Post by batman on Jul 11, 2023 15:28:47 GMT
Edited to take into account the 2024 general election result.
SPELTHORNE
Spelthorne is coterminous with its borough boundaries, and in the most recent boundary review has had both its boundaries and its name unchanged. This has left it as one of a number of constituencies whose name, in terms of where on earth or rather in Britain it is, is a puzzle for the unitiated. This writer did not find out where this constituency was until adulthood, despite living most of his life only 2 constituencies, or about 15 minutes in the car, away. The name must once have had a greater currency locally than just the name of the borough and the constituency, as there was for many years a pub called The Spelthorne on the A308 which (many would be surprised to know) runs through here on its winding way from Belgravia to Maidenhead via Windsor; but it is quite long since demolished and replaced by flats. Its component towns and villages, mostly but not absolutely completely linked by continuous urban build-up, are generally not that well-known either, the exception being Staines, just about the largest especially if you include its sub-villages of Stanwell and Stanwell Moor, Staines having now been officially remamed Staines-upon-Thames. Staines is well-known for being the home of comedy character Ali G, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, and people still joke today about going to Da Staines Massive. Indeed, his show may well have contributed to the town's official name change, though its riverside is actually rather attractive and it is fair enough that the town is allowed to celebrate its main attraction in this way. Staines as a town actually crosses the Thames over the bridge, but those parts of the town on the Surrey side of the river are in the Borough of Runnymede, and thus in the Runnymede and Weybridge constituency. This constituency is rather light on the sort of wealthier areas which one generally associates with Surrey, but is significantly less deprived than neighbouring constituencies across the border into Greater London, which is part of the reason why it is rather amusing that Ali G lives in what some might think to be the rather middling or even naff Staines, rather than a more recognisably gritty and more obviously multiethnic district in the inner city. If it is accepted that this constituency is not high on the superwealthy index compared with the rest of the present-day county of Surrey, it is very important to note that, alone amongst the many towns and villages that make up the present-day county, this borough historically was not in Surrey, but until the formation of the Greater London Council in the 1960s was in Middlesex, before that county's abolition at that time. Not only is that the case, but its residents generally prefer not to regard themselves as Surrey people, and hanker after the days when Middlesex was more than the name of a couple of hospitals, and a county cricket club based at Lord's. In terms of ethnicity, too, this constituency is a little more ethnically diverse than much of Surrey, with Stanwell having a particularly high BAME population by Surrey standards, although it still has a clear majority of White residents, and is considerably less diverse than the neighbouring London boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow. The other neighbouring London borough is Richmond-upon-Thames, which is closer to Spelthorne in terms of ethnicity, but is quite a bit more socially upscale; if one drives towards London on the A308, this is the borough one first comes to, at Hampton. Politically, until 2024 Spelthorne voted Conservative by margins ranging from reasonably comfortable (the narrowest majorities were in the two Blair landslides) to overwhelming, after the constituency assumed its recognisable current form in 1955. The Spelthorne seat won by the Labour Party in their historic landslide in 1945 was very different from this one, since it also included all of Feltham and its internal suburbs. That territory gained its own constituency in the 1955 boundary changes and since it now lies in a different county is unlikely to be included in with any part of Spelthorne in the foreseeable future, although the county boundary at some points is not all that obvious on the ground as you turn left on the roundabout from Snakey Lane which runs in a roughly north-westerly direction off the A316 flyover.
