Bury South

[batman]

It was Andrew Teale who wrote the profile of this constituency on its former boundaries. I am prepared to write a profile of the new seat, my connection with it being that I have always had, and continue to have, family members in the constituency, and have visited it frequently over the years (I have also used a number of its Holts pubs!), but if Andrew prefers to edit his original profile or indeed write a completely new one, I will of course defer to him.

[batman]

edited to take into account the 2024 general election result etc.




BURY SOUTH

This constituency was formed in 1983 and is not that similar to any previous seat, being constructed from chunks of the former Bury & Radcliffe and Middleton & Prestwich seats. These were marginal territory, both rather surprisingly successfully defended by Labour in the 1979 general election, and this constituency was been consistently marginal for a number of years except during the Blair period, when it was safe for its then Labour MP Ivan Lewis (later to achieve Shadow Cabinet office and later still to lose the Labour Whip over allegations of inappropriate behaviour), and as of the 2024 general election; before Lewis's election in 1997 there were some very close contests all resulting in Tory wins, with the later-to-be-famous Hazel Blears very narrowly defeated in 1992. Its marginality returned in 2010, and on notional 2019 figures at the election past this was a wafer-thin Tory marginal; however, this constituency is currently unique as the Conservative MP elected in 2019, Christian Wakeford, subsequently crossed the floor to join the Labour Party (the two other MPs who did the same in the 2019-2024 parliament did not attempt to defend their seats or stand elsewhere), was subsequently confirmed, not without controversy, as the Labour candidate for the constituency for the general election, and was re-elected handsomely in 2024 in his new colours. The constituency name can be seen as rather misleading, as it contains very little if any of Bury itself but rather has formed the southern half or thereabouts of the Metropolitan Borough which bears the town's name. The boundary changes removed one ward, Radcliffe North, which has therefore split the Radcliffe community for the first time, but added the Kersal & Broughton Park ward in the far north-east of the City of Salford in its stead, giving the constituency a non-Bury borough element for the first time since its formation.

The constituency has three principal communities, Whitefield, Prestwich and that part of Radcliffe which remains in the seat. Unsworth ward is a semi-separate community which was moved into the constituency from Bury North in the 2010 boundary changes, and remains in the seat. Kersal & Broughton Park ward is a large part though not the entirety of a somewhat anomalous predominantly owner-occupied and middle-class corner of Salford . This is a very residential seat and town centre shopping areas of any consequence are generally minor. Its wards have differing demographic make-up and are mostly characterised by at least some degree of marginality between the Labour and Conservative parties, though some wards such as Besses have seen quite long periods of Labour tenure. Whitefield and Prestwich are large enough towns to have identifiable sub-areas of their own. I take first the Whitefield part of the constituency, located in its geographical centre.

Whitefield can be said to have 2 wards, Besses and Pilkington Park, although it could be said that a little of Unsworth is really in the Whitefield community; however, many of its residents including my cousin who lives there would say they live in Unsworth, and parts of the ward have BL postcodes and can perhaps be regarded as an extended part of the Bury community. Besses and Pilkington Park are quite contrasting in social terms. Much the more prosperous is Pilkington Park, which includes the particularly prosperous Stand area with its quite large detached houses; however, many Stand residents tend not to call it that, generally saying that they live in Whitefield. This ward has by some way the larger Jewish community of the Whitefield wards, a community with a strong presence in more than one part of this constituency though certainly not all. Pilkington Park was once a consistently if not monolithically Tory ward, but has swung a long way towards Labour since Sir Keir Starmer succeeded Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Party. In the 2023 local elections, after a split in the all-out 2022 elections, a local Jewish Labour candidate won with a surprisingly comfortable majority over the Tories. Besses, which is wedged between the other Pilkington Park and Unsworth wards, is distinctly different in character. Besses has a full name, Besses-o'-the-Barn, which is still often used. Labour has long won in Besses ward, which has a working-class social composition and was once famous for its brass band, and in recent times its victories have been overwhelming. Unsworth ward in terms of social class lies somewhere between the two previously-mentioned wards, less prosperous than much of Pilkington Park, but a bit further up the social scale than Besses. It has been won by Labour consistently for a number of years but does still have a coherent Tory vote. It does have an identifiable but rather small Jewish community, and is much less an area of Jewish residence (and synagogues) than Stand or other parts of Pilkington Park ward. Taken as a whole, these 3 wards can sometimes give the Tories a small majority but Labour in better years can rack up a fair-sized lead, even though Whitefield is not always regarded as a Labour town, and they must have been a long away ahead in 2024.

