Post by Robert Waller on May 18, 2022 13:34:43 GMT
New Town seats have moved away from the Labour party in recent decades - and Bracknell was never one of their more fruitful New Towns to start with. Since the creation of Bracknell council, first as a non-metropolitan district within Berkshire and since 1997 as a unitary authority, Labour has only held control at municipal level twice, after the elections of 1973 (the very first contests) and 1995 (the height of unsullied New Labour and Blair promise). By 2022 the Conservatives held 37 of the 42 seats on Bracknell Forest council, with Labour just four. They have never held the parliamentary seat that includes the town, and have never seemed further away than now. In December 2019 the new Tory candidate James Sunderland won with a majority of 19,829.
Despite its modern appearance, Bracknell was actually designated as one of the original batch of New Towns in 1948, after the report of the enquiry of the Reith Committee which sat between 1945 to 1947 to discuss the post-war settlement of major housing issues. It was not initially intended to be as large scale a new community as, say, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage or Crawley, with an initial target population of just 25,000. However there have been subsequent waves of expansion and further development of the local plan, and by 2018 its estimated population was over 84,000.
As time has passed the original New Town aim of a mixture of class and residential neighbourhoods has been diluted. Labour’s strongest neighbourhoods tend to be the older ones, with their only victories in May 2019 coming in Great Hollands North and, in a split result, in Priestwood/Garth (still with 34% social housing in the 2011 census). They also gained an Old Bracknell councillor convincingly in a December 2021 byelection. Newer neighbourhoods tend to the safely Tory. The nature of the industry attracted has also changed with the decades. Bracknell became a centre of high-tech, communications and and computing industries. Here are represented 3M, Panasonic, Fujitsu (formerly ICL), Dell, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technology and Honeywell, while British Aerospace manufacturing disappeared in the 1980s. Some have nominated Bracknell as a major centre of an M4 ‘Silicon Corridor’. The Met Office was based here too, before its ‘devolved’ move down to Exeter in 2003. All in all, the type of employment available in Bracknell has been relatively white-collar, well-paid, less likely to be unionized – and less likely to be correlated with Labour voting preference. The 2011 census figures are bound to be out of date, but the ranking of the Bracknell seat among the very highest as regards economic activity and adults in full time employment is unlikely to have changed significantly. This is a comfortably prosperous part of south east England.
In the early years after the Second World War, the expanding Bracknell area was part of the Wokingham seat, then covering the parts of Berkshire east of Reading and west of Windsor. By 1979 Berkshire’s electorate had expanded sufficiently to gain a seventh and extra seat, with the not entirely geographically accurate name of East Berkshire (which already had an electorate of over 82,000 in 1982, a year before its first contest, as Bracknell’s growth continued). East Berkshire’s existence lasted for four elections, till 1997, when Bracknell first received recognition in the name of a constituency. Just like Wokingham, East Berkshire had always been safely Conservative, and in 1997 its MP Andrew Mackay seamlessly extended his tenure, which lasted till 2010. In fact the only change of tenure came when Mackay’s successor, Philip Lee, crossed the floor to join the Liberal Democrats during a speech by Boris Johnson on Brexit. However disdaining any incumbency advantage, Lee contested the neighbouring Wokingham in the December 2019 general election. He polled a very respectable 37% against arch-Brexiteer John Redwood there, but in Bracknell constituency the Liberal Democrats got less than 15% and finished third. It is probably not coincidental that Bracknell is estimated to have voted 53% to leave the EU in 2016, while Wokingham favoured Remain by around 57% to 43%.
It should also be noted that Bracknell (new) town has never been large enough to complete a seat on its own, and still isn’t. In the version that has even extant since 2010, the boundaries loop south through the endemic pine woods of his part of Berkshire to include the communities of Sandhurst and Crowthorne, and south west to add three wards from Wokingham district – Finchampstead North and South, and Wokingham Without ( a splendid historic appellation that always stirs one to ponder – without what?). Sandhurst and Crowthorne in particular are home to some prominent British institutions. Some of these are even recognized in the names of wards: College Town includes the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, since 1801 the most famous training ground of the officers of the British Army. Little Sandhurst & Wellington ward includes Wellington College, a secondary boarding school also with a long-standing military flavour, although that has changed in the 21st century not least because of the efforts of probably the most well known headmaster in the country, Anthony Seldon, who ruled here from 2006 to 2015 (and being knighted in 2014) before moving on to the University of Buckingham. The school is actually nearer Crowthorne rather than Sandhurst, and in Crowthorne itself is to be found the third institution, Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where famous residents have included Ronald Kray and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Peter Sutcliffe the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and Christiana Edmunds the ‘Chocolate Cream Poisoner’, and Richard Dadd, the artist.