The main constituent towns which make up this constituency are Staines(-upon-Thames), Ashford, Shepperton and Sunbury-on-Thames, of which Shepperton is somewhat the smallest and also perhaps the most prosperous. Also included are the surviving villages of Stanwell and Stanwell Moor, postally part of Staines but separated from it by distinctly scrubby countryside and also reservoirs with high banking on which sheep graze. These villages between them form the best part of two borough council wards, and one county council electoral division, and are best considered separately from Staines. The constituency also includes two other semi-separate villages, Littleton and Charlton, and the larger and more conjoined one of Laleham, immediately south of Staines along the Thames. Between Shepperton and Sunbury lie the Hallifords, Upper and Lower, of which Upper is the larger. Upper Halliford is just important enough to merit a railway station. Sunbury is quite extensive and large enough to have several distinct elements, which are generally described as Lower Sunbury (a somewhat chocolate-box villagey area close to the Thames), Sunbury Cross with its council tower blocks, shopping mall, somewhat scruffy older housing and local shopping parade opposite the mall, and Sunbury Common closer to the border with Greater London. Sunbury Cross is much the grittiest of these and looks not that dissimilar to Feltham, but politically has not been a Labour area for many years, at least not at local level. Sunbury Cross is in fact not a very extensive area, and not far north runs into Sunbury Common, which is basically standard-issue suburbia; the northern end of the area is sometimes known locally as Felthamhill, hard by the border with the London Borough of Hounslow. For a number of years Sunbury Common was the Liberal Democrats's strongest area in Spelthorne, and in the most recent local elections they outpolled the Tories comfortably, although they were run close by local independents. Lower Sunbury, which lies the other side of the A316, is much the most upmarket part of Sunbury, and also by some distance the most extensive in area. It is not that hugely dissimilar to Hampton village which lies not far to its east. Lower Sunbury has traditionally been strongly Conservative, but with its proximity to Hampton and its London borough of Richmond-upon-Thames has seen these allegiances somewhat weaken in favour of the Lib Dems. Sunbury is taken as a whole a contrasting town, seeing greater degrees of social polarisation than is seen in the other towns which make up Spelthorne. In general elections it must have always voted Conservative, albeit by varying degrees, probably even in 2024. Sunbury is less ethnically diverse than some other parts of the constituency, this diversity tending to increase the closer one gets to Staines.
Ashford, which is always careful not to be confused with its larger namesake in Kent, joins almost seamlessly on to Sunbury. It is on a different railway line from Sunbury, whose trains run to and from Shepperton and Waterloo, and is served instead by trains to and from Windsor, faster trains bound for Reading (which do all stop at Staines) not stopping here. Ashford is a fairly socially mixed town, with a significant council estate presence, but a distinctly larger element of mostly interwar semis. It has a recognisable town centre in a way that Sunbury does not, and is perhaps surprisingly extensive, even having its own mini-suburbs of Chattern Hill in its north, and Ashford Common in its east. Ashford politically has generally not been that different from Sunbury, being a rather unequal battle between the generally dominant Conservatives and their Labour, Liberal Democrat and occasionally in local elections independent rivals, though the latter have been doing well there of late, winning outright in Ashford East in 2023, and winning a seat in Ashford Town along with a Conservative and a Green. Spelthorne has in recent times in borough (but not in County Council) elections seen a kind of progressive alliance, whereby Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have not stood against each other in order to give the anti-Conservative vote a better chance, and while some wards (e.g. the two Stanwell ones) saw no Liberal Democrat or Green candidates in 2023, others such as those in Sunbury saw no Labour ones. Labour does have a presence in Ashford but does not generally win in the majority of the town; however, the north of the town is in the same borough ward as the southern end of Stanwell across the A30 trunk road, of which more later, and this ward does currently at the time of writing have Labour councillors, the last borough elections having taken place in 2023.
Looking at the various villages, Laleham if we can still regard it as a village rather than a southern suburb of Staines is the largest. It is not superwealthy but is generally comfortably off and only in desperate times for the Conservatives does it normally give them a great deal of trouble. Remarkably, however, in the height of New Labour's pre-governmental popularity in the mid-1990s, Labour actually managed to win the Shepperton and Laleham division of Surrey County Council in a by-election, a success which perhaps not surprisingly has not been since repeated. The Greens took full advantage of the non-candidacy of the Lib Dems and Labour to win Laleham and Shepperton Green ward in a by-election in 2022, but when there was another by-election in the ward not long afterwards and this time the Greens and Labour declined to stand, in favour of the Lib Dems, the voters decided to return a Conservative councillor this time, and the Tories narrowly held on to the ward in the 2023 main elections. It may be that the Tories are slightly stronger in the Laleham than the Shepperton Green element of the ward, though the distinction may not be that significant. Part of Laleham, however, lies in the Riverside and Laleham ward, and this elected in 2023 two Independents and a Liberal Democrat, the Lib Dem being the only candidate from the 3 main opposition political parties to stand in the 3 seats. These councillors beat the Conservatives fairly comfortably. Littleton and Charlton are quite small and socially middling rather than particularly prosperous. Such as they are, they tend to vote Conservative though not always overwhelmingly. The Hallifords are however distinctly less heavily Conservative, and the Tories were thrashed in the Halliford and Sunbury West ward in the most recent local elections. Littleton is almost conjoined to the Shepperton Green part of Shepperton, and Upper Halliford is quite close though not quite conjoined to Shepperton proper.
