Post by batman on Jul 6, 2023 11:04:29 GMT
Edited to take into account the 2024 general election.
BRENTFORD AND ISLEWORTH
This seat was formed for the 1974 general election (all the 1974 London constituencies were drawn ready in time for the 1973 GLC elections too), originally with a prefix of "Hounslow". Until the 2024 boundary changes, it contained all of the previous Brentford and Chiswick constituency, and roughly half of the previous Heston and Isleworth. The seat always tended towards being slightly above average in terms of electorate, and in advance of the 2024 election the Boundary Commission recognised that by removing the entire Chiswick section from the east of the constituency, and adding instead the Whitton ward from the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames and one other Hounslow council ward, Heston East. Chiswick has been the only part of the pre-2024 constituency which has continued to send Conservative councillors to Hounslow's council chamber in recent years, but has been very close in general elections. With its removal has probably disappeared any real chance the Tories have to become competitive in this constituency in the foreseeable future, as in the recent past they have been able to rack up large leads over Labour in that community. While in the past the remaining wards have occasionally dabbled in electing local councillors from other parties - not just the Lib Dems, but even an independent Brentford FC-supporting councillor, although he himself later aligned with Labour - the politics of the remaining wards, which take in much though not all of Hounslow as well as the upmarket Osterley, have been in general a rather unequal battle usually (though not always) involving just Labour and the Conservatives. The addition of Whitton throws in some municipal political variety to the redrawn seat, but has not had a great partisan effect, indeed with Heston East ward also being added Labour was able to maintain a comfortable lead in this constituency.
Brentford has a history as a docks town, and still has some echoes of this in some quarters closer to the river despite the construction of some very upmarket riverside flats; at its eastern edge, the new Brentford football stadium (the GTech Community Stadium), which now sees top-flight football, is now fully open about a mile further east than the old one (Griffin Park), which was noted for being the only football league ground with a pub at each corner. Large council estates are to be found in Brentford, both north and south of the M4 flyover. It does however have a small and beautiful 200-year-old conservation area called The Butts (it's a lot nicer than it sounds), whose houses are historic and handsome enough to attract rock stars who might otherwise be more associated with neighbouring constituencies; it also has a pleasant interwar mostly owner-occupied area immediately south of Boston Manor Underground station.
Isleworth remains distinctly socially mixed, with more council estates partially balanced by some privately-built interwar semi-detached houses and also the graceful old upmarket riverside houses close to Syon Park and Syon House, London seat of the Dukes of Northumberland; Isleworth can also be said to include Osterley and, to the south of that, the Spring Grove area which is increasingly popular with successful professionals of all kinds. While Brentford has significant non-white communities, Isleworth remains predominantly white, perhaps surprisingly strongly. Rather oddly, an element of the Isleworth community around the western part of Spring Grove Road is part of the Heston East ward which has now been added to the constituency, but while this unites the Isleworth community it has rather awkwardly led to a significant minority of the Heston community being added to the seat, while the majority of that community remains, logically enough, in a redrawn Feltham and Heston seat. Heston East ward is a bit more socially upscale than the other 2 Heston wards and used to be remarkably safe for the Conservatives in the old days, but since Labour took it in the 1990s it is now as safe as the other traditionally more Labour-inclined Heston wards. Heston, lying as it does between Hounslow and Southall, has a very large Indian subcontinental population, with all the three major Indian faiths strongly represented, and this has undoubtedly been one of the reasons for Heston East's transformation from being a totally safe Tory ward to a totally safe Labour one. Those parts of Isleworth which lie within that ward's boundaries are just a little less upmarket than those the other side of the Piccadilly Line which are in the Osterley and Spring Grove ward
A very major component of the constituency is the majority of Hounslow proper (as opposed to Heston, Cranford and Heathrow which are all postally officially part of Hounslow). Hounslow is well-known for its very strong communities from the Indian subcontinent, with people of Indian Sikh, Indian Hindu and Pakistani Muslim heritage all being very well-represented (and a mostly relatively poor Polish population, too), although it would be incorrect to surmise that those of White British, or indeed Black Caribbean, background are not still present in significant numbers, much more so than in Southall or much of Heston to its north. Hounslow still has some pockets of very pleasant suburban housing, especially in Hounslow South ward abutting the Twickenham rugby ground where the Conservatives have been competitive until very recently, but much of the town is of an unmistakably working-class nature as befits a place where so many workers at Heathrow Airport live.