Whether many of the residents of the three institutions actually vote in significant numbers is a moot point. In any case all the extraneous wards to Bracknell New Town itself have usually been very safely Conservative, although the Liberal Democrats finished a reasonably close second in Central Sandhurst in May 2019, and were much more competitive in the more hospitable Wokingham borough, even gaining Finchampstead South in the favourable circumstances of May 2022.
However in the most recent boundary changes proposed in both the Commission's initial and revised reports as Berkshire and its neighbouring counties have continued to grow, the three Wokingham wards would be removed from Bracknell and placed in Wokingham itself. On the other hand one ward would be added: Warfield Harvest Ride, currently in Windsor – which despite its rather delightful rural name is in fact a contiguous part of the newer, and almost entirely privately owned, Bracknell residential estate developments, and indeed one of the few wards of Bracknell Forest council currently outside this constituency. If these apparently sensible changes are made, the Bracknell seat should remain fairly equally safe against Labour in second place, while slightly weakening the Liberal Democrat position in third. Unlike its neighbour Wokingham, where the Liberal Democrats gave a further reminder of their potential in the May 2022 council elections, Bracknell seems destined to continue to give the Conservatives safe haven in the burgeoning housing between the trees of the forests of Windsor and Swinley, unthreatened by any local political outlawry or disruption of the Robin Hood disposition.
General Election 2019: Bracknell
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Sunderland 31,894 58.7 -0.1
Labour Paul Bidwell 12,065 22.2 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Kaweh Beheshtizadeh 7,749 14.3 +6.8
Green Derek Florey 2,089 3.8 New
Independent Olivio Barreto 553 1.0 +0.2
C Majority 19,829 36.5 +7.9
2019 Electorate: 79,206
Turnout 54,350 68.6 -2.0
Conservative hold
Swing 3.9 Lab to C
2011 Census
Age 65+ 13.2% 541/650
Owner-occupied 68.9% 251/650
Private rented 11.3% 500/650
Social rented 17.7% 273/650
White 90.9% 415/650
Black 1.9% 180 /650
Asian 4.8% 237/650
Managerial & professional 40.0%
Routine & Semi-routine 20.4%
No adults in employment 24.9% 633/650
Economically active 77.2% 7/650
In full time employment 48.0% 9/650
Employed in information and communication 9.9% 16/650
Degree level 29.9% 171/650
No qualifications 16.5% 578/650
Students 6.2% 445/650
2021 Census
Owner occupied 68.4% 219/573
Private rented 15.1% 435/573
Social rented 16.6% 230/573
White 86.3%
Black 2.4%
Asian 7.1%
Managerial & professional 41.1% 91/573
Routine & Semi-routine 19.3% 440/573
Degree level 35.8% 180/573
No qualifications 13.4% 498/573
Despite its modern appearance, Bracknell was actually designated as one of the original batch of New Towns in 1948, after the report of the enquiry of the Reith Committee which sat between 1945 to 1947 to discuss the post-war settlement of major housing issues. It was not initially intended to be as large scale a new community as, say, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage or Crawley, with an initial target population of just 25,000. However there have been subsequent waves of expansion and further development of the local plan, and by 2018 its estimated population was over 84,000.
As time has passed the original New Town aim of a mixture of class and residential neighbourhoods has been diluted. Labour’s strongest neighbourhoods tend to be the older ones, with their only victories in May 2019 coming in Great Hollands North and, in a split result, in Priestwood/Garth (still with 34% social housing in the 2011 census). They also gained an Old Bracknell councillor convincingly in a December 2021 byelection. Newer neighbourhoods tend to the safely Tory. The nature of the industry attracted has also changed with the decades. Bracknell became a centre of high-tech, communications and and computing industries. Here are represented 3M, Panasonic, Fujitsu (formerly ICL), Dell, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technology and Honeywell, while British Aerospace manufacturing disappeared in the 1980s. Some have nominated Bracknell as a major centre of an M4 ‘Silicon Corridor’. The Met Office was based here too, before its ‘devolved’ move down to Exeter in 2003. All in all, the type of employment available in Bracknell has been relatively white-collar, well-paid, less likely to be unionized – and less likely to be correlated with Labour voting preference. The 2011 census figures are bound to be out of date, but the ranking of the Bracknell seat among the very highest as regards economic activity and adults in full time employment is unlikely to have changed significantly. This is a comfortably prosperous part of south east England.
