Post by Robert Waller on Nov 5, 2023 20:57:10 GMT
This profile is based on that in the previous sub-board by yellowperil, who is the first person "I" in the text below. There are also essential contributions form Pete Whitehead on boundary changes. I have updated using the 2023 local election results and 2021 census figures, along with the last paragraph summary.
The Eastbourne constituency has existed since 1885, and used to include not just the town of Eastbourne but a substantial rural hinterland, which has gradually been shed as the population within the borough has increased. Up to and including 2019 only the suburban village of Willingdon, part of Wealden district, was added to Eastbourne borough to make up the numbers for the constituency- East Dean had been shed in 2010, and Polegate in 1997, while other villages such as Pevensey and Westham had gone in 1983. This has become essentially an urban constituency, and from the Conservative point of view it lacks the comforting ring of blue-voting villages beyond the periphery of the town that characterises some other Sussex coastal constituencies like Hastings.
Another characteristic of Eastbourne in contrast to some other of the Sussex resort towns is that Labour has long been very weak here. The last time Labour got as high as second place here in a general election was 1959, and even then they were some 16,000 votes behind the Tory. There are no Labour wards in the town- this is no Hastings, Brighton or even Worthing. And in modern times this somewhat old-fashioned place has sometimes had "a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative". The only challenge to Tory hegemony was always likely to come from the Liberals, who were always had some presence here, and more latterly the Liberal Democrats. Of course the development of Eastbourne as a resort for gentlefolk in the middle years of the nineteenth century was very much a project of the Dukes of Devonshire, and so maybe the Cavendishes always imbued the place with a certain Whiggish air.
This modern era was ushered in by an act of terrible brutality for which responsibility lay elsewhere. In July 1990 the then MP for Eastbourne, Ian Gow, a close associate of Margaret Thatcher, was assasinated by car bomb by the Provisional IRA. In the ensuing by-election the seat was captured by David Bellotti of the LibDems on a 20% swing from the Tories compared with Gow's 1987 result. This was all the more remarkable when one considers that the circumstances of the by-election must surely have produced a sympathy vote for the Conservatives among Gow's former constituents. (As someone there at the time I (yellowperil) can confirm it certainly did in some quarters). But it was a point when the Thatcher government was extremely unpopular at the time, and that was the view that prevailed in Eastbourne. Two year later Bellotti lost the seat back to Nigel Waterson, who proceeded to hold it by quite small margins from 1992 to 2010. The 2005 election Stephen Lloyd standing for the first time for the Lib Dems reduced Waterson's majority down to 1124, and then in 2010 he defeated Waterson by 3,435. In 2015 a new Tory candidate, Caroline Ansell, squeaked past Lloyd by 733, only for Lloyd to come back in 2017 by 1,609. In 2019 it was Ansell's turn again and she won by 4,331, the largest majority for either party since 1992. It had been somewhat complicated by the fact that Lloyd had spent much of his second term having resigned the Lib Dem whip, a story I will return to later, as I propose later to consider the peculiar impact of Brexit politics on this constituency.
Before doing so, we may examine the distribution of the local vote. Throughout this century, at least, the Lib Dems have been quite strongly in command in Eastbourne Borough. At the ward level, the distribution of votes is remarkably uncomplicated. The borough is divided into 9 3-member wards, all up on a 4 year cycle. Almost without exception, each these 9 wards vote in the 3 candidates of their preferred party, with scarcely any split voting. So far more than is true in most places we know where the Lib Dem vote is and we know where the Tory vote is. If politics generally are going very strongly one way or another, a couple of wards could get close enough to swing, and when they do they tend to swing for all 3 councillors in that ward. The voting seems very politically focussed, with relatively little sign of a personal vote for individual councillors. The strongest Tory ward is generally Meads, the south-western corner of the Borough high up above the town centre and heading up towards Beachy Head, followed by Ratton, also high up on the west side adjacent to the Downs, and Sovereign, over on the eastern seaside area around the Marina (Sovereign Harbour). Caroline Ansell was a councillor for Sovereign.
