2023 Review - West Midlands

[islington]

I've been reflecting on recent exchanges and in particular on the really helpful post by iainbhx about the finer points of the geography of Dudley.

Obviously the prerequisite for making a submission is that its proposer should be confident that it represents a clear and significant improvement on the BCE scheme. Having had a couple of nights to sleep on it, I do not have that confidence in respect of Staffs and the Black Country so I won't be putting anything forward in this area.

Basically this is because I can't see a good way of taking only two Dudley wards to go with Staffs. You can take three (Kingswinfords and Wordsley), and the BCE has resolved the resultant shortage of voters in Dudley/Sandwell by a not-very-attractive ward split. But there's no more satisfactory solution that I can see; and in the end there are worse things in life than a ward split, and the LibDems' scheme for Wolverhampton is one of them.

I am still minded, however, to submit something on Brum / Solihull / Warwks.

[islington]

Turning back to Birmingham, and just to show that I'm prepared to consider a ward split when it achieves something useful, I'm contemplating the map below as an alternative arrangement in north and central Birmingham. The aim here is to avoid the much-changed Erdington seat in the plan I posted on 6 Mar, and also to maintain a viable Hodge Hill. This entails some consequential changes to Ladywood and Yardley. The rest of Brum would be as posted on 6 Mar.

Erdington - 71242. Contains PDs NEC1 and NEC2 of Nechells, with a combined electorate of 2485. This is much more recognizably based on the current seat, although it still extends south of the M6.

Hodge Hill - 72036. Includes the rest of Nechells, which takes it further west than is ideal but it's still the clear successor of the current seat. If preferred it could take Garretts Gn instead of Heartlands but that would mean moving more electors than the arrangement shown above.

Ladywood - 70016.

Yardley - 70137. Not quite so neat and tidy as in my non-split plan.

Compared with the non-split plan, this is certainly an improvement in terms of minimum change. The question is whether the improvement is sufficient to justify a ward split when there are many alternative 10-seat Birmingham plans that involve no splits at all. 

[sirbenjamin]

Are there any 10-seat Brums that don't have horrible knock-on effects immediately outside?

I'm more inclined towards a cross-border Birmingham-Solihull seat *if* it means we can have a 6-seat Warks, a 3-seat Cov and a 1-seat Bromsgrove all neatly self-contained.

[greenchristian]

Mar 9, 2022 14:11:04 GMT sirbenjamin said:

Are there any 10-seat Brums that don't have horrible knock-on effects immediately outside?

Only if you consider the concept of a Solihull-Warks cross-border seat to be inherently horrible (and more so than splitting up the Chelmsley Wood estate).

[sirbenjamin]

Mar 9, 2022 14:13:54 GMT greenchristian said:

Mar 9, 2022 14:11:04 GMT sirbenjamin said:

Are there any 10-seat Brums that don't have horrible knock-on effects immediately outside?

Only if you consider the concept of a Solihull-Warks cross-border seat to be inherently horrible (and more so than splitting up the Chelmsley Wood estate).

I like a Solihull-Warks crossing less than a Solihull-Brum crossing, because crossing a ceremonial county boundary feels worse to me than crossing between two LAs in the same county.

(I know this won't matter for people whose heads are stuck pre-1974.)

[iainbhx]

I think the best thing to say about Sandwell is that it is inchoate, it is made of several different communities - some of which have been historic rivals and some of which are split across boroughs - which isn't quite so true of Dudley.

The classic example is Great Barr which is split across Birmingham, Sandwell and to a lesser extent Walsall. Great Barr could be the core of a seat, but combining 3 Mets. Nah.

There's also the dimension of ethnicity - Dudley is pretty white - especially the two Kingswinfords, Wordsley, Norton and, of course, Gornal. Ok, there's bits of Dudley and a few other places, but overall Sandwell has a much larger BAME population, especially in West Brom and Smethwick which probably have several majority minority wards by now. This has changed the way Sandwell hangs together from how it used to hang together in the 80's, never mind the Muslin/Sikh relationship within some of those wards.

Smethwick; Smethwick, St Paul's, Soho & Victoria
Warley: Langley, Bristnall, Old Warley
Rowley: Rowley, Blackheath
Great Barr: Newton, Great Barr, Charlemont & Grove Vale
West Brom: West Brom Central, Greets Green and Lyng, Hateley Heath.
Wednesbury: Wednesbury N & S
Tipton : Tipton Green, Princes End, Great Bridge

The Wednesbury & Tipton clusters sort of hold together, Wednesbury would probably be more comfortable with Darlo or Bilston.

The Warley and Rowley clusters also hold together reasonably well.

