Post by Robert Waller on Oct 24, 2023 9:39:47 GMT
(I thought I'd have a go at the constituency of my birth)
The northern part of Stoke-on-Trent includes two of Arnold Bennett’s ‘Five Towns’ (six really), Burslem and Tunstall. This is solidly working-class territory, which in rather distantly past years now produced a full slate of Labour councillors in annual city council elections, most recently in 1996 when they won all 60, but since 1998 other groups, such as an organised slate of Independents, have seriously eroded this position. One of the first onto the city council was Lee Wanger, elected for Tunstall North in 1998, who received over 11% of the vote in the 2001 General Election, one of a surprisingly large number of Independents and minor party candidates to do well in what was in many ways a very quiet set of election results. This started a transformation in the electoral history of Stoke in Trent, at first in city council elections, then culminating in the loss of all three Stoke seats in the December 2019 general election for the first time since 1931.
Those 60 councillors that Labour held in 1996 diminished steadily to 21 by 2002, the local monopoly combined with a national Labour government leaving no room to hold anyone else to account and also plenty of scope for internal quarrels and splits. There were some recoveries, for example to 35 councillors in 2004 and 34 in 2011, but a record low of 17 was set in 2008 and repeated in May 2019. Who took up the slack? Well, the answer is: an extraordinary variety. ‘Independents’ reached a summit of 28 in 2008, but even that word included a number of different factions and labels (City Independents, for example, not to be confused with just plain Independents). The Liberal Democrats peaked at 11 councillors in 2002, but declined to zero from 2011 onwards. By 2019, six months before their successful general election, the principal opposition to Labour on the city council had become the Conservatives. Indeed this was confirmed even in 2023, by which time they had seen two of their Prime Ministers fall, and were generally in full retreat round the rest of the country. However in May 2023, while Labour advanced by 12 council seats from 17 to 29, the Tories lost only one to keep 14, while the Independents were the big losers, dropping from 12 to just one.
Within the Stoke-on-Trent North parliamantary seat in the 2023 Stoke city elections, the Conservatives won two wards – a gain in Tunstall from the City Independents (held in 2019 by nine other than the Lee Wanger who did so much to start the whole Independent movement off) and a hold in Goldenhill & Sandford, and holding two of their previous three in Baddeley, Milton & Norton. Labour took all the others: holding Burslem (Central) , Bradely & Chell Heath, Ford Green & Smallthorne ,Little Chell & Stanfield and Moorcroft & Sneyd Green - the former half of which will be in this seat after the boundary changes - and gaining Burslem Park and Great Chell & Packmoor from City Independents.
The Labour party’s travails on the city council were reflected by a gradual but steep decline in their performance in general elections within Stoke. In the North constituency, Labour’s share fell at every election from 1997 to 2105, starting at 65.2% and reaching 39.9% at the latter date – a drop in numerical majority to 4,836 from 17,392. Unlike in the municipal arena, the Tories did retain second place each time, although the BNP saved their deposit with shares of 7% in 2005 and 8% in 2010, a clue to the nature of some of the discontent with Labour. UKIP finished a strong third with nearly 25% in 2015. In 2017 Labour recovered in terms of share to 51%, but their majority actually slipped to under 3,000 as the Conservatives improved even more by 18%. Helped by the presence of no fringe parties or independents on the ballot, the traditional two major parties polled a remarkable 95.2% between them in Stoke North in 2017. Then came the Tory gain in December 2019, as Jonathan Gullis secured a further swing of 10,7%. The defeated MP Ruth Smeeth’s discontent with the direction her party had taken was palpable in election night interviews.
Her demise may be ascribed to the way the Labour party had not appealed to the concerns of Stoke North voters. For a start, Stoke as a whole voted almost 70% to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, and Labour’s commitment to enabling that decision in the next three years was equivocal. However the European vote itself was a product of ‘feeling left behind’ and excluded. Although Stoke is really North Midlands rather than West Midlands, the pattern was similar to the Conservative gains in the Black Country, for example. The 2021 census found that Stoke North is now over 85% white and strikingly working class – the seat on its new boundaries is the 10th most working class in England and Wales in terms of routine and semi-routine occupations. It is also within the dozen with least educational degrees. These figures reach even greater extremes in some of the neighbourhoods within Stoke North.
