Post by andrewteale on Jan 31, 2021 17:56:54 GMT
Welcome to the western of the two constituencies based on the Home of the Tubular Bandage. As described in the Oldham East and Saddleworth entry, Oldham was a two-seat parliamentary borough until 1950 when it was divided into two single-member constituencies. The Oldham West constituency (now known as Oldham West and Royton) basically dates from then.
This seat has always been based on the western and, unusually, more working-class half of Oldham proper. The reason for this unusual demographic is that Oldham lies in the foothills of the Pennines, and this is the side of town which is exposed to all the smog coming on the prevailing westerly wind from the Manchester conurbation.
At the bottom of the hill which Oldham stands on can be found Chadderton, a classic Lancashire textile town which grew in the late nineteenth century from a small rural township into the second-largest urban district in England by population. Chadderton had been part of the original Oldham constituency after the Great Reform Act, but during the inter-war years it was separated from Oldham to become part of the Middleton and Prestwich constituency. The 1950 redistribution reversed that change and Chadderton has been part of an Oldham seat ever since.
The 1945 Attlee landslide had seen the Labour slate of Frank Fairhurst and Leslie Hale gain the two-seat Oldham constituency from the Conservatives. Fairhurst sought re-election in the new Oldham East constituency while Hale fought Oldham West. Hale was a solicitor who had started his political career young - he was first elected to Leicestershire county council at the age of 23, and became an MP in his early forties.
Leslie Hale had a long parliamentary career in Oldham West on majorities which were steady at around 9-10% all through the 1950s. That was despite a number of prominent Conservatives trying their luck, starting in 1950 with poet and war veteran Ian Horobin.
Horobin was elected the following year as MP for Oldham East, and the Oldham West Tories instead selected John Grigg, the son of Edward Grigg, Lord Altrincham, who had been a Liberal MP for Oldham from 1922 until 1925 when he resigned to become Governor of Kenya. After service in France and Belgium in the Second World War, Grigg junior had joined the staff of his father's <em>National Review</em> magazine and by the 1955 general election he had taken over as the editor. In that election he reduced Hale's majority from 4,195 to 3.899. Shortly after the 1955 election the old Lord Altrincham died and John Grigg inherited his peerage, which was the last thing he wanted; when the Peerage Act 1963 allowed peerages to be disclaimed Grigg was the second person to take advantage of that after Tony Benn, but by then his opportunity to get into the Commons had passed.
The opportunity for the Tories in Oldham West also looked to have passed, as Leslie Hale increased his majority in 1959 against the backdrop of the Macmillan landslide. The Tory candidate on that occasion was John Sutcliffe, who would later serve as MP for Middlesbrough West during the Heath administration and whose father Sir Harold Sutcliffe had been MP for Royton from 1931 to 1955. Walter Bromley-Davenport, son of the eccentric Knutsford MP Sir William Bromley-Davenport, did no better in 1964, and in 1966 Hale scored his highest majority of 7,572 against New Zealand-born divorce barrister and Tory candidate Bruce Campbell.
This majority proved not to be enough when Leslie Hale resigned from the Commons on health grounds in 1968, after nearly 23 years' service. For the resulting by-election Labour selected a 28-year-old university lecturer called Michael Meacher who already had a parliamentary campaign under his belt: he had fought Colchester in 1966, losing by just 1,015 votes. The Tories readopted Bruce Campbell, and the field expanded with the intervention of the Liberals and the prolific crime writer John Creasey, a former Liberal figure standing for his own All-Party Alliance national unity group. 1968 was a bad year for Labour candidates: the local elections of that year were a notorious wipeout, and the party had regularly been recording double-digit swings against it in by-elections. Such was the case in Oldham West when polling day came around on 13th June. Meacher saw the Labour vote crash from 61% to just 34%; Creasey saved his deposit with 13%, and Bruce Campbell found himself as the first and so-far only Conservative MP for Oldham West with 46% of the vote.
That was the high point of Bruce Campbell's electoral career. The 1970 general election saw a rematch with Michael Meacher, who recovered Oldham West with a majority of 1,675. Campbell went back to the law, and his career progressed sufficiently that he was appointed as a judge in 1976. He was subsequently sacked from the judicial benches in 1983 following a scandal over smuggled cigarettes and alcohol from Guernsey, which were found on his yacht by Customs.