In the local elections in 2015 and 2019 those were exactly the results- those 3 wards provided the 9 Tory councillors. The other 6 wards were pretty solidly Lib Dem , providing 18 councillors. The strongest Lib Dem ward is probably Devonshire -the heart of seaside Eastbourne, the tennis, the theatre, all that. The other wards are the Old Town, Upperton, St Anthony’s, Hampden Park and Langney - all of the central and northern part of the town. Then of course there is the one bit of the constituency outside the borough, which in 2019 was just Willingdon. It may be significant that Caroline Ansell had wanted to re-name the constituency as Eastbourne and Willingdon, but got no real takers for that, but Willingdon has obviously been important to her survival. Not much of a clue to that from the local election results though; Wealden district is now pretty overwhelmingly Conservative, except for Willingdon which has generally returned independents.
In the most recent elections in May 2023 there was just one change from this established pattern. A Liberal Democrat finished top of the poll in the affluent Meads ward, though the Tories took the other two. Nevertheless this was the first time anyone but a Conservative has won in Meads on the borough council in the last 50 years. Then in August 2023 the LDs also won the Meads division on East Sussex council, a gain following the death of a Conservative county councillor. Previously the balance had been the same as on the borough council, wt the Tories just winning the Meads, Ratton and Sovereign divisions and the Lib Dems all the others.
Can this apparent schism between two political sections of Eastbourne be explained by internal demographic variation? As far as age is concerned, yes, Meads was by far the 2021 census MSOA with the highest proportion over 65, at 44.5%. Sovereign Harbour was also above the Eastbourne average (24.5%) at 29.6%. But the third location of Tory strength, Ratton, actually had slightly fewer than average (24.2%). Ratton did, however, possess the highest percentage (40%) of professional and managerial workers anywhere n the borough apart from Meads (47%). The most routine and semi-routine workers were clearly in Langney, Hampden Park North, and a pocket in the central Pier MSOA. Hampden Park and Langney also were the only parts of Eastbourne where there is a substantial minority of social rented housing (20 to 25% in 2021) whereas Meads had a remarkable 59% owned outright without need of a mortgage, which fits with its age profile. Eastbourne’s small ethnic minority population, mainly Asian, is concentrated in the central OAs and in Upperton. Overall, then the Conservatives have been strongest in the more wealthy and aged neighbourhoods and wards, and the Lib Dems everywhere else.
In general, the Eastbourne electorate were generally quite liberal in outlook , voted substantially for Lib Dem candidates for local elections, but were less sure about voting that way when it came to general elections, and that tendency was greatly strengthened when the defining issue became membership of the European Union, because there was a clear majority for Leave here. 57.5% is not a particularly high Leave vote in 2016, but it is well above the national average and is similar to Bexhill and Hastings, and massively high compared with the figures for Brighton and Hove, say (Pavilion 25.9, Kemptown 43.6, Hove 32.9). Stephen Lloyd, who personally was a Remainer, but for whom it was not perhaps the defining issue, had a dilemma when it came to elections being defined on this issue. When he gained the seat back from Caroline Ansell in 2017, he did so on an undertaking to abide by the referendum result. He was, one might say, listening to what his electors told him. (The irony of that statement is that Lloyd is profoundly deaf). This is why he declined the Lib Dem whip, but also why he was able to reclaim the whip just before the 2019 election and to fight for Eastbourne under the Lib Dem manifesto commitment. Given how the country voted in 2019, the ensuing result was inevitable.
Minor boundary changes remove the Willingdon area (part of Wealden district) to Lewes and bring the boundaries of the parliamentary seat into line with those of the borough. Willingdon may be a little more Conservative than Eastbourne as a whole (it’s difficult to be sure because of the strength of Independents locally) but the partisan impact will be minor in any event.
