Post by batman on Jul 8, 2023 8:25:01 GMT
edited to take into account the general election result etc.
EALING CENTRAL & ACTON
This seat was first contested in 2010, but the recent boundary changes have now made the seat something of a halfway house between the 2010-2024 version of Ealing Central and Acton, and the 1997-2010 seat called Ealing Acton and Shepherd's Bush. Traditionally, the Ealing community itself has tended somewhat towards the Conservatives, and the Acton community somewhat towards Labour (although the Tories did win the old Acton seat twice post-WWII before it was merged with a chunk of Ealing in 1974). This seat now includes a substantial but reduced element of the Ealing community, all of Acton whether it lies in the borough of Ealing or of Hammersmith and Fulham, and a small element of Shepherd's Bush. Walpole ward, which straddles parts of both the Ealing and West Ealing communities mostly to the south of the A4020 main road, has now disappeared from the seat, but to it have been added two wards from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. One of these wards, College Park and Old Oak, includes East Acton underground station, and its surrounding council estate many of whose residents work either at the local hospital, confusingly named Hammersmith Hospital (it now incorporates Queen Charlotte's Hospital, which when it was actually located in Hammersmith was my birthplace), or the famous prison, Wormwood Scrubs, constructed in the 19th century largely through the forced labour of its inmates. This part is generally referred to as East Acton although it shares the W12 postcode with Shepherd's Bush. College Park and Old Oak, including as it does Wormwood Scrubs open space (which surprisingly includes a small athletics stadium, named after Olympic gold medallist Linford Christie), is in area a large ward, although its population is quite small, and stretches far enough north to include an area, known as College Park, which has the NW10 postcode of Harlesden but is part of the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Also included in the ward is a small council-built enclave closer in towards Shepherd's Bush. This ward is overwhelmingly Labour, and only has a small minority of privately-built housing hard by the border with Kensington and Chelsea, as well as in College Park which really only consists of a few streets, and has a large Black and other ethnic minority population. The other ward, Wormholt, is unequivocally (at least in the case of the great majority of its streets) part of the Shepherd's Bush community, rather seamlessly shading into the eastern part of Acton proper (as opposed to East Acton, which was a separate village to the north-east of here until the very latter stages of the 19th century). It has seen some limited gentrification but is still a heavily predominantly working-class area, again very multiethnic, with sizable low-rise council estates. It was formerly in the same ward as the White City estate, but no longer, and has now been separated from that area for parliamentary purposes. While Labour would have been ahead of the Conservatives in Walpole ward in the 2019 election, despite its history as a very closely-fought marginal, they would have been far further ahead in these two wards, and these changes have further entrenched what was already a comfortable-looking majority for Labour's Rupa Huq, who was first elected here in 2015 when she gained the seat from the one-term Conservative MP Angie Bray. Huq got into trouble with the Labour Party's disciplinary body for some comments about the then Conservative Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng which were deemed offensive, but after issuing what was regarded as a generally satisfactory apology she was allowed to resume the Labour Whip, and was re-elected with great comfort in 2024 as the Labour MP.
Ealing as a community or, if you like, town as opposed to its entire eponymous borough has a longstanding nickname, The Queen of the Suburbs. It certainly has some very attractive residential areas, on and around the North Circular Road south-east of the town centre, around the Common, and north of Haven Green opposite Ealing Broadway station, which after years of waiting now has Crossrail services on the Elizabeth Line. These areas are heavily owner-occupied with some private renting and very few council-built enclaves. Even further up the social scale is the interwar development between Hanger Lane and the neighbouring Piccadilly Line stations of North Ealing and Park Royal, centred on a road called Corringway. Here are large detached houses, almost all still undivided. This polling district was said to be the only one in the entire borough where Labour failed to achieve 20% of the vote, and even now it would not be much higher than that as the Conservatives have traditionally been very strong. However, a lot of Ealing proper has what is often termed an "intellectual" population - interested in the arts, educated, fairly socially liberal. This is perhaps not entirely unnatural in an area famous for its film studio, noted especially for its comedies (though the studio is in the area which has now left the constituency). These voters are found in many of Britain's major urban centres, London very much included, and a majority of them will have voted against leaving the European Union in 2016. The high incidence of such voters has contributed to a noticeable weakening of the Conservative position in the three Ealing community wards which continue to be part of this seat - Ealing Common, Hanger Hill and Ealing Broadway. Labour now has its first-ever councillor in the first-mentioned of these, and very unusually the ward elected one councillor each from Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in 2018, though the Liberal Democrats were able to gain the Conservative seat in 2022. The other two wards were very safe for the Conservatives when they were first created, but the Tories now only have a modest majority in Ealing Broadway, and had to make do with sharing Hanger Hill with the Liberal Democrats (with Labour close behind) in 2022. The Liberal Democrats gained a further seat in a by-election not long after the 2024 general election. These wards have similarities but also differences. Ealing Common does have one solidly working-class polling district, almost entirely council-built, immediately south-east of South Ealing tube station. Ealing Broadway has some very graceful streets north of Haven Green but is a little less socially upscale south of the Broadway, where there is a great deal of multi-occupancy and a smattering of council-built homes. Hanger Hill is quite socially polarised between the previously mentioned Corringway area and the much more down-at-heel West Twyford area, named after a derelict former stately home and lying east of Hanger Lane tube station. The areas immediately west and north of the famous Hanger Lane Gyratory System, in the middle of which the station is found, have a significant Iranian and Iraqi population and they too are a decent source of Labour votes despite the ward voting more Conservative than Labour. Taken as a whole, the Ealing half of the constituency is still mainly white, though less so than it once was, with various minorities including a mostly prosperous Indian population on the increase .