Shepperton is important enough to be the terminus of a railway branch line into London Waterloo (in fact two lines, as most trains go via Kingston and Wimbledon, but in rush hours there are some trains via Richmond) but is no metropolis. It is generally the best of the towns in Spelthorne for the Conservatives, and currently unlike Staines, Ashford and Sunbury has no non-Conservative councillors. It does have some small council estates, but they do not amount to much. Mostly it is owner-occupied, with good-sized homes, and fairly prosperous if not quite squillionaire CEO territory. That the Tories were able to outpoll their opponents, even without the opposition vote being split between Lib Dem, Lab and Green, in this year's elections suggests that if anything this part of Spelthorne may have become even more Conservative than it has traditionally been, which is quite a lot.
Staines is the best-known and generally the busiest of the towns which make up Spelthorne. It has a fairly extensive main shopping area, part of which is now pedestrianised, and is in fact the main shopping centre of the borough. By and large, although this is a slight over-simplification, its southern end is the most prosperous part of the town, its eastern end the most dominated by council estates, with the rest of the town quite socially mixed, although generally the further one gets from the Thames the less socially upscale the housing tends to be. Staines has been generally dominated by the Tories for most of the borough's history, but does have a significant anti-Conservative vote, and in the most recent local elections they were beaten in both of the town's eponymous wards, by a mixture of Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens and an Independent. Staines is a little more multiethnic than much of the borough, though Ashford has a fairly similar ethnic composition to Staines too; both towns are still clearly majority White, but with small but definite ethnic minority populations too. It comes as something of a surprise that Staines also has an Orthodox Synagogue, on the fringes of the town centre; it serves a wider community than just Staines, especially following the closure some years ago of Hounslow's synagogue. Labour arguably underperformed in Staines for many years, for example in the former Staines Town ward consistently losing by very wide margins to the Tories, but it is by no means clear that in the 2024 general election the Tories were able to beat Labour overall in the town. If so, it would have been by an extremely narrow margin. I am excluding Stanwell from Staines for the purposes of that calculation.
Stanwell is not only separated from Staines, to which it officially postally belongs, by (albeit rather scrubby at times) countryside, but it is separated from most of the rest of the borough politically too. It lies hard by the boundary with Greater London as it looks across the perimeter road to the Heathrow terminals. It is far more multiethnic than the rest of the borough, not least because of its greater proximity to multiethnic areas of outer London, and its large number of workers at Heathrow Airport (these are pretty prevalent in many parts of the borough, but particularly here), and now almost certainly has the largest BAME element of any area of Surrey except the Canalside ward in Woking, site of Britain's first purpose-built mosque. Both Stanwell itself and Stanwell Moor, especially the latter, do have some pleasant owner-occupied streets with good quality and at times good-sized houses, but the predominant element is council estates. Although Labour has struggled, principally for organisational reasons, at times to win borough council elections here, the Stanwell electoral division of Surrey County Council has been held continuously by Labour ever since 1981. Since the 2023 borough council elections, all the councillors here are now Labour, with Labour that year being unopposed by any party other than the Conservatives, not even TUSC this time. Although the Ashford element of the ward has in the past been a stumbling block for Labour, the Tories were fairly comfortably beaten in the Ashford North and Stanwell South ward, with Labour having an only slightly closer time of it in Stanwell North which also includes Stanwell Moor. The Conservative vote remains here, and is if anything a little stronger than it once was, for reasons which are perhaps somewhat complex; there was a time when Labour won Stanwell council seats by more overwhelming margins than is now the case, but we are talking quite a few decades ago. The knock-on effect of the extension of the ULEZ charge to the edge of Greater London may be one factor which is at present slightly depressing the Labour majorities here.