Michael Meacher went on to represent Oldham West for forty-five years, seeing his majority blossom as time went on. His seat was changed by the Boundary Commission over the decades: in 1983 Failsworth was added from the old Manchester Openshaw seat, in 1997 Failsworth moved out and was replaced by Royton from the Oldham Central and Royton seat, which prompted a name change to Oldham West and Royton. The 2010 redistribution left the seat little changed.
Not many major personalities took Meacher on after 1970, although the ones who did were pretty notable. David Trippier, later MP for Rossendale from 1979 to 1997 and now a prominent Freemason, was the Conservative candidate here in both 1974 elections; Jonathan Lord, the present MP for Woking, fought the seat in 1997. The 2001 general election, held shortly after race riots in Oldham, was notorious for the candidacy of the British National Party leader Nick Griffin who finished third with 16% of the vote (against 51% for Meacher and 18% for the Conservatives); in tense scenes at the count, the returning officer banned all candidates from making speeches after the declaration. Griffin returned for the 2003 Oldham council election, finishing second to Labour with 28% in Chadderton North ward, but hasn't been seen here since.
Meacher was one of the few people to serve as a minister in both the Wilson and Blair governments, joining the ministerial ladder after the first 1974 election in the Department of Industry and finishing as an Environment minister for the first six years of the Blair administration. In 1983 he stood for deputy leader of the Labour party as the main left-wing candidate, being soundly beaten by Roy Hattersley; and he seriously considered putting his name forward for the 2007 Labour leadership election.
Michael Meacher died after a short illness in October 2015 at the age of 75, shortly after starting his twelfth term of office. When he was first elected, his successor as MP for Oldham West hadn't been born. Jim McMahon had started his political career at 23 by winning a by-election to Oldham council in Failsworth East ward in November 2003; he rose to become leader of the Labour group in 2008, and then assumed the leadership of Oldham council in 2011 after Labour defeated a Lib Dem-led administration in that year's elections. He rose up the greasy pole very fast indeed: by late 2015 he was leader of the Labour group on the Local Government Association, had been named Council Leader of the Year by the Local Government Information Unit and "6th most influential person in local government" by the Local Government Chronicle, and had been appointed OBE and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In December 2015 McMahon added "MP" to those post-nominal initials by winning the Oldham West and Royton by-election. He beat UKIP by the wide margin of 62-23, a swing to Labour since the May 2015 election (where UKIP had also finished in second place). The Tory candidate James Daly, a Bury councillor (and subsequently MP for Bury North since December 2019), crashed to just 9%.
McMahon's seat is a rather socially-divided one which has lots of demographic traps for the unwary. To take one example, a 2017 article from Electoral Calculus nominated one census district within the seat, around Chadderton Way in Oldham, as the locality in the UK that feels most British, which at first sight caused me to wonder what Electoral Calculus had been smoking. The area they picked out is in the centre of Coldhurst ward, which covers most of the unlovely Oldham town centre and whose population is two-thirds ethnically Asian, mostly (and unusually for Greater Manchester) of Bangladeshi heritage. It should not surprise that Coldhurst ward makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales for population aged under 16 (32%), those who have never worked or are long-term unemployed (24%), Islam (64%), those looking after home or family (13%) and those working in accommodation or food service (24%); Coldhurst also appeared in the top 100 of the last census for adults with no qualifications (43%) and unemployment (9.4%). Werneth ward, immediately to the south-west of Oldham town centre, is even more Asian and Muslim and scores heavily on many of the same metrics, but the population there is mostly of a Pakistani rather than a Bangladeshi background.
Some of this has spilled down the hill into Chadderton; but Chadderton, Royton and the other two wards of Oldham proper in the seat (Hollinwood and Medlock Vale) are best characterised as generally white working-class. The textile mills are gone or disappearing, but manufacturing still provides many jobs within the constituency.
In December 2019 Jim McMahon won a third term of office with a 55-30 lead over the Conservatives and a majority of 11,127. Under Keir Starmer, McMahon made the Shadow Cabinet for the first time as shadow minister for transport - the same brief that he had done for real on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority as leader of Oldham council. Unless there are major boundary changes to his seat, at still only 40 years old he would appear to be well-set for a bright future on the national stage to go with his bright past on the local stage.
