2023 Review - London

[heslingtonian]

Jun 28, 2023 22:51:19 GMT evergreenadam said:

The Harefield and Ruislip Manor ward swap would presumably make Labour’s job harder in Uxbridge?

I'd expect so, not because Harefield Village is any better for Labour than Ruislip Manor is but there's a lot more voters in Ruislip Manor.

[Peter Wilkinson]

Jun 28, 2023 18:06:18 GMT johnloony said:

Jun 28, 2023 11:12:14 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Jun 28, 2023 11:11:22 GMT greatkingrat said:

Also
Lambeth Central -> Clapham and Brixton Hill
Vauxhall -> Vauxhall and Camberwell Green
Wembley -> Brent West
Willesden -> Brent East

FFS

Those last two are good. Better to use proper sensible borough names rather than antiquated bumpkin names which only existed thousands of years ago.

I'm not sure whether that last observation is meant to be serious or sarcastic. It reads plausibly as a tenable (if by no means necessarily correct) point of view either way.

Leaving that particular point aside, though, if one is choosing places in the London Borough of Brent to use as constituency names, Wembley and Willesden are the most obvious ones - so it's not surprising that the BCE thought of using them. They were indeed the places that gave their names to Brent's two predecessor boroughs - and the borough of Willesden, to the south-east of the river Brent, was the successor of a medieval parish with the same name and boundaries. While Wembley did not have a similar history, it too was clearly the dominant place in its own area to the north-west of the Brent by the mid-19th century.

So Wembley and Willesden were perfectly good constituency names for Brent constituencies - and would have reflected genuine local communities, if the quota range had been 20,000 higher, allowing the creation of two Borough of Brent constituencies separated by the river from which the borough took its name. As things stand, it could probably be argued that calling what will now be the Brent West constituency Wembley would still properly reflect its community - the constituency lies entirely on the north-west side of the river Brent, and the areas on its side of the Brent which it does not include are probably the ones which are least specifically Wembley.

However, the same can certainly not be said for calling what will now be the Brent East constituency Willesden - the constituency contains about 15,000 voters living on the Wembley side of the Brent (and the number would go up to about 25,000 if the remainder of the ones not going into Brent West weren't going, as an orphan ward, into Harrow East instead). This is compounded by the fact that over 30,000 voters from the southern edge of Brent weren't going to be in Willesden constituency but were being placed into Queen's Park and Little Venice constituency instead. Judging by the comments on the revised proposals from Brent residents, this seems to have gone down particularly badly with the 11,000-odd voters in Harlesden and Kensal Green ward.

Indeed, it looks as if the bulk of the BCE's postbag late last autumn from Brent was either from people who were horrified to find themselves included in Willesden constituency (because Willesden was on the wrong side of the Brent) or from people from Harlesden who were horrified to find that there was going to be a Willesden constituency from which they were going to be excluded. The BCE was obviously very disinclined to redraw its map of Brent (and unavoidably much of the rest of north London) in its final proposals - it was far easier to alter proposed constituency names. They could, I suppose, have gone for changing Willesden to the geographically more accurate (and longer) Willesden North and Kingsbury - but presumably felt that going for the still reasonably geographically accurate but anodyne Brent East (and Brent West for Wembley) instead would give them the quietest life for the least bother. In this case, I can't really blame the BCE.

[minionofmidas]

Yes, I remember thinking that Willesden really needed a "N & whatever" suffix. You could have even paired it with a "Paddington N & Willesden S"!

[Pete Whitehead]

I don't think you needed a North suffix although a mention of Kingsbury would have been in order. Really the problem was the boundary in that area that pushed that seat North of the Brent in the first place. My own proposals avoided that.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

I've gone through to look at precise figures (so far as available - estimates where not) of the new constituencies in terms of the current ones. There are three current constituencies which are the 'base seat' for two new ones:

Beckenham -> 57% of Beckenham and Penge, and 50.8% of Bromley and Biggin Hill
Streatham -> 54.5% of Clapham and Brixton Hill, and 51.9% of Streatham and Croydon North
West Ham -> 60.6% of Stratford and Bow, and 75.3% of West Ham and Beckton

By contrast Bromley and Chislehurst is not the base seat for any of the new seats. The largest part goes to Bromley and Biggin Hill but it's only 44.7% of the electorate.