Ali G's home constituency has been faithful to the Conservatives since it assumed its present form in 1955, and until 2024 it never was really close in parliamentary elections, even though the Tories were very fortunate to remain in control of the local council in the 1995 elections, when they secured very slightly fewer actual votes than Labour, a success that Labour were fairly comfortably unable to repeat when the general election came round two years later. The seat was from 2010 represented for the Conservatives by Kwasi Kwarteng, who rose briefly to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in Liz Truss's short-lived administration. After increasing mutterings that he was rarely seen in the constituency, and the expectation that Labour might this time provide a stiffer challenge to him, he opted to retire in 2024. His decision quite possibly saved the Conservatives from defeat in the constituency in the general election. However, it was still a very tough night for the Tories, whose share of the vote for new candidate and now MP Lincoln Jopp fell by a staggering 30.4%. Had Labour been able to put a serious squeeze on the Liberal Democrat and Green votes, it would have meant a Labour gain. As it was, however, while Labour's share rose by an above-average 5.3%, that of both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens actually rose slightly too, and this has saved Jopp and the Conservatives, even though only the Tories of all the parties saw their vote share drop here. 14,038 votes were thus enough for victory for Jopp, with a majority of 1,590, the lowest ever in the post-1955 constituency, over Labour. The Tories will hope that the nationwide swing will see them more comfortably home in the future, but if they fail to make much of an improvement in terms of the deficit they are in behind Labour, and the latter can this time squeeze the Lib Dem and Green votes, this seat (especially if the gentle demographic change emanating, perhaps, from the London boroughs to its east and north becomes more of a factor) still has the potential to be a serious worry for the Tories. Only time, of course, will tell.
SPELTHORNE
Spelthorne is coterminous with its borough boundaries, and in the most recent boundary review has had both its boundaries and its name unchanged. This has left it as one of a number of constituencies whose name, in terms of where on earth or rather in Britain it is, is a puzzle for the unitiated. This writer did not find out where this constituency was until adulthood, despite living most of his life only 2 constituencies, or about 15 minutes in the car, away. The name must once have had a greater currency locally than just the name of the borough and the constituency, as there was for many years a pub called The Spelthorne on the A308 which (many would be surprised to know) runs through here on its winding way from Belgravia to Maidenhead via Windsor; but it is quite long since demolished and replaced by flats. Its component towns and villages, mostly but not absolutely completely linked by continuous urban build-up, are generally not that well-known either, the exception being Staines, just about the largest especially if you include its sub-villages of Stanwell and Stanwell Moor, Staines having now been officially remamed Staines-upon-Thames. Staines is well-known for being the home of comedy character Ali G, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, and people still joke today about going to Da Staines Massive. Indeed, his show may well have contributed to the town's official name change, though its riverside is actually rather attractive and it is fair enough that the town is allowed to celebrate its main attraction in this way. Staines as a town actually crosses the Thames over the bridge, but those parts of the town on the Surrey side of the river are in the Borough of Runnymede, and thus in the Runnymede and Weybridge constituency. This constituency is rather light on the sort of wealthier areas which one generally associates with Surrey, but is significantly less deprived than neighbouring constituencies across the border into Greater London, which is part of the reason why it is rather amusing that Ali G lives in what some might think to be the rather middling or even naff Staines, rather than a more recognisably gritty and more obviously multiethnic district in the inner city. If it is accepted that this constituency is not high on the superwealthy index compared with the rest of the present-day county of Surrey, it is very important to note that, alone amongst the many towns and villages that make up the present-day county, this borough historically