Across the seat as a whole the figure for no educational qualifications is 26%, but it exceeds 30% in the MSOAs of Longport and Burslem Park , Tunstall, and Bradely & Chell Heath, where only 16.5% have degrees. There are very few pockets of middle class residence within the Stoke boundaries. The largest proportion of higher professional and managerial workers in any MSOA within the Stoke section of Stoke North in the 2021 census was 7.4% in Great Chell & Packmoor, the highest with degrees 24.9% in Baddeley & Milton. There are significant estates of social rented housing such as the peripheral Chell Heath estate, and in inner city type areas such as between Burslem and Longport, where the older terraces of sub-standard housing have been cleared and replaced, as on Supreme Street, Candy Lane and Angels Way (a case of nominative optimism here?). There are still plenty of old houses left, though, such as around Smallthorne and some of these are home to the ethnic minority communities of Stoke North, such as in Tunstall (31% Asian) and between Burslem and Cobridge, and on both sides of the A50 Waterloo Road in Moorcroft ward, where the highest OA is over 73% Asian and 75% Muslim. This contrasts starkly with most of the seat, though, especially the peripheral districts in Chell Heath council estate and the low cost private housing of Norton and Baddeley, where there are no Muslims at all in some OAs.
The parts of Stoke North that are not within the city should not be forgotten. There are wards from Stoke’s Potteries neighbour Newcastle under Lyme. Some have been included in the constituency since 2010, and between 1983 and 1997. Talke and Butt Lane ward (including Talke Pits) is a logical northwestern extension of Stoke North, easily connected to the city by the A500 trunk road but on the other side of it from most of Newcastle. Kidsgrove & Ravenscliffe, on the other hand , covers a distinct and independent town, a separate Urban District (including Talke) till 1974 when it was rather illogically subsumed under Newcastle under Lyme. Indeed it had looked north to join Biddulph in the Leek constituency, and indeed was a major contributor to that seat being won by Labour from 1918 to 1970, losing only in 1931. Kidsgrove gets its TV from BBN North West and ITV Granada. There have been no Newcastle Borough elections since May 2022, but then Talke & Butt Lane was held by Labour, as they have ever since ending in 2011 a long run of Liberal Democrat success there. Kidsgrove & Ravenscliffe has elected Tory councillors only twice in the last fifty years – but those occasions happen to be 2018 and 222, the most recent two contests.
There are fairly minor boundary changes for the next general election in Stoke North. The whole of the Newchapel and Mow Cop ward at the extreme north eastern edge of Newcastle under Lyme borough will now be included, which means that the seat will reach the heights (1099 feet) on which the ruins of the 1754 folly loom. This ward has also turned to the Tories in the last pair of council elections. The only other changes are in swaps between Stoke North and Stoke Central, with Sneyd Green being switched from the former to the latter and Baddeley Green and Baddeley Edge going the other way, being added to North. Overall the effect will be to add a few hundred to the notional Conservative 2019 majority.
Many will no doubt predict that Stoke North will return to the Labour column in a 2024 general election, after a solitary aberration in 2019. It is the middle of the three Stoke constituencies in vulnerability. South was the first to fall, in 2017, had the largest Conservative majority in 2019, and is the most affected by boundary changes which will make it decidedly safer for Jack Brereton MP. Stoke Central was won by the smallest margin, just 670, and will not have an incumbent MP after the retirement of Jo Gideon (who was elected at the age of 67 and has since turned 70). But North might not be a shoo-in for a regain. Opinion polls in 2023 may say so, but taking the 2022 and 2023 local election results together Labour would have barely been ahead, and that is not to take into account any double incumbency effect Jonathan Gullis may benefit from (that is, in 2019 he faced Ruth Smeeth’s personal vote, and after five years he may have built up one of his own).