Adding up the May 2023 votes across all the nine wards that form the new, even more compact Eastbourne, the Liberal Democrats were ahead with 44.0% compared with 29.4% for the Conservatives. It is of course true that the LDs have won a plurality in municipal contests many times, but have only won the parliamentary seat intermittently. Therefore the outcome of the next general election will again depend on national issues. That concerning Europe is likely to have faded by 2024, which will help the Lib Dems in Eastbourne give its 2016 referendum preferences. On the other hand they will not have an incumbent MP, as they did in 2019: Josh Babarinde has been selected
www.eastbournelibdems.org.uk/josh-babarinde-obe
The boundary changes will be of some help, if the contest is otherwise very close. One feels it may depend on just how much the Tory share falls nationally, and whether the Labour vote, only 7% in 2019, will continue to be willing to vote tactically to remove them locally as well as from the government of the land.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 24.5% 91/575
Owner occupied 60.3% 392/575
Private rented 26.7% 94/575
Social rented 13.0% 382/575
White 90.8% 281/575
Black 1.0% 323/575
Asian 5.0% 266/575
Managerial & professional 31.1% 325/575
Routine & Semi-routine 25.0% 241/575
Degree level 29.8% 349/575
No qualifications 18.4% 247/575
Students 6.0% 241/575
General Election 2019: Eastbourne
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Caroline Ansell 26,951 48.9 +4.8
Liberal Democrats Stephen Lloyd 22,620 41.0 -5.9
Labour Jake Lambert 3,848 7.0 -1.1
Brexit Party Stephen Gander 1,530 2.8 New
Independent Ken Pollock 185 0.3 New
C Majority 4,331 7.9
Turnout 55,134 69.5 -3.4
Conservative gain from Liberal Democrats
Swing 5.3 LD to C
Boundary Changes
Eastbourne consists of
92.0% of Eastbourne
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_313_Eastbourne_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional Result (Rallings & Thrasher)
The Eastbourne constituency has existed since 1885, and used to include not just the town of Eastbourne but a substantial rural hinterland, which has gradually been shed as the population within the borough has increased. Up to and including 2019 only the suburban village of Willingdon, part of Wealden district, was added to Eastbourne borough to make up the numbers for the constituency- East Dean had been shed in 2010, and Polegate in 1997, while other villages such as Pevensey and Westham had gone in 1983. This has become essentially an urban constituency, and from the Conservative point of view it lacks the comforting ring of blue-voting villages beyond the periphery of the town that characterises some other Sussex coastal constituencies like Hastings.
Another characteristic of Eastbourne in contrast to some other of the Sussex resort towns is that Labour has long been very weak here. The last time Labour got as high as second place here in a general election was 1959, and even then they were some 16,000 votes behind the Tory. There are no Labour wards in the town- this is no Hastings, Brighton or even Worthing. And in modern times this somewhat old-fashioned place has sometimes had "a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative". The only challenge to Tory hegemony was always likely to come from the Liberals, who were always had some presence here, and more latterly the Liberal Democrats. Of course the development of Eastbourne as a resort for gentlefolk in the middle years of the nineteenth century was very much a project of the Dukes of Devonshire, and so maybe the Cavendishes always imbued the place with a certain Whiggish air.