This seat has always been based on the western and, unusually, more working-class half of Oldham proper. The reason for this unusual demographic is that Oldham lies in the foothills of the Pennines, and this is the side of town which is exposed to all the smog coming on the prevailing westerly wind from the Manchester conurbation.
At the bottom of the hill which Oldham stands on can be found Chadderton, a classic Lancashire textile town which grew in the late nineteenth century from a small rural township into the second-largest urban district in England by population. Chadderton had been part of the original Oldham constituency after the Great Reform Act, but during the inter-war years it was separated from Oldham to become part of the Middleton and Prestwich constituency. The 1950 redistribution reversed that change and Chadderton has been part of an Oldham seat ever since.
The 1945 Attlee landslide had seen the Labour slate of Frank Fairhurst and Leslie Hale gain the two-seat Oldham constituency from the Conservatives. Fairhurst sought re-election in the new Oldham East constituency while Hale fought Oldham West. Hale was a solicitor who had started his political career young - he was first elected to Leicestershire county council at the age of 23, and became an MP in his early forties.
Leslie Hale had a long parliamentary career in Oldham West on majorities which were steady at around 9-10% all through the 1950s. That was despite a number of prominent Conservatives trying their luck, starting in 1950 with poet and war veteran Ian Horobin.
Horobin was elected the following year as MP for Oldham East, and the Oldham West Tories instead selected John Grigg, the son of Edward Grigg, Lord Altrincham, who had been a Liberal MP for Oldham from 1922 until 1925 when he resigned to become Governor of Kenya. After service in France and Belgium in the Second World War, Grigg junior had joined the staff of his father's <em>National Review</em> magazine and by the 1955 general election he had taken over as the editor. In that election he reduced Hale's majority from 4,195 to 3.899. Shortly after the 1955 election the old Lord Altrincham died and John Grigg inherited his peerage, which was the last thing he wanted; when the Peerage Act 1963 allowed peerages to be disclaimed Grigg was the second person to take advantage of that after Tony Benn, but by then his opportunity to get into the Commons had passed.
The opportunity for the Tories in Oldham West also looked to have passed, as Leslie Hale increased his majority in 1959 against the backdrop of the Macmillan landslide. The Tory candidate on that occasion was John Sutcliffe, who would later serve as MP for Middlesbrough West during the Heath administration and whose father Sir Harold Sutcliffe had been MP for Royton from 1931 to 1955. Walter Bromley-Davenport, son of the eccentric Knutsford MP Sir William Bromley-Davenport, did no better in 1964, and in 1966 Hale scored his highest majority of 7,572 against New Zealand-born divorce barrister and Tory candidate Bruce Campbell.
This majority proved not to be enough when Leslie Hale resigned from the Commons on health grounds in 1968, after nearly 23 years' service. For the resulting by-election Labour selected a 28-year-old university lecturer called Michael Meacher who already had a parliamentary campaign under his belt: he had fought Colchester in 1966, losing by just 1,015 votes. The Tories readopted Bruce Campbell, and the field expanded with the intervention of the Liberals and the prolific crime writer John Creasey, a former Liberal figure standing for his own All-Party Alliance national unity group. 1968 was a bad year for Labour candidates: the local elections of that year were a notorious wipeout, and the party had regularly been recording double-digit swings against it in by-elections. Such was the case in Oldham West when polling day came around on 13th June. Meacher saw the Labour vote crash from 61% to just 34%; Creasey saved his deposit with 13%, and Bruce Campbell found himself as the first and so-far only Conservative MP for Oldham West with 46% of the vote.
That was the high point of Bruce Campbell's electoral career. The 1970 general election saw a rematch with Michael Meacher, who recovered Oldham West with a majority of 1,675. Campbell went back to the law, and his career progressed sufficiently that he was appointed as a judge in 1976. He was subsequently sacked from the judicial benches in 1983 following a scandal over smuggled cigarettes and alcohol from Guernsey, which were found on his yacht by Customs.
