Where have the Tories serially underperformed the most?

[Clark]

Thought I'd create this thread for the Conservatives as Batman did for Labour...

I'll start with Bearsden - should be monolithically Conservative given it's Social and Economic make up but is actually anything but.  I guess Milngavie up the road would be similar

[Davıd Boothroyd]

University cities.

The Lib Demmy bits of south-west London (plus similar areas in Manchester - Cheadle and Hazel Grove - and Sheffield Hallam).

Very wealthy inner west London.

[Sandy]

North East Fife
Edinburgh - especially Edinburgh South and Edinburgh West.
North Perthshire - the white whale for the Tories.

[iain]

Basically everywhere rural in both Scotland and Wales.

[YL]

An obvious answer is parts of greater Liverpool, though I suppose that is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I would argue that before 2019 the Tories had been underperforming for some time in the less deprived parts of South Yorkshire other than west Sheffield, in terms of current constituencies Rother Valley and especially Penistone & Stocksbridge, but that may no longer be the case.

[sirbenjamin]

In Hindu communities, until fairly recently.

[Defenestrated Fipplebox]

For the last 40 to 50 years - Liverpool.

[batman]

Feb 1, 2023 15:49:02 GMT YL said:

An obvious answer is parts of greater Liverpool, though I suppose that is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I would argue that before 2019 the Tories had been underperforming for some time in the less deprived parts of South Yorkshire other than west Sheffield, in terms of current constituencies Rother Valley and especially Penistone & Stocksbridge, but that may no longer be the case.

Liverpool, at least in the case of some of its constituencies, is an example of extreme Conservative over-performance in the period pre-1964 which has now completely unwound & is rather the opposite today.

[bjornhattan]

Blaydon - the seat might have been nearly all pit villages decades ago, but now it's mainly lower middle class suburbia. Unlike somewhere like Tynemouth, there's not an intellectual element which might be shifting it leftwards - it's just steadily getting better off as the years go by.

Seats which have been as safe for Labour traditionally and have similar demographics elsewhere (such as South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester) fell to the Conservatives, yet Blaydon didn't.

[owainsutton]

Feb 1, 2023 16:48:22 GMT Defenestrated Fipplebox said:

For the last 40 to 50 years - Liverpool.

Over thirty years of boycotting The Sun is an influence in this.

[Pete Whitehead]

Feb 1, 2023 17:47:29 GMT owainsutton said:

Feb 1, 2023 16:48:22 GMT Defenestrated Fipplebox said:

For the last 40 to 50 years - Liverpool.

Over thirty years of boycotting The Sun is an influence in this.

Not much of one. The main collapse in Conservative support in a general election occurred in 1987

[greenchristian]

Feb 1, 2023 17:59:55 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Feb 1, 2023 17:47:29 GMT owainsutton said:

Over thirty years of boycotting The Sun is an influence in this.

Not much of one. The main collapse in Conservative support in a general election occurred in 1987

It's almost certainly been a significant factor helping maintain the low levels of support for the Conservatives and other right-wing parties, though.

[Pete Whitehead]

Feb 1, 2023 18:16:11 GMT greenchristian said:

Feb 1, 2023 17:59:55 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Not much of one. The main collapse in Conservative support in a general election occurred in 1987

It's almost certainly been a significant factor helping maintain the low levels of support for the Conservatives and other right-wing parties, though.

I'm not convinced. Conservative support was falling relatively in all the big cities from the 1960s onwards (actually Liverpool started to trend away from the Conservatives in 1959) and this gathered pace in the 1980s. In most the fall in Conservative support was not as precipitous (the only comparable city is Glasgow) but nevertheless they were wiped out in various previously safe seats in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield etc in 1997 and have never really recovered in any of them either.
I think the kind of people who engage in infantile politically inspired boycotts of that kind are not the sort of people who would ever have been likely Conservative voters anyway.

[jamie]

Feb 1, 2023 17:11:20 GMT bjornhattan said:

Blaydon - the seat might have been nearly all pit villages decades ago, but now it's mainly lower middle class suburbia. Unlike somewhere like Tynemouth, there's not an intellectual element which might be shifting it leftwards - it's just steadily getting better off as the years go by.

Seats which have been as safe for Labour traditionally and have similar demographics elsewhere (such as South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester) fell to the Conservatives, yet Blaydon didn't.

Blaydon is an interesting case as I don’t think the underperformance was as great in the past. The Tories used to have a decent, if decidedly minority, vote for quite a few elections in the post-war period, notably 41% in February 1974. The emergence of the Liberals really seems to have hurt them, and consequently they’ve done relatively well in 2015/2017/2019 as the Lib Dem vote has diminished at general elections (it is my understanding that a lot of the more Labour inclined Lib Dem voters had already returned in 2010). At a local level, they used to do well in Whickham until the rise of the Liberals/SDP, and they had some historical strength in Rowlands Gill and, bizarrely, Winlaton/Blaydon. 