This modern era was ushered in by an act of terrible brutality for which responsibility lay elsewhere. In July 1990 the then MP for Eastbourne, Ian Gow, a close associate of Margaret Thatcher, was assasinated by car bomb by the Provisional IRA. In the ensuing by-election the seat was captured by David Bellotti of the LibDems on a 20% swing from the Tories compared with Gow's 1987 result. This was all the more remarkable when one considers that the circumstances of the by-election must surely have produced a sympathy vote for the Conservatives among Gow's former constituents. (As someone there at the time I (yellowperil) can confirm it certainly did in some quarters). But it was a point when the Thatcher government was extremely unpopular at the time, and that was the view that prevailed in Eastbourne. Two year later Bellotti lost the seat back to Nigel Waterson, who proceeded to hold it by quite small margins from 1992 to 2010. The 2005 election Stephen Lloyd standing for the first time for the Lib Dems reduced Waterson's majority down to 1124, and then in 2010 he defeated Waterson by 3,435. In 2015 a new Tory candidate, Caroline Ansell, squeaked past Lloyd by 733, only for Lloyd to come back in 2017 by 1,609. In 2019 it was Ansell's turn again and she won by 4,331, the largest majority for either party since 1992. It had been somewhat complicated by the fact that Lloyd had spent much of his second term having resigned the Lib Dem whip, a story I will return to later, as I propose later to consider the peculiar impact of Brexit politics on this constituency.
Before doing so, we may examine the distribution of the local vote. Throughout this century, at least, the Lib Dems have been quite strongly in command in Eastbourne Borough. At the ward level, the distribution of votes is remarkably uncomplicated. The borough is divided into 9 3-member wards, all up on a 4 year cycle. Almost without exception, each these 9 wards vote in the 3 candidates of their preferred party, with scarcely any split voting. So far more than is true in most places we know where the Lib Dem vote is and we know where the Tory vote is. If politics generally are going very strongly one way or another, a couple of wards could get close enough to swing, and when they do they tend to swing for all 3 councillors in that ward. The voting seems very politically focussed, with relatively little sign of a personal vote for individual councillors. The strongest Tory ward is generally Meads, the south-western corner of the Borough high up above the town centre and heading up towards Beachy Head, followed by Ratton, also high up on the west side adjacent to the Downs, and Sovereign, over on the eastern seaside area around the Marina (Sovereign Harbour). Caroline Ansell was a councillor for Sovereign.
In the local elections in 2015 and 2019 those were exactly the results- those 3 wards provided the 9 Tory councillors. The other 6 wards were pretty solidly Lib Dem , providing 18 councillors. The strongest Lib Dem ward is probably Devonshire -the heart of seaside Eastbourne, the tennis, the theatre, all that. The other wards are the Old Town, Upperton, St Anthony’s, Hampden Park and Langney - all of the central and northern part of the town. Then of course there is the one bit of the constituency outside the borough, which in 2019 was just Willingdon. It may be significant that Caroline Ansell had wanted to re-name the constituency as Eastbourne and Willingdon, but got no real takers for that, but Willingdon has obviously been important to her survival. Not much of a clue to that from the local election results though; Wealden district is now pretty overwhelmingly Conservative, except for Willingdon which has generally returned independents.
In the most recent elections in May 2023 there was just one change from this established pattern. A Liberal Democrat finished top of the poll in the affluent Meads ward, though the Tories took the other two. Nevertheless this was the first time anyone but a Conservative has won in Meads on the borough council in the last 50 years. Then in August 2023 the LDs also won the Meads division on East Sussex council, a gain following the death of a Conservative county councillor. Previously the balance had been the same as on the borough council, wt the Tories just winning the Meads, Ratton and Sovereign divisions and the Lib Dems all the others.
Can this apparent schism between two political sections of Eastbourne be explained by internal demographic variation? As far as age is concerned, yes, Meads was by far the 2021 census MSOA with the highest proportion over 65, at 44.5%. Sovereign Harbour was also above the Eastbourne average (24.5%) at 29.6%. But the third location of Tory strength, Ratton, actually had slightly fewer than average (24.2%). Ratton did, however, possess the highest percentage (40%) of professional and managerial workers anywhere n the borough apart from Meads (47%). The most routine and semi-routine workers were clearly in Langney, Hampden Park North, and a pocket in the central Pier MSOA. Hampden Park and Langney also were the only parts of Eastbourne where there is a substantial minority of social rented housing (20 to 25% in 2021) whereas Meads had a remarkable 59% owned outright without need of a mortgage, which fits with its age profile. Eastbourne’s small ethnic minority population, mainly Asian, is concentrated in the central OAs and in Upperton. Overall, then the Conservatives have been strongest in the more wealthy and aged neighbourhoods and wards, and the Lib Dems everywhere else.