To Prestwich for the purposes of this profile can perhaps be added the Kersal and Broughton Park ward, which is not part of the Prestwich community but has significant elements in common with neighbouring Sedgley ward.  It does have a council estate in Kersal but mostly consists of quite good-sized owner-occupied semis and detached houses. It has a very large Jewish community, much of which is strictly-Orthodox. For many years Labour was perhaps surprisingly dominant here, perhaps to some extent for relatively parochial reasons, but their dominance has come to an abrupt halt in the last few years, when the Tories have arguably finally started to realise their potential, at least in local elections. Even in the generally poor 2023 elections the Tories won this ward by more than two to one, but it was the only ward in this redrawn constituency which was won by the Tories. Sedgley ward, the southernmost ward both of the Prestwich community and of the Borough of Bury as a whole, is often, unlike its namesake ward in the Black Country, known locally as Sedgley Park. It is a little less socially upscale than Kersal and Broughton Park but it too has a very large Jewish community, indeed both these wards are amongst the very top wards in Britain in terms of percentage of Jewish residents. Its housing tends to be mainly owner-occupied but a little smaller and perhaps its prevailing social composition could be described as lower-middle-class. Its Jewish residents include, again, a goodly number of the strictly-Orthodox, but there are more liberal or even secular Jews here than in Kersal and Broughton Park. Sedgley ward, it could be argued, has shown, as Kersal and Broughton Park did until recently, surprising loyalty to Labour, even being won in pretty good style in the difficult year of 2019 when Jewish voters were starting to turn against Labour in a noticeable way (this phenomenon was less strongly evident, though not absent, in the earlier years of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership). The local Labour councillors have taken great pains to maintain good relations with the local Jewish community, of which one of these councillors is very much a part, and in the 2023 local elections Labour had a very large majority of more than three-to-one over the Conservatives, which given the social composition of the ward is quite a high ratio. St Mary's ward, which includes Prestwich's small but perhaps slightly up-and-coming town centre, is more extensive than the other two Prestwich wards largely because some fair-sized green spaces lie within it . It is mixed in terms of housing types, ethnicity and social class. In terms of housing, there are some high-class owner-occupied roads, but also plenty of terraced streets and a council estate element. Some of its more upmarket roads have become increasingly attractive to young professionals priced out of more obviously trendy parts such as Chorlton-cum-Hardy in south Manchester. These voters are not currently attracted to the Conservative Party at all and tend to add to the mostly Labour preferences seen in the more downmarket parts of the ward. There is a bit of an Asian community here, otherwise not a major feature of the constituency, some white working-class voters but also, as with most of Prestwich, something of a Jewish community, although not as large as that in Sedgley ward. Considering how socially mixed the ward is, it too perhaps has a surprisingly strong Labour lead, the party racking up an almost monolithic majority in the 2023 elections. Holyrood ward, in the north-east of the Prestwich community, is also socially mixed, but politically at local level is very different, as it for a long time was the sole Liberal Democrat stronghold in the entire borough of Bury; however, Labour, having split the ward with the Lib Dems in the all-out elections of 2022, won it fairly narrowly but clearly in 2023. There is little doubt that the Tories do much better here in general elections than their derisory local vote suggests. The ward includes the small semi-rural community of Simister, which features frequently in reports of traffic congestion on Manchester's motorways. Taken as a whole, it could perhaps be said that Prestwich as a community, even if one includes Kersal and Broughton Park ward in with it, is a little more Labour-inclined than its social composition might appear to suggest; however, the Tories would still probably be capable of outpolling Labour in this part of the seat in a very strong year, which of course 2024 was emphatically not.

The remaining main element of the constituency is the roughly two-thirds of the town of Radcliffe which has stayed in Bury South. Radcliffe is a town with a strong industrial heritage. It unlike Prestwich and Whitefield to its south has a very small Jewish population indeed. The Tories' strongest ward in the town, North, now departs from the constituency; the two that remain have in recent years voted consistently for the local Radcliffe First party. These wards have a strong working-class element, but are far from devoid of streets of owner-occupied semis either, even though these are not generally executive homes. These wards are swing areas in general elections although the Tories are currently a very long way behind in local ones. Radcliffe has an identifiable town centre, although it is not very extensive and has limited shopping facilities, in contrast to, for example, nearby Bury.

The boundary change removed one Conservative ward but added another; as such, it had almost no partisan implications. This constituency as it stands would have voted extremely narrowly for the Conservatives in the 2019 election, indeed a recount would almost certainly have been necessary. Labour would already have very strongly fancied its chances of picking the seat up in 2024, indeed it would have been imperative for the party to do so, but Wakeford by changing allegiances removed the need for that assuming he was able to secure re-election. Local election results suggested that Labour, apart from in the Kersal and Broughton Park ward, had now forged ahead, and these results were not illusory. The Tories fielded Arnie Saunders, a Rabbi from the Salford part of the constituency, who represents the aforementioned Kersal & Broughton Park ward, but although one might have expected him to poll strongly both there and to a lesser extent in Sedgley, his result turned out to be extremely poor even by the standards of the 2024 election, the Conservative share of the vote plummeting by no less than 20%. In contrast Wakeford boosted Labour's share by 4%, well above the national average. This swing was, in common with many notional or actual Tory marginals defended in 2024, more than the national average, and leaves Labour in a very commanding position in this previously marginal seat. One day perhaps the Tories will be able to challenge here again, but the short-term outlook for them does not look good.

