Post by batman on Jul 15, 2023 20:04:03 GMT
Edited to take into account the 2024 general election result.
VAUXHALL AND CAMBERWELL GREEN
This new constituency is a variant on the former Vauxhall, a seat which had existed in one form or another for over 70 years. Unlike Vauxhall, which never crossed the borders of the London Borough of Lambeth (before or after the creation of the present London Boroughs), this new seat like so many other new creations follows the precedent of Dulwich and West Norwood in uniting areas of Lambeth with a minority from the neighbouring borough of Southwark. This new seat, while it looks awkward in some respects, at least unites the community of Kennington in one constituency for the first time. Vauxhall was a safe Labour seat throughout its history, other than in one freakish back-end-of-the-GLC by-election which was won by the Liberals. This constituency will be no different, in fact it is even weaker for the Conservatives than the outgoing seat.
Vauxhall is not, as it happens, a particularly major component of this constituency; Vauxhall is a well-known transport interchange, and the name of one of the bridges crossing into the city of Westminster from here, but not that many people would say they live there unless they live extremely close to that station. This is true also of Lambeth. Lambeth itself, as opposed to South Lambeth, even though there is an Underground station called Lambeth North only just about exists as an area today, having a near-deserted and almost entirely working-class residential High Street, which perhaps 120 years ago or so would have been, in contrast, a hive of activity - although of course Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a very well-known and historic landmark close to the River Thames. The main areas which comprise this constituency are Waterloo, closest of all to central London and to all intents and purposes part of it, South Lambeth, Kennington, and much though not all of Stockwell & Camberwell. The constituency has lost most of its previous Brixton and Clapham components in the boundary changes, gaining Newington and Camberwell Green wards in compensation. The areas gained are slightly smaller in terms of electorate than those lost, as the outgoing Vauxhall constituency had become slightly oversized in electorate. There are, in addition to Lambeth Palace, other well-known landmarks to be found here - the Oval cricket ground where the very first Test match to be held in England took place in 1880, the Royal Festival Hall and the South Bank cultural development as a whole, the London Eye, St Thomas' Hospital, the MI6 building near Vauxhall station which has been shown in James Bond films, the multi-platformed railway terminus at Waterloo, and some other more minor local ones. This is very much an inner-city seat, in which expensive riverside flats guarded by ever-attentive concierges (undoubtedly inhabited by some of the many MPs who have their London homes here, not surprisingly with the Houses of Parliament overlooking the constituency) and some still elegant owner-occupied squares and terraces, especially in Kennington, contrast with large council estates of various vintages, many built by the London County Council well over a hundred years ago. There are however at least some elegant areas in South Lambeth, and to a lesser extent in Stockwell.
This is a very multi-cultural constituency. Still the principal ethnic minority population is the Black community, which as well as a large number of people of Caribbean heritage also includes many people of African heritage these days. Other ethnic minorities are by no means absent, including a large Portuguese community centred on South Lambeth, although this never has been an area noted for its British Asian community. The White working class has by no means entirely disappeared, especially in some of the council estates in the northern parts of the constituency, but is a much smaller component of the seat than was once the case. Those who live in owner-occupied homes work in a variety of occupations. There are many who work at the Palace of Westminster, for the NHS and in other public sector jobs, for example in education, but here also can be found, as well as MPs, people working in sectors of the private-sector economy more readily associated with the Conservatives such as finance and the law. Many voters in owner-occupied homes are what is sometimes described as intellectual - Brexit-opposing, socially liberal, interested in the arts, etc. - and with the South Bank being such a well-known part of the constituency, it is not altogether surprising that many voters who visit it with varying regularity can be found here. These voters are much less inclined towards the Conservatives than they were a few decades ago. It is not surprising that the Tories struggle to contend in the constituency as a whole, and the only ward in the former constituency, the socially polarised Clapham Town, which does have a coherent Conservative presence has now left this territory. There are a few elegant streets in Camberwell here and there but for the most part the constituency has an even more working-class social composition than before. In most wards, what opposition there is to Labour, at least at local level, has in recent years been dominated by the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems had quite a long period in control of Bishops ward, now essentially renamed Waterloo & South Bank (the ward closest in to central London), and have also had councillors in Oval ward, which includes some of the afore-mentioned elegant squares which still exist in Kennington; more aberrantly, they did for a time have a councillor in Vassall ward, which essentially covered the area now in Myatt's Fields ward. The areas covered by other wards, such as Vauxhall, Kennington, Newington, Camberwell Green and Stockwell East (mostly new ward names in the most recent changes), have seen Labour in a position of complete safety for decades. The Liberal Democrats themselves had a disastrous year in 2014 when their representation was wiped out altogether in a number of London boroughs, and these included Lambeth; however, they did return to the council chamber in 2022. In the last 3 local elections, Labour has managed to win every single council seat in this constituency; Lambeth's opposition Greens and Liberal Democrats are to be found entirely in what was until 2024 the Streatham constituency, and the Liberal Democrats are nowhere near winning either of the Southwark wards now to be included. The Greens have a decent vote and have at various times been the nearest challengers to Labour in some wards, but they have yet to break through in this constituency in terms of winning seats; in the 2024 general election, it was they, with a whopping 13% increase in vote share, who took a still distant second place to Labour.
