'Notional Wards' - Scotlands cities

[afleitch]

You may remember the huge guesstimate project of working out 'notional' results for Scotland collapsed into the current multimember wards.

Well I wanted to do the same for the cities, but at a closer level. The problem of course is that since 1974 there have been six sets of district/council boundaries and they are now quite big.

What I decided to do was look at Glasgow's official (but not really used except for statistical purposes' 'neighbourhood' boundaries

www.glasgow.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=36609&p=0

They broadly follow multi-member wards, are compact, follow Victorian, mid-war and post-war community growth patterns and have more variance in population. I was also able to use the mixture of old local election results and regression.

The results broadly follow the results for the multimember wards except on the southside. There's some variance there I think because of the more 'hyper localised' results and some of the boundaries. I am not too concerned at the difference.



So here is the base map

I'll upload various years, some interesting. Some...dull over the next few days.

[afleitch]

1979

So we start off with something vintage.



Look at the blue, look at the map, embrace your inner Victor and Barry.

In 1979 the Tories were left with their soon to be final seat in Glasgow; Hillhead. Teddy Taylor had just been ousted in Cathcart.

Here the Tories are uniformly strong across the West End from Anniesland, Jordanhill, Partick, Kelvinside, Dowanhill etc. That doesn't extend into Hillhead proper which both the 2nd and 3rd Reviews notes wasn't actually in the seat of that name. In the Cathcart seat, the Tories perform strongly in parts of the city that locally, they would still return councillors in until as late as 1992; Cathcart, Newlands, King's Park and Langside (represent). Castlemilk is solid solid Labour, so much so that the split of Castlemilk in the 3rd review would have made the seat notionally Tory. Carmunnock is Labour but is actually in the Rutherglen seat at this time.

This blue bastion extends outside Cathcart as part of the safely Labour Pollok seat were Tory at local level in Pollockshields, Shawlands and Strathbungo. Little blue islands can also be found in Dennistoun (part of Springburn) and Cardonald (part of Craigton). Dennistoun also had a Tory councillor at this time. These are holdouts before significant change happens.

By the late 1970's Glasgow housebuilding both at the periphery and it's Comprehensive Redevelopment Areas; areas in the old Victorian cities cleared for low dense housing had mostly stopped. Indeed huge swathes of the urban landscape remained cleared but untouched for decades. The Ring Road half complete. The movement of the middle class outwards to Newton Mearns, Bearsden et all and some of the working class to new towns had reached it's peak, leaving behind older residents and opportunities for students and international arrivals.

The city would probably have been as finely balanced. If it wasn't for the canary yellow menace to shatter Tory Kelvinside dreams...

[Clark]

Much of Glasgow is now virtually unrecognisable from it's former self - all the worst of the tenements cleared and new housing erected making hugely deprived areas look quite moderate.

[afleitch]

Before I march into the 80's a few notes on October 1974.

One of the most interesting things about the SNP advance followed by their quick decline (1968 locals, 1974 GE's, 1977 locals) is that analysts at the time could not see a correlation between class/employment and voting behaviour particularly in the cities. It really defied expectations and voter loyalty was non existent. What was noted was how hyper localised support was. SNP support in Glasgow during the 'wave' elections in 1968 and 1977 was focused on the periphery; that is to say relatively new housing estates; Drumchapel, Pollok, Castlemilk, Easterhouse that were at the time desirable but by the 1980's would see serious economic decline. That voting behaviour was also seen to a similar extent in local and general election results in the New Towns; particularly East Kilbride, Cumbernauld and Livingston. Perhaps this was a 'thrill of the new' attraction, perhaps the less religiously divided and class divided new settlements had an effect on the psychology in voting behaviour. At least until the dream soured.

Anyway, this is layered into my model for the 1974 election and probably over-estimates SNP support in some areas, but do expect to see some 'wins' in seats where the party was a few thousand votes behind Labour.

[Pete Whitehead]

Is there some census data available for these city neighbourhoods?

[islington]

If electorate numbers could be supplied it might might sense to amend Rule 5 in Scotland so that these are the units used as building-blocks for Westminster seats.

[michael2019]

Jun 3, 2021 6:25:34 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Is there some census data available for these city neighbourhoods?

There's data on the Glasgow website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=19710 and there is also
 something like www.nomisweb.co.uk/sources/census_2011_qsuk 

Which you can get for Scottish intermediate zones but you can have smaller Scottish data zones for some data it seems (I think this divides them into about 3 or 4 - labelled zonename 1, zonename 2 etc.) but this is not what the city council is using - it *may* be combining Scottish intermediate zones into more recognisable neighbourhoods or combining the smaller data zones or doing something completely different! But I have no knowledge of Glasgow!