Acton is a different matter altogether and is essentially a mixture of not particularly upmarket owner-occupied and privately rented areas and council estates, some of which are of some size. Acton proper essentially has 3 and a bit Ealing council wards; these 3 entirely-Acton-proper wards are all Labour-held, and none of them can now be regarded as anything but safe. South Acton, though it has some pleasant areas in its western extremities close to Ealing Common station, is particularly reliably Labour and includes a large, and now almost entirely rebuilt, medium-to-high-rise council estate. Its predecessor ward, Heathfield, was not lost by Labour for decades. Labour had not the slightest difficulty in holding the ward in a by-election in October 2024, at a time when they were haemorrhaging votes in many other areas. Acton Central and East Acton are fairly politically similar to each other, having some good residential streets but both having large, and in this case mainly low-rise, council estates. Both have coherent Tory votes, but Labour is pretty well ahead these days. East Acton ward contains perhaps the sole genuinely wealthy Acton enclave of Shaa Road, close to a Saudi school, a road full of large detached and often gated houses containing some celebrities. One element of Western Acton (shading into North Ealing) is what is probably London's only large Japanese community, complete with Japanese shops, schools and even estate agents, some of which lives in former council houses near West Acton station. Many members of this community are here for fixed periods for work purposes, are not naturalised British citizens, and thus do not vote. Taken as a whole, however, Acton as a community - including the section of it which is in Southfield ward - tends to be a little down-at-heel and much less affluent than Ealing is as a community. Labour's historic slight edge has tended to widen further in recent years. Southfield ward, however, is different. Most of the ward is in the W4 postal area, which is Chiswick, and Chiswick remains a distinctly upmarket area for the most part - of course, the great majority of it lies within the borough of Hounslow, not Ealing. Some of the roads in the ward are very prosperous indeed. Unlike the Hounslow council Chiswick wards, however, the ward is not a long-term Conservative stronghold, but rather has been held without interruption, not even in their dreadful year of 2014, by the Liberal Democrats, who, perhaps benefitting from the somewhat "intellectual" (again) nature of the population, and perhaps also benefitting from efficient local vote-squeezing of Labour, have held the ward for decades now, defying constant Conservative and more sporadic Labour efforts to oust them. The tiny Acton Green open space at the southern edge of the ward is oddly-named, since it's regarded as being in Chiswick, not in Acton. The Liberal Democrats in recent years have not done as well in Southfield ward in general elections as they have in local ones, their votes being rather dispersed in favour of the two main parties. In 2015 the Tories were the main beneficiaries despite losing the seat, since 2017 probably Labour have been. As a whole, the Acton area is significantly more multi-racial than the Ealing area, having large Black Caribbean and African and middle Eastern communities, as well as the mostly non-voting Japanese community. The Black Caribbean community, as with Shepherds Bush immediately to Acton's east, is long-established.
So, this is a constituency which is divided between Ealing and Acton with a bit of Chiswick thrown in, but now the divide is distinctly in favour of Acton with parts of Shepherd's Bush adding a further element. Politically, it was seen as a three-way marginal in 2010, largely because it contained (as it still does) the Liberal Democrats' two strongest wards in the borough of Ealing, Ealing Common and Southfield, and the partial Liberal Democrat win in Hanger Hill in 2022 tends to suggest that they would have polled pretty well there too in 2010. In that year of the so-called Cleggasm, the Lib Dems were strongly fancied to win by many, the Conservatives by plenty more, and Labour by not that many. In the end, it seems that Labour's vote in its strongest areas was just firm enough to prevent large-scale movement towards the Lib Dems, and they retained an only moderately close second place, with the Tories' Angie Bray, already a seasoned campaigner, elected. She may well have hoped to consolidate her lead, but Labour picked a strong local candidate for the 2015 election in Dr Rupa Huq, resident in Ealing all her life, well-known in the area, and with a celebrity sister to boot. She went down very well on the doorstep, so it appears, and squeezed the Liberal Democrat vote well enough to defy the poor national results for Labour and take the seat; it seems that Bray had failed to build up a personal vote of any consequence. She then greatly benefitted from the large swing to Labour seen in so many London seats, sometimes known as the Corbyn surge, to increase her majority to a barely credible 13,800, gaining support from centrist pro-European voters (she was a very strong advocate of Remain in the 2016 referendum) as well as pro-Corbyn voters in 2017. Her majority, in a result distinctly similar to that in Brentford and Isleworth next door, declined only very slightly in 2019, and this seat could already be fairly regarded as safe even before these boundary changes, which have now created a seat which it is very hard to imagine the Conservatives winning again. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats with their support in Hanger Hill, Ealing Common and Southfield wards may yet fancy their chances of becoming a more challenging alternative in the future, but in the end there seem to be too many Labour stronghold areas in the constituency for any other winner to emerge, and the Tories at least managed to maintain a rather distant second place at the most recent general election not far ahead of the Lib Dems.