Michael Meacher went on to represent Oldham West for forty-five years, seeing his majority blossom as time went on. His seat was changed by the Boundary Commission over the decades: in 1983 Failsworth was added from the old Manchester Openshaw seat, in 1997 Failsworth moved out and was replaced by Royton from the Oldham Central and Royton seat, which prompted a name change to Oldham West and Royton. The 2010 redistribution left the seat little changed.
Not many major personalities took Meacher on after 1970, although the ones who did were pretty notable. David Trippier, later MP for Rossendale from 1979 to 1997 and now a prominent Freemason, was the Conservative candidate here in both 1974 elections; Jonathan Lord, the present MP for Woking, fought the seat in 1997. The 2001 general election, held shortly after race riots in Oldham, was notorious for the candidacy of the British National Party leader Nick Griffin who finished third with 16% of the vote (against 51% for Meacher and 18% for the Conservatives); in tense scenes at the count, the returning officer banned all candidates from making speeches after the declaration. Griffin returned for the 2003 Oldham council election, finishing second to Labour with 28% in Chadderton North ward, but hasn't been seen here since.
Meacher was one of the few people to serve as a minister in both the Wilson and Blair governments, joining the ministerial ladder after the first 1974 election in the Department of Industry and finishing as an Environment minister for the first six years of the Blair administration. In 1983 he stood for deputy leader of the Labour party as the main left-wing candidate, being soundly beaten by Roy Hattersley; and he seriously considered putting his name forward for the 2007 Labour leadership election.
Michael Meacher died after a short illness in October 2015 at the age of 75, shortly after starting his twelfth term of office. When he was first elected, his successor as MP for Oldham West hadn't been born. Jim McMahon had started his political career at 23 by winning a by-election to Oldham council in Failsworth East ward in November 2003; he rose to become leader of the Labour group in 2008, and then assumed the leadership of Oldham council in 2011 after Labour defeated a Lib Dem-led administration in that year's elections. He rose up the greasy pole very fast indeed: by late 2015 he was leader of the Labour group on the Local Government Association, had been named Council Leader of the Year by the Local Government Information Unit and "6th most influential person in local government" by the Local Government Chronicle, and had been appointed OBE and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In December 2015 McMahon added "MP" to those post-nominal initials by winning the Oldham West and Royton by-election. He beat UKIP by the wide margin of 62-23, a swing to Labour since the May 2015 election (where UKIP had also finished in second place). The Tory candidate James Daly, a Bury councillor (and subsequently MP for Bury North since December 2019), crashed to just 9%.
McMahon's seat is a rather socially-divided one which has lots of demographic traps for the unwary. To take one example, a 2017 article from Electoral Calculus nominated one census district within the seat, around Chadderton Way in Oldham, as the locality in the UK that feels most British, which at first sight caused me to wonder what Electoral Calculus had been smoking. The area they picked out is in the centre of Coldhurst ward, which covers most of the unlovely Oldham town centre and whose population is two-thirds ethnically Asian, mostly (and unusually for Greater Manchester) of Bangladeshi heritage. It should not surprise that Coldhurst ward makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales for population aged under 16 (32%), those who have never worked or are long-term unemployed (24%), Islam (64%), those looking after home or family (13%) and those working in accommodation or food service (24%); Coldhurst also appeared in the top 100 of the last census for adults with no qualifications (43%) and unemployment (9.4%). Werneth ward, immediately to the south-west of Oldham town centre, is even more Asian and Muslim and scores heavily on many of the same metrics, but the population there is mostly of a Pakistani rather than a Bangladeshi background.
Some of this has spilled down the hill into Chadderton; but Chadderton, Royton and the other two wards of Oldham proper in the seat (Hollinwood and Medlock Vale) are best characterised as generally white working-class. The textile mills are gone or disappearing, but manufacturing still provides many jobs within the constituency.
In December 2019 Jim McMahon won a third term of office with a 55-30 lead over the Conservatives and a majority of 11,127. Under Keir Starmer, McMahon made the Shadow Cabinet for the first time as shadow minister for transport - the same brief that he had done for real on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority as leader of Oldham council. Unless there are major boundary changes to his seat, at still only 40 years old he would appear to be well-set for a bright future on the national stage to go with his bright past on the local stage.