This is a relatively rare example of a seat in London where, if we take this as the successor seat to Vauxhall, Labour has had things pretty much their own way since World War II, especially south of the Thames. Although the Liberal Democrats have for several decades now had a goodly number of councillors in the northern part of the borough of Southwark, the two wards included here have had a largely unclouded history from Labour's point of view; Newington ward was held very easily with a majority of roughly two to one over the Lib Dems in a June 2023 by-election, and Camberwell Green has been Labour-dominated almost unbrokenly for generations, hard by the hugely safe and overwhelmingly council-estate dominated, and enormously influenced by Black Caribbeans and Black Africans, area of Peckham as it is. Camberwell itself has a very large Black African and Black Caribbean population, and Newington ward is not that different in this respect; both have a very high proportion of socially rented homes, with Newington topping 57% on this metric. Camberwell Green saw a huge Labour win in the 2022 council elections, with a single Green candidate providing the only thing approaching serious opposition, but they were still beaten almost 3 to 1 by Labour. By and large, the areas being gained from Southwark are even more council-estate-dominated that those which depart to a new constituency of Clapham and Brixton Hill, though the distinction is not a huge one. Part of Camberwell's SE5 postcode can be found in the Myatt's Fields ward, and this now has joined much of the rest of Camberwell in a way that can perhaps be regarded as logical. Although Camberwell is an overwhelmingly working-class area today, it was not always so. In days gone by it had considerably greater elegance, though those days are a long time ago now. The famous Cockney song "Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road" features a mention of the beneficiary's rich Uncle Tom, who lived in Camberwell. It is perhaps not a well-known fact that Kennington Underground station, a very busy interchange where people can change between the City and Charing Cross branches of the Northern Line (and is also now a junction from which the recently-built Battersea branch sweeps up in a north-westerly direction), lies not in the borough of Lambeth like the majority of Kennington but, just, in Southwark. These boundary changes unite the whole Kennington community in one constituency for the first time, at least in living memory, although the areas being added are lighter on graceful owner-occupied terraces and squares than the Lambeth Borough majority of the area.
There was a great deal of controversy attached to the selection of Kate Hoey as the Labour candidate in the 1989 by-election which was caused by the decision of left-winger Stuart Holland to pursue other interests. The local party preferred a Black left-winger, Martha Osamor (who many years later was awarded a peerage by Jeremy Corbyn in his period leading the Labour Party), but Neil Kinnock and the then National Executive decided otherwise and effectively imposed Hoey, a rare Protestant Ulsterwoman in British Labour politics who was at the time seen as a safer pair of hands on the party's soft Kinnockite left. As time went on, her support of hunting with dogs and Brexit in particular made her an increasingly controversial figure in the party, and by the time of the 2019 election it was clear that right-wing and left-wing elements in her CLP had both had enough of her. No doubt sensing this, and having reached the age of 73, Hoey opted to retire, and then endorsed the Democratic Unionist Party openly shortly afterwards. Her replacement, elected with great ease, was Flo(rence) Eshalomi, formely Nosegbe, well-known as a Greater London Assembly member, and generally regarded as a relatively right-wing figure within the party by most observers on most though not all issues. She was elected for this new seat very easily in 2024, with a margin of more than 3 to 1 over the Greens, despite a small drop in vote share which was not unusual in inner south London in that election. The Liberal Democrats had previously poured resources into Vauxhall in the 2017 general election, as they thought that Hoey's pro-Brexit views gave them a serious chance, but they could not have been more incorrect as, in her final election in the Labour interest, Hoey actually increased the already very large Labour majority. This seat has in whatever guise it has appeared been safe Labour for generations, and it is very hard to imagine how it could be anything else.