Friar Park - historically part of West Brom, has been associated more with Wednesbury since Sandwell was formed, feels and looks a lot more like Wednesbury
Tividale - historically part of Tipton, but also has attachments to Oldbury, Oakham up on the ridge line feels much more like part of Dudley. Contains Tividale Quays - which was a very brave regeneration of Dudley Port.
Abbey - aka Bearwood is really part of Groß Birmingham and would fit in an Edgbaston seat easily, but for a Sandwell seat is more Warley than Smevvick.
Cradley Heath and Old Hill - best with the other part of Cradley, although they will fight to the death about the differences between them, Ode Hill looks towards Halesowen more than Oldbury
Oldbury - Chemical Town - therefore strange in the metal bashing Black Country, was once part of Halesowen and therefore of Shropshire. Used to fit well with the Warley group, not so much now apart from being more middle class. The far north of the ward belongs with Tipton, the central section is really part of Tivvy, it's an odd set of ward boundaries.

Tipton, Darlo and Wednesbury - now there's a seat Nick Griffin would have loved.

[iainbhx]

In both its old and new forms, Nechells has always been one of the more splittable wards in Brum.

[Chris from Brum]

Mar 10, 2022 6:41:16 GMT iainbhx said:

In both its old and new forms, Nechells has always been one of the more splittable wards in Brum.

Agree there, as an area it doesn't have an overall coherence.  It contains the Aston University and Matthew Boulton College campuses, its southern part is split from the rest by the Nechells Parkway, and in the middle is an area dominated by industry.

[iang]

Mar 9, 2022 18:43:23 GMT iainbhx said:

I think the best thing to say about Sandwell is that it is inchoate, it is made of several different communities - some of which have been historic rivals and some of which are split across boroughs - which isn't quite so true of Dudley.

The classic example is Great Barr which is split across Birmingham, Sandwell and to a lesser extent Walsall. Great Barr could be the core of a seat, but combining 3 Mets. Nah.

There's also the dimension of ethnicity - Dudley is pretty white - especially the two Kingswinfords, Wordsley, Norton and, of course, Gornal. Ok, there's bits of Dudley and a few other places, but overall Sandwell has a much larger BAME population, especially in West Brom and Smethwick which probably have several majority minority wards by now. This has changed the way Sandwell hangs together from how it used to hang together in the 80's, never mind the Muslin/Sikh relationship within some of those wards.

Smethwick; Smethwick, St Paul's, Soho & Victoria
Warley: Langley, Bristnall, Old Warley
Rowley: Rowley, Blackheath
Great Barr: Newton, Great Barr, Charlemont & Grove Vale
West Brom: West Brom Central, Greets Green and Lyng, Hateley Heath.
Wednesbury: Wednesbury N & S
Tipton : Tipton Green, Princes End, Great Bridge

The Wednesbury & Tipton clusters sort of hold together, Wednesbury would probably be more comfortable with Darlo or Bilston.

The Warley and Rowley clusters also hold together reasonably well.

Friar Park - historically part of West Brom, has been associated more with Wednesbury since Sandwell was formed, feels and looks a lot more like Wednesbury
Tividale - historically part of Tipton, but also has attachments to Oldbury, Oakham up on the ridge line feels much more like part of Dudley. Contains Tividale Quays - which was a very brave regeneration of Dudley Port.
Abbey - aka Bearwood is really part of Groß Birmingham and would fit in an Edgbaston seat easily, but for a Sandwell seat is more Warley than Smevvick.
Cradley Heath and Old Hill - best with the other part of Cradley, although they will fight to the death about the differences between them, Ode Hill looks towards Halesowen more than Oldbury
Oldbury - Chemical Town - therefore strange in the metal bashing Black Country, was once part of Halesowen and therefore of Shropshire. Used to fit well with the Warley group, not so much now apart from being more middle class. The far north of the ward belongs with Tipton, the central section is really part of Tivvy, it's an odd set of ward boundaries.

Tipton, Darlo and Wednesbury - now there's a seat Nick Griffin would have loved.

Friar Park was always part of the Wednesbury township rather than West Brom (though that was partly because WB was already six wards, as it included Great Barr> Back in the day, we would have loved a Parliamentary seat that centred around the Scott Arms

[iainbhx]

Mar 10, 2022 13:36:04 GMT iang said:

Mar 9, 2022 18:43:23 GMT iainbhx said:

Friar Park - historically part of West Brom, has been associated more with Wednesbury since Sandwell was formed, feels and looks a lot more like Wednesbury

Friar Park was always part of the Wednesbury township rather than West Brom (though that was partly because WB was already six wards, as it included Great Barr> Back in the day, we would have loved a Parliamentary seat that centred around the Scott Arms

I bet we would have. With Friar Park I was talking pre-74, Friar Park was part of the old West Bromwich County Borough and became its own separate ward in 1953.

[islington]

West Mids now in: BCE-94673. I stuck to my resolve to leave Staffs and the Black Country alone so the submission confines itself to Brum, Warwks and Solihull and it bangs the drum for the basic approach adopted by safc26 in submission BCE-80763.

It does, however, offer alternatives in respect of some of the specific constituencies.