Apart from Mow Cop, at a very untypical end of this constituency, it has few picturesque sights or claims to fame. There is the vast echoing stadium of Port Vale football stadium (record attendance 49,768 – in 1960); Vale are north Stoke, Stoke City south. There is the Robbie Williams tourist trail, largely in Burslem where he lived over a pub as a child and in Tunstall where he went to school, all definitely in North.
www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/robbie-williams-tourist-trail-takes-7131172
The Middleport pottery centre, a popular recreation for tourists of some of the glories of the Potteries past, is within the seat. There is even Haywood Hospital, the birthplace if one psephologist but not of another, Michael Thrasher, who is from further south in Stoke. But for all it lack of glamour Stoke in Trent North is an important constituency, one which will be an acid test if whether Keir Starmer’s version of the Labour party can recover an overwhelmingly working class former stronghold in which their domination has crumbled over the past quarter of a century since that original Wanger breakthrough. They need seats like this if they are to govern, especially with an overall majority.
2021 Census
Age 65+ 19.0% 290/575
Owner occupied 61.9% 371/575
Private rented 18.4% 274/575
Social rented 19.7% 159/575
White 87.0% 330/575
Black 1.8% 243/575
Asian 7.9% 199/575
Managerial & professional 21.2% 543/575
Routine & Semi-routine 35.1% 10/575
Degree level 20.8% 565/575
No qualifications 26.2% 32/575
Students 5.8% 261/575
General Election 2019: Stoke-on-Trent North
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Jonathan Gullis 20,974 52.3 +7.0
Labour Ruth Smeeth 14,688 36.6 -14.3
Brexit Party Richard Watkin 2,374 5.9
Liberal Democrats Peter Andras 1,268 3.2 +1.0
Green Alan Borgars 508 1.3 -0.3
Independent Matthew Dilworth 322 0.8
C Majority 6,286 15.7 N/A
Turnout 40,134 57.5 -1.1
Conservative gain from Labour
Swing 10.7 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Stoke-on-Trent North consists of
94.1% of Stoke-on-Trent North
6.6% of Stoke-on-Trent Central
4.4% of Staffordshire Moorlands
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/west-midlands/West%20Midlands_471_Stoke-on-Trent%20North_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional results on new boundaries (Rallings & Thrasher)
The northern part of Stoke-on-Trent includes two of Arnold Bennett’s ‘Five Towns’ (six really), Burslem and Tunstall. This is solidly working-class territory, which in rather distantly past years now produced a full slate of Labour councillors in annual city council elections, most recently in 1996 when they won all 60, but since 1998 other groups, such as an organised slate of Independents, have seriously eroded this position. One of the first onto the city council was Lee Wanger, elected for Tunstall North in 1998, who received over 11% of the vote in the 2001 General Election, one of a surprisingly large number of Independents and minor party candidates to do well in what was in many ways a very quiet set of election results. This started a transformation in the electoral history of Stoke in Trent, at first in city council elections, then culminating in the loss of all three Stoke seats in the December 2019 general election for the first time since 1931.
Those 60 councillors that Labour held in 1996 diminished steadily to 21 by 2002, the local monopoly combined with a national Labour government leaving no room to hold anyone else to account and also plenty of scope for internal quarrels and splits. There were some recoveries, for example to 35 councillors in 2004 and 34 in 2011, but a record low of 17 was set in 2008 and repeated in May 2019. Who took up the slack? Well, the answer is: an extraordinary variety. ‘Independents’ reached a summit of 28 in 2008, but even that word included a number of different factions and labels (City Independents, for example, not to be confused with just plain Independents). The Liberal Democrats peaked at 11 councillors in 2002, but declined to zero from 2011 onwards. By 2019, six months before their successful general election, the principal opposition to Labour on the city council had become the Conservatives. Indeed this was confirmed even in 2023, by which time they had seen two of their Prime Ministers fall, and were generally in full retreat round the rest of the country. However in May 2023, while Labour advanced by 12 council seats from 17 to 29, the Tories lost only one to keep 14, while the Independents were the big losers, dropping from 12 to just one.
Within the Stoke-on-Trent North parliamantary seat in the 2023 Stoke city elections, the Conservatives won two wards – a gain in Tunstall from the City Independents (held in 2019 by nine other than the Lee Wanger who did so much to start the whole Independent movement off) and a hold in Goldenhill & Sandford, and holding two of their previous three in Baddeley, Milton & Norton. Labour took all the others: holding Burslem (Central) , Bradely & Chell Heath, Ford Green & Smallthorne ,Little Chell & Stanfield and Moorcroft & Sneyd Green - the former half of which will be in this seat after the boundary changes - and gaining Burslem Park and Great Chell & Packmoor from City Independents.