[bsjmcr]

This is my home seat too and a very good summary, and just the right length (I would have struggled to keep it short). I would only have added (maybe it is implied but not obvious to an unfamiliar reader) that it was Conservative from its creation in '83 right up to '97, held by David Sumberg and very surprisingly held in 1992 by about 700 votes against one Hazel Blears. Only because I have a bee in my bonnet when many in the media referred to this as Red Wall when Wakeford crossed the floor...

May I also mention the oddly-named small village of Simister in the Holyrood ward which includes some farmland. I am proud of how green this area is, on both sides of the constituency - Prestwich Clough/Drinkwater/Philips Park (or collectively Prestwich Forest Park) and the Irwell (probably over 500 acres) forming the western boundary with Salford/Bolton, and Simister and Heaton Park to the east. Heaton Park is of course not in this constituency but makes a strong impression on the area, not least when Parklife comes to town. I'd probably politely disagree that St Mary's is a primarily working-class ward, with its large size is due to all that green space, and certainly areas such as St Ann's Road and Prestwich Park Road south are the most leafiest roads in the town along with Sheepfoot Lane where seven-figure house prices are not unusual. But I agree there is a proportion of social housing peppered throughout the constituency (sometimes a stone's throw away from the most expensive houses), though few are sprawling estates like in other parts of Manchester.

I think Prestwich and Whitefield are becoming increasingly attractive to commuters priced out of the go-to areas of Didsbury and Chorlton, and those are places where large houses have often been converted into apartments, so those looking for actual houses with gardens are coming over here. Radcliffe though, this is much less the case and is for sure the 'red wall' 'element' of this constituency, though the complex make-up of the consistency as a whole is why it is not red wall.

[andrewteale]

I've not had the time to take an active role in the updated Almanac so far, so thanks to batman for his profile and to bsjmcr for his comments.

I grew up in the St Mary's ward of Prestwich at the far end of Gardner Road, next to all that greenery. I'd agree that St Mary's is not primarily a working-class ward. It contains Prestwich town centre which is quite well-defined and rivals Radcliffe for shopping these days; that demonstrates how far Radcliffe has sunk and how much Prestwich has gone up in the world. Prestwich town centre has a very different vibe now compared with when I walked through it to and from school in the 1990s - there can't be many other places where Kwik Save was redeveloped as Marks and Spencer Food.

Unsworth ward does extend into Whitefield town centre, but it's predominantly a Bury ward and mostly has BL rather than M postcodes. I'm not sure I would describe the Besses community as straddling the M60, eight or ten lanes of traffic is a big barrier. In fact, the Besses community isn't that big and the largest component of Besses ward is the Hillock estate, which is Manchester overspill. Whitefield was also the original home of Halls cough sweets.

Radcliffe First, incidentally, were only founded in 2019 - they are not a localist party of particularly long standing.

[batman]

It's clear that there are parts of this constituency I don't know as well as others. Basically I know the Jewish areas quite well because I have visited relatives there, and one or two bits where there are good pubs (generally Holts or in the more distant past Thwaites) that I've visited. I will edit my profile hopefully this morning to take all the above points into account. I really didn't know that Prestwich had an identifiable town centre of any consequence but clearly I was wrong.

[Robert Waller]

2021 Census, new boundaries

Age 65+ 16.2% 404/575
Owner occupied 64.2% 329/575
Private rented 20.2% 196/575
Social rented 15.6% 263/575
White 83.0% 379/575
Black 2.6% 198/575
Asian 8.3% 192/575
Jewish 15.8% 3/575
Managerial & professional 34.2% 251/575
Routine & Semi-routine 21.3% 379/575
Degree level 33.5% 245/575
No qualifications 18.7% 238/575
Students 7.0% 196/575





General Election 2019: Bury South

Party Candidate Votes % ±%

Conservative Christian Wakeford 22,034 43.8 +2.2
Labour Lucy Burke 21,632 43.0 -10.3
Liberal Democrats Richard Kilpatrick 2,315 4.6 +2.5
Brexit Party Andrea Livesey 1,672 3.3
Independent Ivan Lewis 1,366 2.7
Green Glyn Heath 848 1.7
Independent Michael Boyle 277 0.6
Women's Equality Gemma Evans 130 0.3

C Majority 402 0.8


Turnout 50,274 66.9 -2.3

Conservative gain from Labour

Swing 6.3 Lab to C


Boundary Changes
Bury South consists of
88.4% of Bury South
11.8% of Blackley and Broughton

Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/north-west/North%20West_225_Bury%20South_Portrait.pdf

2019 Notional result (Rallings & Thrasher)

Con	21574	43.5%
Lab	20639	41.6%
LD	3059	6.2%
BxP	1847	3.7%
Grn	900	1.8%
Oths	1615	3.3%
Majority	935	1.9%