was not in Surrey, but until the formation of the Greater London Council in the 1960s was in Middlesex, before that county's abolition at that time. Not only is that the case, but its residents generally prefer not to regard themselves as Surrey people, and hanker after the days when Middlesex was more than the name of a couple of hospitals, and a county cricket club based at Lord's. In terms of ethnicity, too, this constituency is a little more ethnically diverse than much of Surrey, with Stanwell having a particularly high BAME population by Surrey standards, although it still has a clear majority of White residents, and is considerably less diverse than the neighbouring London boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow. The other neighbouring London borough is Richmond-upon-Thames, which is closer to Spelthorne in terms of ethnicity, but is quite a bit more socially upscale; if one drives towards London on the A308, this is the borough one first comes to, at Hampton. Politically, until 2024 Spelthorne voted Conservative by margins ranging from reasonably comfortable (the narrowest majorities were in the two Blair landslides) to overwhelming, after the constituency assumed its recognisable current form in 1955. The Spelthorne seat won by the Labour Party in their historic landslide in 1945 was very different from this one, since it also included all of Feltham and its internal suburbs. That territory gained its own constituency in the 1955 boundary changes and since it now lies in a different county is unlikely to be included in with any part of Spelthorne in the foreseeable future, although the county boundary at some points is not all that obvious on the ground as you turn left on the roundabout from Snakey Lane which runs in a roughly north-westerly direction off the A316 flyover.
The main constituent towns which make up this constituency are Staines(-upon-Thames), Ashford, Shepperton and Sunbury-on-Thames, of which Shepperton is somewhat the smallest and also perhaps the most prosperous. Also included are the surviving villages of Stanwell and Stanwell Moor, postally part of Staines but separated from it by distinctly scrubby countryside and also reservoirs with high banking on which sheep graze. These villages between them form the best part of two borough council wards, and one county council electoral division, and are best considered separately from Staines. The constituency also includes two other semi-separate villages, Littleton and Charlton, and the larger and more conjoined one of Laleham, immediately south of Staines along the Thames. Between Shepperton and Sunbury lie the Hallifords, Upper and Lower, of which Upper is the larger. Upper Halliford is just important enough to merit a railway station. Sunbury is quite extensive and large enough to have several distinct elements, which are generally described as Lower Sunbury (a somewhat chocolate-box villagey area close to the Thames), Sunbury Cross with its council tower blocks, shopping mall, somewhat scruffy older housing and local shopping parade opposite the mall, and Sunbury Common closer to the border with Greater London. Sunbury Cross is much the grittiest of these and looks not that dissimilar to Feltham, but politically has not been a Labour area for many years, at least not at local level. Sunbury Cross is in fact not a very extensive area, and not far north runs into Sunbury Common, which is basically standard-issue suburbia; the northern end of the area is sometimes known locally as Felthamhill, hard by the border with the London Borough of Hounslow. For a number of years Sunbury Common was the Liberal Democrats's strongest area in Spelthorne, and in the most recent local elections they outpolled the Tories comfortably, although they were run close by local independents. Lower Sunbury, which lies the other side of the A316, is much the most upmarket part of Sunbury, and also by some distance the most extensive in area. It is not that hugely dissimilar to Hampton village which lies not far to its east. Lower Sunbury has traditionally been strongly Conservative, but with its proximity to Hampton and its London borough of Richmond-upon-Thames has seen these allegiances somewhat weaken in favour of the Lib Dems. Sunbury is taken as a whole a contrasting town, seeing greater degrees of social polarisation than is seen in the other towns which make up Spelthorne. In general elections it must have always voted Conservative, albeit by varying degrees, probably even in 2024. Sunbury is less ethnically diverse than some other parts of the constituency, this diversity tending to increase the closer one gets to Staines.