In the early years after the Second World War, the expanding Bracknell area was part of the Wokingham seat, then covering the parts of Berkshire east of Reading and west of Windsor. By 1979 Berkshire’s electorate had expanded sufficiently to gain a seventh and extra seat, with the not entirely geographically accurate name of East Berkshire (which already had an electorate of over 82,000 in 1982, a year before its first contest, as Bracknell’s growth continued). East Berkshire’s existence lasted for four elections, till 1997, when Bracknell first received recognition in the name of a constituency. Just like Wokingham, East Berkshire had always been safely Conservative, and in 1997 its MP Andrew Mackay seamlessly extended his tenure, which lasted till 2010. In fact the only change of tenure came when Mackay’s successor, Philip Lee, crossed the floor to join the Liberal Democrats during a speech by Boris Johnson on Brexit. However disdaining any incumbency advantage, Lee contested the neighbouring Wokingham in the December 2019 general election. He polled a very respectable 37% against arch-Brexiteer John Redwood there, but in Bracknell constituency the Liberal Democrats got less than 15% and finished third. It is probably not coincidental that Bracknell is estimated to have voted 53% to leave the EU in 2016, while Wokingham favoured Remain by around 57% to 43%.
It should also be noted that Bracknell (new) town has never been large enough to complete a seat on its own, and still isn’t. In the version that has even extant since 2010, the boundaries loop south through the endemic pine woods of his part of Berkshire to include the communities of Sandhurst and Crowthorne, and south west to add three wards from Wokingham district – Finchampstead North and South, and Wokingham Without ( a splendid historic appellation that always stirs one to ponder – without what?). Sandhurst and Crowthorne in particular are home to some prominent British institutions. Some of these are even recognized in the names of wards: College Town includes the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, since 1801 the most famous training ground of the officers of the British Army. Little Sandhurst & Wellington ward includes Wellington College, a secondary boarding school also with a long-standing military flavour, although that has changed in the 21st century not least because of the efforts of probably the most well known headmaster in the country, Anthony Seldon, who ruled here from 2006 to 2015 (and being knighted in 2014) before moving on to the University of Buckingham. The school is actually nearer Crowthorne rather than Sandhurst, and in Crowthorne itself is to be found the third institution, Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where famous residents have included Ronald Kray and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Peter Sutcliffe the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and Christiana Edmunds the ‘Chocolate Cream Poisoner’, and Richard Dadd, the artist.
Whether many of the residents of the three institutions actually vote in significant numbers is a moot point. In any case all the extraneous wards to Bracknell New Town itself have usually been very safely Conservative, although the Liberal Democrats finished a reasonably close second in Central Sandhurst in May 2019, and were much more competitive in the more hospitable Wokingham borough, even gaining Finchampstead South in the favourable circumstances of May 2022.
However in the most recent boundary changes proposed in both the Commission's initial and revised reports as Berkshire and its neighbouring counties have continued to grow, the three Wokingham wards would be removed from Bracknell and placed in Wokingham itself. On the other hand one ward would be added: Warfield Harvest Ride, currently in Windsor – which despite its rather delightful rural name is in fact a contiguous part of the newer, and almost entirely privately owned, Bracknell residential estate developments, and indeed one of the few wards of Bracknell Forest council currently outside this constituency. If these apparently sensible changes are made, the Bracknell seat should remain fairly equally safe against Labour in second place, while slightly weakening the Liberal Democrat position in third. Unlike its neighbour Wokingham, where the Liberal Democrats gave a further reminder of their potential in the May 2022 council elections, Bracknell seems destined to continue to give the Conservatives safe haven in the burgeoning housing between the trees of the forests of Windsor and Swinley, unthreatened by any local political outlawry or disruption of the Robin Hood disposition.
General Election 2019: Bracknell
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Sunderland 31,894 58.7 -0.1
Labour Paul Bidwell 12,065 22.2 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Kaweh Beheshtizadeh 7,749 14.3 +6.8
Green Derek Florey 2,089 3.8 New
Independent Olivio Barreto 553 1.0 +0.2
C Majority 19,829 36.5 +7.9
2019 Electorate: 79,206
Turnout 54,350 68.6 -2.0
Conservative hold
Swing 3.9 Lab to C
2011 Census
Age 65+ 13.2% 541/650
Owner-occupied 68.9% 251/650
Private rented 11.3% 500/650
Social rented 17.7% 273/650
White 90.9% 415/650
Black 1.9% 180 /650
Asian 4.8% 237/650
Managerial & professional 40.0%
Routine & Semi-routine 20.4%
No adults in employment 24.9% 633/650
Economically active 77.2% 7/650
In full time employment 48.0% 9/650
Employed in information and communication 9.9% 16/650
Degree level 29.9% 171/650
No qualifications 16.5% 578/650
Students 6.2% 445/650
2021 Census
Owner occupied 68.4% 219/573
Private rented 15.1% 435/573
Social rented 16.6% 230/573
White 86.3%
Black 2.4%
Asian 7.1%
Managerial & professional 41.1% 91/573
Routine & Semi-routine 19.3% 440/573
Degree level 35.8% 180/573
No qualifications 13.4% 498/573