The Labour party’s travails on the city council were reflected by a gradual but steep decline in their performance in general elections within Stoke. In the North constituency, Labour’s share fell at every election from 1997 to 2105, starting at 65.2% and reaching 39.9% at the latter date – a drop in numerical majority to 4,836 from 17,392. Unlike in the municipal arena, the Tories did retain second place each time, although the BNP saved their deposit with shares of 7% in 2005 and 8% in 2010, a clue to the nature of some of the discontent with Labour. UKIP finished a strong third with nearly 25% in 2015. In 2017 Labour recovered in terms of share to 51%, but their majority actually slipped to under 3,000 as the Conservatives improved even more by 18%. Helped by the presence of no fringe parties or independents on the ballot, the traditional two major parties polled a remarkable 95.2% between them in Stoke North in 2017. Then came the Tory gain in December 2019, as Jonathan Gullis secured a further swing of 10,7%. The defeated MP Ruth Smeeth’s discontent with the direction her party had taken was palpable in election night interviews.
Her demise may be ascribed to the way the Labour party had not appealed to the concerns of Stoke North voters. For a start, Stoke as a whole voted almost 70% to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, and Labour’s commitment to enabling that decision in the next three years was equivocal. However the European vote itself was a product of ‘feeling left behind’ and excluded. Although Stoke is really North Midlands rather than West Midlands, the pattern was similar to the Conservative gains in the Black Country, for example. The 2021 census found that Stoke North is now over 85% white and strikingly working class – the seat on its new boundaries is the 10th most working class in England and Wales in terms of routine and semi-routine occupations. It is also within the dozen with least educational degrees. These figures reach even greater extremes in some of the neighbourhoods within Stoke North.
Across the seat as a whole the figure for no educational qualifications is 26%, but it exceeds 30% in the MSOAs of Longport and Burslem Park , Tunstall, and Bradely & Chell Heath, where only 16.5% have degrees. There are very few pockets of middle class residence within the Stoke boundaries. The largest proportion of higher professional and managerial workers in any MSOA within the Stoke section of Stoke North in the 2021 census was 7.4% in Great Chell & Packmoor, the highest with degrees 24.9% in Baddeley & Milton. There are significant estates of social rented housing such as the peripheral Chell Heath estate, and in inner city type areas such as between Burslem and Longport, where the older terraces of sub-standard housing have been cleared and replaced, as on Supreme Street, Candy Lane and Angels Way (a case of nominative optimism here?). There are still plenty of old houses left, though, such as around Smallthorne and some of these are home to the ethnic minority communities of Stoke North, such as in Tunstall (31% Asian) and between Burslem and Cobridge, and on both sides of the A50 Waterloo Road in Moorcroft ward, where the highest OA is over 73% Asian and 75% Muslim. This contrasts starkly with most of the seat, though, especially the peripheral districts in Chell Heath council estate and the low cost private housing of Norton and Baddeley, where there are no Muslims at all in some OAs.
The parts of Stoke North that are not within the city should not be forgotten. There are wards from Stoke’s Potteries neighbour Newcastle under Lyme. Some have been included in the constituency since 2010, and between 1983 and 1997. Talke and Butt Lane ward (including Talke Pits) is a logical northwestern extension of Stoke North, easily connected to the city by the A500 trunk road but on the other side of it from most of Newcastle. Kidsgrove & Ravenscliffe, on the other hand , covers a distinct and independent town, a separate Urban District (including Talke) till 1974 when it was rather illogically subsumed under Newcastle under Lyme. Indeed it had looked north to join Biddulph in the Leek constituency, and indeed was a major contributor to that seat being won by Labour from 1918 to 1970, losing only in 1931. Kidsgrove gets its TV from BBN North West and ITV Granada. There have been no Newcastle Borough elections since May 2022, but then Talke & Butt Lane was held by Labour, as they have ever since ending in 2011 a long run of Liberal Democrat success there. Kidsgrove & Ravenscliffe has elected Tory councillors only twice in the last fifty years – but those occasions happen to be 2018 and 222, the most recent two contests.
