - which in recent years has expanded outside the city to take over East Midlands and London Stansted airports - underpins the constituency's economy in more ways than the obvious one, as Manchester city council is the airport's largest shareholder with a 35.5% stoke. The dividends paid by the airport to Manchester and the other nine Greater Manchester boroughs have proved a very useful source of income for the conurbation's local government.
The airport is the best-connected location in a constituency criss-crossed by motorways. The constituency's only railway station is located there, and in recent years the Metrolink people have opened a new tram line connecting Wythenshawe with the airport, Sale Water Park and Manchester beyond. Trams on this route start at the very early time of 4am, in order to get the airport's morning shift into work. If High Speed 2 goes ahead as planned, it will include a Manchester Airport station.
Being on the south side of the Mersey, the whole of this constituency was originally part of Cheshire, and until the Second World War it) was part of the Altrincham constituency which was as safe Tory as you might expect. The growth of Wythenshawe meant that by 1935 Altrincham was twice the size of every other seat in Cheshire; in the general election of that year the Tory candidate, journalist, First World War hero and former Governor of Kenya Lt-Col Sir Edward Grigg, polled over 50,000 votes to 21-and-a-half thousand for Labour. Unsurprisingly this was one of the seats which was split up in the interim 1945 boundary review, with Sale becoming part of the new Altrincham and Sale constituency (which has basically persisted ever since, although with less and less of Sale as time has gone on) and Wythenshawe going into the short-lived Bucklow constituency along with such middle-class towns as Cheadle, Hale and Lymm and a significant rural area (the Bucklow Rural District). In the '45 election Bucklow was comfortably Conservative, returning new MP Lt William Shepherd, director of Manchester Chamber of Commerce and recently returned from the campaign in France, Belgium and the Netherlands; he defeated the Labour candidate by 30165 votes to 22497.
Wythenshawe finally got a seat of its own (as Manchester Wythenshawe) for the 1950 general election. Shepherd moved to the new seat of Cheadle, leaving Manchester city councillor and catering firm manager Eveline Hill to defend Wythenshawe for the Tories; and defend it she did, surviving adverse boundary changes in 1955 to hold her increasingly marginal seat until 1964. This wasn't because Wythenshawe was a particularly Tory area (far from it) but because the seat as then drawn included the rich and (at the time) strongly Conservative suburb of Didsbury on the other side of the Mersey.
The Labour candidate who defeated Hill was Alf Morris, brother of another Labour MP for Manchester and uncle of Estelle Morris, an Education secretary under Tony Blair. Having seen his father die a long and lingering death as a result of First World War injuries (losing a leg and a eye, and being gassed), Morris became a tireless campaigner for disability rights: in 1970 he successfully negotiated through Parliament the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, the world's first legislation giving rights to the disabled, and in 1974 Morris was appointed by Wilson as the world's first ever Minister for the Disabled. After his first election, Morris was never seriously threatened at the ballot box and bequeathed a large majority upon his retirement in 1997.
That large majority was inherited by Paul Goggins, a Salford city councillor whose career had been in childcare and children's charities, and who claimed to have been from the family which inspired the character of Mrs Goggins in the Postman Pat stories. With Labour now in government nationally Goggins got onto the junior ministerial ladder, serving in the Home Office as prisons minister and later in the Northern Ireland office.
Paul Goggins died aged just 60 at the start of 2014, after collapsing while running. The resulting by-election in February 2014 safely returned new Labour candidate Mike Kane, who is very much from the same mould as Goggins: history in local government (in this case Manchester city council), Roman Catholic, Man City fan. Like Goggins, Kane has gone down the ministerial route, although in a shadow capacity; he was the shadow schools minister throughout the Corbyn era, and Keir Starmer has appointed Kane as a shadow minister for regional transport.
Kane's majority has been above 10,000 votes in all three general elections since the 2014 by-election, with the December 2019 general election giving him a 53-30 lead over the Conservatives. If local election results are any guide, then the local Conservatives are in trouble as they are now down to just one local councillor in the constituency: in Sale's Brooklands ward, which was safely Conservative up until the EU referendum of 2016, voted Labour in 2018 for the first time ever and the party won a second seat in 2019. Priory ward (covering Sale town centre) is safe Labour; Sale Moor is traditionally more marginal but hasn't voted Conservative since they entered government.
As you might expect, things are far more dire for Conservatism in Manchester. The last time the Tories won a ward within the city boundaries was in 1992; in this century they have targeted Manchester's Brooklands ward a few times but would appear to have basically given up. The other four Manchester wards within the constituency boundary were all safely Labour in May 2019 with the party consistently polling between 50% and 60%. Labour have had a full slate of Wythenshawe councillors since 2014, when the last Lib Dem holdout in Northenden ward was defeated.
So it would appear that Mike Kane has a safe seat for as long as he wants it. Whether Wythenshawe can shake off its Shameless reputation by the end of his term is quite another question.