Ashford, which is always careful not to be confused with its larger namesake in Kent, joins almost seamlessly on to Sunbury. It is on a different railway line from Sunbury, whose trains run to and from Shepperton and Waterloo, and is served instead by trains to and from Windsor, faster trains bound for Reading (which do all stop at Staines) not stopping here. Ashford is a fairly socially mixed town, with a significant council estate presence, but a distinctly larger element of mostly interwar semis. It has a recognisable town centre in a way that Sunbury does not, and is perhaps surprisingly extensive, even having its own mini-suburbs of Chattern Hill in its north, and Ashford Common in its east. Ashford politically has generally not been that different from Sunbury, being a rather unequal battle between the generally dominant Conservatives and their Labour, Liberal Democrat and occasionally in local elections independent rivals, though the latter have been doing well there of late, winning outright in Ashford East in 2023, and winning a seat in Ashford Town along with a Conservative and a Green. Spelthorne has in recent times in borough (but not in County Council) elections seen a kind of progressive alliance, whereby Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have not stood against each other in order to give the anti-Conservative vote a better chance, and while some wards (e.g. the two Stanwell ones) saw no Liberal Democrat or Green candidates in 2023, others such as those in Sunbury saw no Labour ones. Labour does have a presence in Ashford but does not generally win in the majority of the town; however, the north of the town is in the same borough ward as the southern end of Stanwell across the A30 trunk road, of which more later, and this ward does currently at the time of writing have Labour councillors, the last borough elections having taken place in 2023.
Looking at the various villages, Laleham if we can still regard it as a village rather than a southern suburb of Staines is the largest. It is not superwealthy but is generally comfortably off and only in desperate times for the Conservatives does it normally give them a great deal of trouble. Remarkably, however, in the height of New Labour's pre-governmental popularity in the mid-1990s, Labour actually managed to win the Shepperton and Laleham division of Surrey County Council in a by-election, a success which perhaps not surprisingly has not been since repeated. The Greens took full advantage of the non-candidacy of the Lib Dems and Labour to win Laleham and Shepperton Green ward in a by-election in 2022, but when there was another by-election in the ward not long afterwards and this time the Greens and Labour declined to stand, in favour of the Lib Dems, the voters decided to return a Conservative councillor this time, and the Tories narrowly held on to the ward in the 2023 main elections. It may be that the Tories are slightly stronger in the Laleham than the Shepperton Green element of the ward, though the distinction may not be that significant. Part of Laleham, however, lies in the Riverside and Laleham ward, and this elected in 2023 two Independents and a Liberal Democrat, the Lib Dem being the only candidate from the 3 main opposition political parties to stand in the 3 seats. These councillors beat the Conservatives fairly comfortably. Littleton and Charlton are quite small and socially middling rather than particularly prosperous. Such as they are, they tend to vote Conservative though not always overwhelmingly. The Hallifords are however distinctly less heavily Conservative, and the Tories were thrashed in the Halliford and Sunbury West ward in the most recent local elections. Littleton is almost conjoined to the Shepperton Green part of Shepperton, and Upper Halliford is quite close though not quite conjoined to Shepperton proper.
Shepperton is important enough to be the terminus of a railway branch line into London Waterloo (in fact two lines, as most trains go via Kingston and Wimbledon, but in rush hours there are some trains via Richmond) but is no metropolis. It is generally the best of the towns in Spelthorne for the Conservatives, and currently unlike Staines, Ashford and Sunbury has no non-Conservative councillors. It does have some small council estates, but they do not amount to much. Mostly it is owner-occupied, with good-sized homes, and fairly prosperous if not quite squillionaire CEO territory. That the Tories were able to outpoll their opponents, even without the opposition vote being split between Lib Dem, Lab and Green, in this year's elections suggests that if anything this part of Spelthorne may have become even more Conservative than it has traditionally been, which is quite a lot.