In general, the Eastbourne electorate were generally quite liberal in outlook , voted substantially for Lib Dem candidates for local elections, but were less sure about voting that way when it came to general elections, and that tendency was greatly strengthened when the defining issue became membership of the European Union, because there was a clear majority for Leave here. 57.5% is not a particularly high Leave vote in 2016, but it is well above the national average and is similar to Bexhill and Hastings, and massively high compared with the figures for Brighton and Hove, say (Pavilion 25.9, Kemptown 43.6, Hove 32.9). Stephen Lloyd, who personally was a Remainer, but for whom it was not perhaps the defining issue, had a dilemma when it came to elections being defined on this issue. When he gained the seat back from Caroline Ansell in 2017, he did so on an undertaking to abide by the referendum result. He was, one might say, listening to what his electors told him. (The irony of that statement is that Lloyd is profoundly deaf). This is why he declined the Lib Dem whip, but also why he was able to reclaim the whip just before the 2019 election and to fight for Eastbourne under the Lib Dem manifesto commitment. Given how the country voted in 2019, the ensuing result was inevitable.
Minor boundary changes remove the Willingdon area (part of Wealden district) to Lewes and bring the boundaries of the parliamentary seat into line with those of the borough. Willingdon may be a little more Conservative than Eastbourne as a whole (it’s difficult to be sure because of the strength of Independents locally) but the partisan impact will be minor in any event.
Adding up the May 2023 votes across all the nine wards that form the new, even more compact Eastbourne, the Liberal Democrats were ahead with 44.0% compared with 29.4% for the Conservatives. It is of course true that the LDs have won a plurality in municipal contests many times, but have only won the parliamentary seat intermittently. Therefore the outcome of the next general election will again depend on national issues. That concerning Europe is likely to have faded by 2024, which will help the Lib Dems in Eastbourne give its 2016 referendum preferences. On the other hand they will not have an incumbent MP, as they did in 2019: Josh Babarinde has been selected
www.eastbournelibdems.org.uk/josh-babarinde-obe
The boundary changes will be of some help, if the contest is otherwise very close. One feels it may depend on just how much the Tory share falls nationally, and whether the Labour vote, only 7% in 2019, will continue to be willing to vote tactically to remove them locally as well as from the government of the land.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 24.5% 91/575
Owner occupied 60.3% 392/575
Private rented 26.7% 94/575
Social rented 13.0% 382/575
White 90.8% 281/575
Black 1.0% 323/575
Asian 5.0% 266/575
Managerial & professional 31.1% 325/575
Routine & Semi-routine 25.0% 241/575
Degree level 29.8% 349/575
No qualifications 18.4% 247/575
Students 6.0% 241/575
General Election 2019: Eastbourne
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Caroline Ansell 26,951 48.9 +4.8
Liberal Democrats Stephen Lloyd 22,620 41.0 -5.9
Labour Jake Lambert 3,848 7.0 -1.1
Brexit Party Stephen Gander 1,530 2.8 New
Independent Ken Pollock 185 0.3 New
C Majority 4,331 7.9
Turnout 55,134 69.5 -3.4
Conservative gain from Liberal Democrats
Swing 5.3 LD to C
Boundary Changes
Eastbourne consists of
92.0% of Eastbourne
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_313_Eastbourne_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional Result (Rallings & Thrasher)
| Con | 24137 | 47.1% |
| LD | 21969 | 42.9% |
| Lab | 3560 | 7.0% |
| BxP | 1408 | 2.8% |
| Oth | 185 | 0.4% |
| Majority | 2168 | 4.2% |