The addition to all of this territory of Whitton ward is in many ways awkward, but does have a certain logic to it. The boundary between Whitton and Hounslow South wards on the ground is at times very difficult to discern and there are quite strong similarities between the two wards, especially where they border each other. However, Whitton ward has a considerably bigger white population than Hounslow South, which nowadays has a strong British Asian contingent, and some of its streets are just a little further upmarket than any Hounslow South has to offer, although the latter does continue to have some very pleasant residential areas. While Hounslow South has settled down into a pretty (though not overwhelmingly) safe Labour voting pattern, after in the past being a mostly very safe Tory ward, Whitton, as befits a Richmond-upon-Thames ward, is completely different. At local level, it took its time to become winnable for the Liberals as they then were, finally falling to them in the 1986 elections in which the Liberal/SDP Alliance won a full slate of seats in the Twickenham constituency, a feat which so far the present-day Liberal Democrats have been (albeit only very narrowly) been unable to repeat, or one might say unwilling to repeat as in the last two council elections they have left a few seats uncontested, in favour of the Green Party (though not in Whitton where they do hold all 3 seats). For a long while it was marginal between the Tories and the Liberals/Liberal Democrats, but it now seems to have settled down to be a safe Lib Dem ward for now, helped by Labour doing consistently worse than the ward's demography suggests that they perhaps ought to. Voters in Whitton ward in the 2024 general election were faced with completely different political realities, namely that the Liberal Democrats were completely out of contention, and the only party that could even remotely aspire to defeat Labour in the new constituency was the Conservatives, even though at present they have no councillors in the entire seat as it will be drawn; Whitton ward as with the rest of the outgoing Twickenham constituency has never before been in a Labour constituency. In such a situation it was clear that the tactical vote unwound, probably mostly in favour of Labour, though the Tories almost certainly maintained at least a small lead over Labour in the ward. In the end this simply was not enough for the Tories. With the limited exceptions of Osterley and Spring Grove, Hounslow East and Hounslow South, the remaining wards could now be relied on to give Labour very large leads over the Tories, with Brentford East and Hounslow Heath being particularly safe. There are some signs that Labour's grip, as in other constituencies, on the Indian Hindu vote has loosened a good deal, hence perhaps the Tories' somewhat improved position in Hounslow East ward (this factor also appeared to be present in Hounslow South in the Mayoral election, and may still have been in the general election which followed it), but these voters proved nothing like numerous enough to threaten Labour's position overall, although there was a very tiny fractional swing, against the national trend, to the Tories.
Politically this seat was very marginal in its earlier years, threatened to become almost safe for the Tories in the 1980s, but swung particularly heavily to Labour in 1992 and then again in 1997 when the seat was overwhelmingly gained. The Tories did manage to retake it in 2010, when the Labour MP Ann Keen came in for heavy criticism for her part in the MPs' expenses issue, but it was little surprise when Labour retook the seat, in a result distinctly better than their very lukewarm national average in 2015, the longtime Brentford resident Ruth Cadbury being a popular choice as Labour's candidate; and they surged into a five-digit lead in 2017, perhaps helped in particular by an increased turnout by younger residents including students from the University of West London campus in Brentford. A slight swing back to the Tories in 2019 still left Labour well ahead, and it would now take a Conservative landslide of monumental proportions to restore this seat, which they held unbrokenly until 1997, to them. This task if anything looks even more daunting with these boundary changes, as although Whitton is potentially a bit more Conservative than Chiswick which it has replaced, it is far smaller and thus has much less potential impact on the overall result, and the further addition of Heston East has harmed the Tories further. The Tories managed a tiny swing in their favour in 2024, almost certainly helped by the 6.1% polled by the Workers' Party of Britain, whose candidate Nisar Malik was for a number of years a Labour councillor for Hounslow Central ward; but this still looks a very daunting prospect for the Tories, even if Ruth Cadbury, who will be 70 by the end of this parliament if it runs its full course, opts to retire. This essentially is a pretty safe, but not yet supersafe, Labour seat.