I do wonder if part of the reason for their underperformance is that the constituency is deceptively rural. Housebuilding in recent decades has been fairly restricted in large part due to the greenbelt, so it retains a rural feel despite the vast majority of the population being urban. The sort of commuters who have help push similar seats elsewhere in the country to the Conservatives are more likely to move to the likes of Cramlington and Ponteland. The much more important population growth in Blaydon was therefore in the immediate decades after WW2, when there were large housing estates built to house 1000s of people moving out of inner city Newcastle. These people took their political loyalties with them and to this day their families largely vote that way, even if they ‘look’ a lot more like Conservative voters. Therefore, the sort of place it should be compared to is North Tyneside constituency rather than anywhere further south. 

[stb12]

Many seats in Scotland where you'd say they'd be safe Tory in England

[owainsutton]

Feb 1, 2023 18:47:50 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Feb 1, 2023 18:16:11 GMT greenchristian said:

It's almost certainly been a significant factor helping maintain the low levels of support for the Conservatives and other right-wing parties, though.

I'm not convinced. Conservative support was falling relatively in all the big cities from the 1960s onwards (actually Liverpool started to trend away from the Conservatives in 1959) and this gathered pace in the 1980s. In most the fall in Conservative support was not as precipitous (the only comparable city is Glasgow) but nevertheless they were wiped out in various previously safe seats in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield etc in 1997 and have never really recovered in any of them either.
I think the kind of people who engage in infantile politically inspired boycotts of that kind are not the sort of people who would ever have been likely Conservative voters anyway.

Good luck going into a newsagent in Liverpool and telling them that it's an "infantile politically-inspired" boycott.

If that's your actual view about 96 unlawful deaths, please try it in real life.

[bjornhattan]

Feb 1, 2023 18:47:50 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Feb 1, 2023 18:16:11 GMT greenchristian said:

It's almost certainly been a significant factor helping maintain the low levels of support for the Conservatives and other right-wing parties, though.

I'm not convinced. Conservative support was falling relatively in all the big cities from the 1960s onwards (actually Liverpool started to trend away from the Conservatives in 1959) and this gathered pace in the 1980s. In most the fall in Conservative support was not as precipitous (the only comparable city is Glasgow) but nevertheless they were wiped out in various previously safe seats in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield etc in 1997 and have never really recovered in any of them either.
I think the kind of people who engage in infantile politically inspired boycotts of that kind are not the sort of people who would ever have been likely Conservative voters anyway.

I think the Sun boycott has had some effect on politics around Merseyside. When I was analysing the EU referendum, all of the boroughs were far stronger for Remain than demographics would suggest (Knowsley in particular was 10-15% stronger for Remain than you'd expect in a virtually wholly white borough with low levels of education and high levels of poverty).

It's not the full story and it could be coincidental - but something has driven Merseyside more to the left than comparable areas elsewhere in the country.

[jamie]

Its worth noting that greater Liverpool had a surprisingly low vote for Brexit in 2016, and the Conservative performance in the area has gotten relatively worse for successive general elections, especially standing out as a bad performance in 2019 given it is prime 'Red Wall' territory in the original sense (demographically Tory voters not being so).

[Sibboleth]

Of course perspective can be an issue, can't it? You could say that the Conservative result in and around Liverpool in 2019 was a massive underperformance, but you could also say that results in similar regions elsewhere were a massive Labour underperformance. Perhaps both observations are true.

[Pete Whitehead]

Feb 1, 2023 19:26:51 GMT bjornhattan said:

Feb 1, 2023 18:47:50 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I'm not convinced. Conservative support was falling relatively in all the big cities from the 1960s onwards (actually Liverpool started to trend away from the Conservatives in 1959) and this gathered pace in the 1980s. In most the fall in Conservative support was not as precipitous (the only comparable city is Glasgow) but nevertheless they were wiped out in various previously safe seats in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield etc in 1997 and have never really recovered in any of them either.
I think the kind of people who engage in infantile politically inspired boycotts of that kind are not the sort of people who would ever have been likely Conservative voters anyway.

I think the Sun boycott has had some effect on politics around Merseyside. When I was analysing the EU referendum, all of the boroughs were far stronger for Remain than demographics would suggest (Knowsley in particular was 10-15% stronger for Remain than you'd expect in a virtually wholly white borough with low levels of education and high levels of poverty).

It's not the full story and it could be coincidental - but something has driven Merseyside more to the left than comparable areas elsewhere in the country.

I notice its quite low for English identity for an area of that kind. I dare say that Irish immigration still casts a long shadow. I'd also assume that the unusual recent loyalty to Labour compared with areas like South Yorkshire and Durham played a part, given that the party was consistently campaigning for Remain even if half-heartedly in the view of some. I wouldn't say that the influence of print media is zero but the fact that one of several Brexit supporting newspapers is not widely read in an area can only have made a marginal difference amongst all the other factors.