There are fairly minor boundary changes for the next general election in Stoke North. The whole of the Newchapel and Mow Cop ward at the extreme north eastern edge of Newcastle under Lyme borough will now be included, which means that the seat will reach the heights (1099 feet) on which the ruins of the 1754 folly loom. This ward has also turned to the Tories in the last pair of council elections. The only other changes are in swaps between Stoke North and Stoke Central, with Sneyd Green being switched from the former to the latter and Baddeley Green and Baddeley Edge going the other way, being added to North. Overall the effect will be to add a few hundred to the notional Conservative 2019 majority.
Many will no doubt predict that Stoke North will return to the Labour column in a 2024 general election, after a solitary aberration in 2019. It is the middle of the three Stoke constituencies in vulnerability. South was the first to fall, in 2017, had the largest Conservative majority in 2019, and is the most affected by boundary changes which will make it decidedly safer for Jack Brereton MP. Stoke Central was won by the smallest margin, just 670, and will not have an incumbent MP after the retirement of Jo Gideon (who was elected at the age of 67 and has since turned 70). But North might not be a shoo-in for a regain. Opinion polls in 2023 may say so, but taking the 2022 and 2023 local election results together Labour would have barely been ahead, and that is not to take into account any double incumbency effect Jonathan Gullis may benefit from (that is, in 2019 he faced Ruth Smeeth’s personal vote, and after five years he may have built up one of his own).
Apart from Mow Cop, at a very untypical end of this constituency, it has few picturesque sights or claims to fame. There is the vast echoing stadium of Port Vale football stadium (record attendance 49,768 – in 1960); Vale are north Stoke, Stoke City south. There is the Robbie Williams tourist trail, largely in Burslem where he lived over a pub as a child and in Tunstall where he went to school, all definitely in North.
www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/robbie-williams-tourist-trail-takes-7131172
The Middleport pottery centre, a popular recreation for tourists of some of the glories of the Potteries past, is within the seat. There is even Haywood Hospital, the birthplace if one psephologist but not of another, Michael Thrasher, who is from further south in Stoke. But for all it lack of glamour Stoke in Trent North is an important constituency, one which will be an acid test if whether Keir Starmer’s version of the Labour party can recover an overwhelmingly working class former stronghold in which their domination has crumbled over the past quarter of a century since that original Wanger breakthrough. They need seats like this if they are to govern, especially with an overall majority.
2021 Census
Age 65+ 19.0% 290/575
Owner occupied 61.9% 371/575
Private rented 18.4% 274/575
Social rented 19.7% 159/575
White 87.0% 330/575
Black 1.8% 243/575
Asian 7.9% 199/575
Managerial & professional 21.2% 543/575
Routine & Semi-routine 35.1% 10/575
Degree level 20.8% 565/575
No qualifications 26.2% 32/575
Students 5.8% 261/575
General Election 2019: Stoke-on-Trent North
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Jonathan Gullis 20,974 52.3 +7.0
Labour Ruth Smeeth 14,688 36.6 -14.3
Brexit Party Richard Watkin 2,374 5.9
Liberal Democrats Peter Andras 1,268 3.2 +1.0
Green Alan Borgars 508 1.3 -0.3
Independent Matthew Dilworth 322 0.8
C Majority 6,286 15.7 N/A
Turnout 40,134 57.5 -1.1
Conservative gain from Labour
Swing 10.7 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Stoke-on-Trent North consists of
94.1% of Stoke-on-Trent North
6.6% of Stoke-on-Trent Central
4.4% of Staffordshire Moorlands
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/west-midlands/West%20Midlands_471_Stoke-on-Trent%20North_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional results on new boundaries (Rallings & Thrasher)
| Con | 22657 | 54.1% |
| Lab | 14580 | 34.8% |
| BxP | 2334 | 5.6% |
| LD | 1383 | 3.3% |
| Grn | 572 | 1.4% |
| Ind | 322 | 0.8% |
| Con Majority | 8077 | 19.3% |