Staines is the best-known and generally the busiest of the towns which make up Spelthorne. It has a fairly extensive main shopping area, part of which is now pedestrianised, and is in fact the main shopping centre of the borough. By and large, although this is a slight over-simplification, its southern end is the most prosperous part of the town, its eastern end the most dominated by council estates, with the rest of the town quite socially mixed, although generally the further one gets from the Thames the less socially upscale the housing tends to be. Staines has been generally dominated by the Tories for most of the borough's history, but does have a significant anti-Conservative vote, and in the most recent local elections they were beaten in both of the town's eponymous wards, by a mixture of Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens and an Independent. Staines is a little more multiethnic than much of the borough, though Ashford has a fairly similar ethnic composition to Staines too; both towns are still clearly majority White, but with small but definite ethnic minority populations too. It comes as something of a surprise that Staines also has an Orthodox Synagogue, on the fringes of the town centre; it serves a wider community than just Staines, especially following the closure some years ago of Hounslow's synagogue. Labour arguably underperformed in Staines for many years, for example in the former Staines Town ward consistently losing by very wide margins to the Tories, but it is by no means clear that in the 2024 general election the Tories were able to beat Labour overall in the town. If so, it would have been by an extremely narrow margin. I am excluding Stanwell from Staines for the purposes of that calculation.
Stanwell is not only separated from Staines, to which it officially postally belongs, by (albeit rather scrubby at times) countryside, but it is separated from most of the rest of the borough politically too. It lies hard by the boundary with Greater London as it looks across the perimeter road to the Heathrow terminals. It is far more multiethnic than the rest of the borough, not least because of its greater proximity to multiethnic areas of outer London, and its large number of workers at Heathrow Airport (these are pretty prevalent in many parts of the borough, but particularly here), and now almost certainly has the largest BAME element of any area of Surrey except the Canalside ward in Woking, site of Britain's first purpose-built mosque. Both Stanwell itself and Stanwell Moor, especially the latter, do have some pleasant owner-occupied streets with good quality and at times good-sized houses, but the predominant element is council estates. Although Labour has struggled, principally for organisational reasons, at times to win borough council elections here, the Stanwell electoral division of Surrey County Council has been held continuously by Labour ever since 1981. Since the 2023 borough council elections, all the councillors here are now Labour, with Labour that year being unopposed by any party other than the Conservatives, not even TUSC this time. Although the Ashford element of the ward has in the past been a stumbling block for Labour, the Tories were fairly comfortably beaten in the Ashford North and Stanwell South ward, with Labour having an only slightly closer time of it in Stanwell North which also includes Stanwell Moor. The Conservative vote remains here, and is if anything a little stronger than it once was, for reasons which are perhaps somewhat complex; there was a time when Labour won Stanwell council seats by more overwhelming margins than is now the case, but we are talking quite a few decades ago. The knock-on effect of the extension of the ULEZ charge to the edge of Greater London may be one factor which is at present slightly depressing the Labour majorities here.
Ali G's home constituency has been faithful to the Conservatives since it assumed its present form in 1955, and until 2024 it never was really close in parliamentary elections, even though the Tories were very fortunate to remain in control of the local council in the 1995 elections, when they secured very slightly fewer actual votes than Labour, a success that Labour were fairly comfortably unable to repeat when the general election came round two years later. The seat was from 2010 represented for the Conservatives by Kwasi Kwarteng, who rose briefly to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in Liz Truss's short-lived administration. After increasing mutterings that he was rarely seen in the constituency, and the expectation that Labour might this time provide a stiffer challenge to him, he opted to retire in 2024. His decision quite possibly saved the Conservatives from defeat in the constituency in the general election. However, it was still a very tough night for the Tories, whose share of the vote for new candidate and now MP Lincoln Jopp fell by a staggering 30.4%. Had Labour been able to put a serious squeeze on the Liberal Democrat and Green votes, it would have meant a Labour gain. As it was, however, while Labour's share rose by an above-average 5.3%, that of both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens actually rose slightly too, and this has saved Jopp and the Conservatives, even though only the Tories of all the parties saw their vote share drop here. 14,038 votes were thus enough for victory for Jopp, with a majority of 1,590, the lowest ever in the post-1955 constituency, over Labour. The Tories will hope that the nationwide swing will see them more comfortably home in the future, but if they fail to make much of an improvement in terms of the deficit they are in behind Labour, and the latter can this time squeeze the Lib Dem and Green votes, this seat (especially if the gentle demographic change emanating, perhaps, from the London boroughs to its east and north becomes more of a factor) still has the potential to be a serious worry for the Tories. Only time, of course, will tell.