In terms of the Index of Change, three constituencies are entirely unaltered (Islington North, Tooting, Walthamstow). Here are the Indexes of Change in the others, ranked from low to high:

New seat	Index of Change
Hayes and Harlington	0.0
Carshalton and Wallington	0.6
Sutton and Cheam	0.6
Finchley and Golders Green	1.0
Ealing North	1.8
Romford	2.0
Hornchurch and Upminster	4.9
Richmond Park	8.2
Feltham and Heston	8.3
Barking	8.7
Twickenham	8.9
Islington South and Finsbury	9.3
Battersea	9.3
Leyton and Wanstead	9.6
Mitcham and Morden	9.8
Holborn and St Pancras	10.2
Putney	11.2
Old Bexley and Sidcup	11.9
Hendon	12.2
Greenwich and Woolwich	12.6
Harrow West	14.9
Ealing Southall	16.8
Poplar and Limehouse	18.4
East Ham	19.7
Enfield North	19.7
Cities of London and Westminster	20.0
Chingford and Woodford Green	22.3
Dagenham and Rainham	23.0
Croydon East	23.5
Harrow East	24.2
Kingston and Surbiton	24.4
Dulwich and West Norwood	24.6
Uxbridge and South Ruislip	25.3
Bermondsey and Old Southwark	25.3
Chelsea and Fulham	25.5
Kensington and Bayswater	25.7
Ealing Central and Acton	26.3
Croydon South	27.2
Hackney South and Shoreditch	27.8
Chipping Barnet	28.3
Ilford South	29.4
Wimbledon	29.6
Lewisham East	30.3
Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner	30.9
Lewisham North	31.0
Orpington	31.2
Bexleyheath and Crayford	33.1
Hackney North and Stoke Newington	34.5
Tottenham	35.5
Bethnal Green and Stepney	35.8
Brent West	37.6
Eltham and Chislehurst	43.9
Brentford and Isleworth	44.6
Ilford North	46.0
Erith and Thamesmead	47.5
Edmonton and Winchmore Hill	48.3
Peckham	50.6
Brent East	51.9
Hampstead and Highgate	55.2
Croydon West	56.5
Hornsey and Friern Barnet	63.2
West Ham and Beckton	63.5
Vauxhall and Camberwell Green	64.3
Hammersmith and Chiswick	65.1
Stratford and Bow	84.1
Southgate and Wood Green	85.7
Beckenham and Penge	86.1
Queen’s Park and Maida Vale	88.4
Clapham and Brixton Hill	91.6
Streatham and Croydon North	96.4
Bromley and Biggin Hill	98.6
Lewisham West and East Dulwich	101.5

[John Chanin]

This is what I spent yesterday calculating....

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Jul 9, 2023 10:57:14 GMT John Chanin said:

This is what I spent yesterday calculating....

It would be interesting to compare notes!

[borisminor]

Jul 9, 2023 10:47:22 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

I've gone through to look at precise figures (so far as available - estimates where not) of the new constituencies in terms of the current ones. There are three current constituencies which are the 'base seat' for two new ones:

Beckenham -> 57% of Beckenham and Penge, and 50.8% of Bromley and Biggin Hill
Streatham -> 54.5% of Clapham and Brixton Hill, and 51.9% of Streatham and Croydon North
West Ham -> 60.6% of Stratford and Bow, and 75.3% of West Ham and Beckton

By contrast Bromley and Chislehurst is not the base seat for any of the new seats. The largest part goes to Bromley and Biggin Hill but it's only 44.7% of the electorate.

In terms of the Index of Change, three constituencies are entirely unaltered (Islington North, Tooting, Walthamstow). Here are the Indexes of Change in the others, ranked from low to high:

What level of Index of Change does a comparison between the old and new seat become redundant even with a name change/retaining the same name? 50? 100?

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Here's a link to the electorate calculations.