But in general you can get neighbourhood census data for E&W and Scotland from nomisweb - but you may already have known that  already - so apologies if I have taught you how to suck eggs. 

I believe that these and their E&W equivalents are fairly stable over time as obv. wards are subject to the whims of the boundary commissions etc. but they may have changed.

Apologies if I have go this wrong or mis-understood you. 

[Pete Whitehead]

Jun 3, 2021 15:52:37 GMT michael2019 said:

Jun 3, 2021 6:25:34 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Is there some census data available for these city neighbourhoods?

There's data on the Glasgow website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=19710

Yes this is exactly what I was after thanks - more detail than I expected or hoped for as well

[afleitch]

Sorry for the delay

1983



So things aren't going too well for the Tories here. They didn't return a single MP to the city. You can however see some residual support in the city.

The story here is the advance of the Alliance. You can see in many cases that there's been a simple switch out of Tory to Alliance support particularly in the communities overlapping Hillhead, but it's not exact. Labour are ahead in Broomhill as the Tory support there is still substantial enough to kick the Alliance into third place. The Tories also still ahead in Anniesland/Jordanhill. The Alliance do much better in Hillhead (the community), particularly as half of it is now in Maryhill constituency.

Tory support in the south of the city hugs tight to the boundary between Pollock and Cathcart. In these seats, the vote difference between the Tories and the Alliance in their fights for second are almost negligible, with the Alliance edging ahead in Cathcart/Simshill, Mount Florida and in the sprawling mansions of Pollokshaws West, as well as Crookston, now in the Govan seat. Next door in Rutherglen (then part of Glasgow District) the Alliance are on top in the middle class areas of Burnside etc and this support bleeds across. Likewise, the Tory strength where the city bleeds seamlessly into East Renfrewshire is apparent. Labour have however overwhelmed the opposition in Dennistoun and Croftfoot.

But things are happening behind the scenes which will come to a head in 1987. The strong link between social class and housing tenure/ownership in Glasgow has started to weaken. Demographic changes particularly in the West End see the rise of multiple-occupancy 'student flats' and an aging and fleeing population continues to affect the more establish middle class areas of the city. The Jewish population in Langside is also shrinking from as high as 15-20% of the population in some areas to less than 5%. There is also a growing and wealthy Muslim community establishing itself in Pollokshields to the north.

[stb12]

afleitch sorry for asking something pretty much off topic to your thread but never got anything in the ask the forum thread and it is a historical query so thought you may have something   :

stb12 Avatar

Jun 10, 2021 12:22:38 GMT 1 stb12 said:

Are there any sources to see full regional list candidacies in previous Scottish Parliament elections for the main parties? Tried a lot of googling but seems awkward to find any from the elections before 2016. Constituency candidates are easy enough to look at through wiki etc.

[Clark]

Increasing disdain for Thatcher by 1987 also put Glasgow more in the red

[stb12]

Jun 14, 2021 18:33:37 GMT Clark said:

Increasing disdain for Thatcher by 1987 also put Glasgow more in the red

The fact that the Tories held a FPTP seat in Glasgow as recently as the 80s seems astounding for someone in my age group.

It's never exactly been the Tory free city that the left liked to make out and the Scottish Tory revival in recent years helped demonstrate that, but that increase in Glasgow representation obviously came from the more proportional systems in the Scottish Parliament and Council elections,. Them winning a FPTP constituency contest still looks a million miles away though even if someone got creative with boundaries 

[bjornhattan]

Jun 14, 2021 22:58:35 GMT stb12 said:

Jun 14, 2021 18:33:37 GMT Clark said:

Increasing disdain for Thatcher by 1987 also put Glasgow more in the red

The fact that the Tories held a FPTP seat in Glasgow as recently as the 80s seems astounding for someone in my age group.

It's never exactly been the Tory free city that the left liked to make out and the Scottish Tory revival in recent years helped demonstrate that, but that increase in Glasgow representation obviously came from the more proportional systems in the Scottish Parliament and Council elections,. Them winning a FPTP constituency contest still looks a million miles away though even if someone got creative with boundaries 

The Tories won Manchester Withington and Newcastle upon Tyne Central* in 1983 too - and came quite close even in some of the Liverpool seats (Garston and Wavertree both elected Conservatives in 1979). A lot of cities which are today considered stridently anti-Tory elected them until surprisingly recently.

* It should be noted - that was a very different seat to the current Newcastle Central with rather less working class estates and rather more affluent inner suburbs. Though even a seat with those old boundaries would be out of reach nowadays.