Post by Robert Waller on Nov 6, 2023 19:15:10 GMT
This is based on the profile by carlton43, who I think may take his nom de guerre from this constituency … and who has graciously given permission to adapt. I do appreciate the opportunity to have a variety of 'voices' in the Vote UK Almanac. He is the ‘first person’ below. I have added a fair few boring bits.
This is a really interesting constituency. It is a rarity in being named after an ancient wapentake rather than by town or geographical positioning. It would be much better named as Worksop, Worksop and Retford or North Nottinghamshire; then we would all know where the damn place really is! North Notts would in fact be fine and serve all and every purpose. But, I am a traditionalist and a conservative and so I suppose I should root for the old name to be continued. I don't. North Notts would be better in every way. And, frankly, there is no love lost between Worksop and Retford so the anonymity of North Notts would placate the rivalry.
This is a homogeneous (and also divergent) but shrinking seat (ever retreating southern bounds) at the very top of the county of Nottinghamshire and as such it is damn near to the centre of everything. It is equidistant from the East and West coasts and pretty much half way from Channel coast to the top of the central belt of Scotland. It has a border with a lot of other constituencies and every single one of them is now Conservative and if I had been told that would happen any time between 1959 and 1997 I would have laughed out loud.
In geographical and geological terms it is interesting in being ill-drained and very wet with a water table extremely close to the surface over much of its area, but sitting on rafts of coal seams difficult to win. Only mining, canal and railway have kept it more usable by intensive pumping and draining. Coal mining and the residual authority charged with the closed sites keep the water table lower than the natural level. Worksop and the district of Warsop also once in the constituency are based on the word 'soppe' for a perpetual marsh. This is a wet area subject to minor but persistent flooding.
The surface was coated by English Oak as part of the once huge Sherwood Forest that ran from a bit south of Doncaster to just north of Nottingham. That was a value and one reason for the collection of great houses known as The Dukeries (for which there was once a named railway station) of Worksop, Welbeck, Thoresby, Clumber and Rufford. All amazing buildings and estates at their full extent, all large and Worksop at its height the largest house in Britain (once principal seat of the Duke of Norfolk). Oak that fed into support of the coal mines, the properties and the navy. The boats of the Pilgrim Fathers were built of Bassetlaw oak and partly in this constituency.
Coal and power generation were latterly the drivers of the economy aided by the transverse east-west Chesterfield Canal that passes through Worksop and Retford from Trent to Chesterfield, and the GCR (former Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln) original and continuing main line; and by the north-south A1 (Great North Road), the East Coast mainline (former Great Northern) and close proximity of the M1 slightly to the west. This is well served by infrastructure. The canal was an oddity in always being horse-drawn until the end of commercial traffic 60s/70s with river silt from Humber for knife-grinding at Sheffield.
The politics and associations are as rich and interesting as the cultural and geographic position. This was Conservative from 1885 foundation to an early Labour capture in 1929 and then Labour for 90-years until 2019 and the Johnson landslide in the Midlands and the North. Except for very brief incursions of Liberal tenure 1906-1910 by Frank Newnes son of the famous publisher and newspaper owner George Newnes: and Malcolm MacDonald (son of the Labour Leader and PM Ramsay MacDonald) who was briefly National Labour from 1931-35.
Other notable members being Fred Bellenger 33 years to 1968, Joe Ashton 33 years to 2001, and John Mann 18 years to retirement in 2019. Those three men suited the constituency very well indeed and in my opinion the constituency would have been lost in 1983 but for Ashton and earlier than 2019 but for Mann. I met and liked both of the latter MPs and respected them. I voted for Ashton in 1997 without hesitation. The party was a good machine and full of hard workers and with some sound councillors. Even in the most recent period they could hold and win council seats here.
For example, in the most recent Bassetlaw council elections in May 2023 Labour won 38 of the 48 seats, including nine of the ten in the four Retford wards (missing only one of the three in East) and all 18 in the six Worksop wards. Within the Bassetlaw constituency they also took Harworth (3), Welbeck, Sturton, Sutton (cum Lound), Langold and Blyth (all single member wards) and, yes, Carlton (all three council seats). The Tories were left with only the village wards of Clayworth, East Markham, Everton and Ranskill, though Independents also took other rural north Nottinghamshire wards such as Beckingham and Misterton. This shows that the long tradition of Labour voting at local level has not died. For example, Worksop SE has an unbroken history of such, dating back 50 years to Bassetlaw’s inaugural elections on 1973. South East is centred on Manton, effectively the colliery village of the pit of that name, set on the land of the Duke of Newcastle, which was sunk from 1903 and closed in 1994.
This was only one of the mines in the immediate Worksop area, the penultimate one to close being Shireoaks (1990) north west of the town, which also generated a pit village called Rhodesia (all in Worksop NW ward, Labour since 1973 with two brief Independent interruptions. Mining was also to be found at Firbeck Colliery (Langold village), which only had a short life cycle between 1923 and 1968, and Harworth (Bircotes village), sunk 1921 and closed in 2006. Most of these north Nottinghamshire pits were relatively late to develop because the coal seams slope downwards west to east, so the western mines, in Derbyshire for example, were worked and exhausted first and the later ones being deeper; also making them later to close in England, like those further south in the ‘Dukeries’ in Newark, then Sherwood constituencies. Bassetlaw definitely counts as an ‘ex-mining’ constituency. Harworth is almost in Yorkshire, and indeed almost all the mines in Bassetlaw were in the South Yorkshire area of the NUM at the time of the 1984-5 strike.
Retford, though not a mining town despite the brief existence (1965-93) of Bevercotes Colliery to its south in East Markham ward, also has something of a Labour tradition, its West and South wards usually having been won by them and North slightly more often than not. This is largely due to the high proportion of social rented housing in the north west sector of the town (Hallcroft and beyond) and south west (Ordsall). These are also the most working class areas, along with the town centre around Spital Hill and along the Leverton Road. Retford’s more upmarket areas are on its north eastern and south eastern edges, along with the ‘Holly Road triangle’ (inner east) and the development of Heathfield Gardens (inner north). Retford East (or officially East Retford East) is definitely the best ward for the Conservatives, but even that is not rock solid at municipal level.
Within Worksop there is no doubt where the most upmarket sectors are: one is in South ward, climbing up leafy Sparken Hill towards College Pines golf club (the former Ryder Cup player Lee Westwood is from Worksop, and Worksop Golf Club itself is also in South ward, though Westwood started off at Kilton Forest GC in Worksop East ward) and the private boarding school Worksop College, alma mater of the cricketer Joe Root, although only after he spent most of his schooldays at the state school King Ecgbert’s, Dore, Sheffield. A much newer middle class residential area is in the extensive owner occupied housing estates to both sides of Gateford Road (not as far out as ex-colliery Shiroeaks) in Worksop N and NW wards. Figures for residents with no educational qualification vary from under 5% in parts of the new housing near Gateford to nearly 50% in sections of the Manton council estate. With a population of 43,000 in the 2021 census, Worksop is large enough to have considerable internal variations, as to a slightly lesser extent is Retford (23,700).
There are only minor boundary changes in the 2023 review. Although the Commission did originally propose to change the name to Worksop & Retford (not North Nottinghamshire, though), in the revised and final reports they changed their minds back to Bassetlaw. The only change in lines is that Newark constituency is expanded northwards to include two additional District of Bassetlaw wards: Clayworth and Sturton, with about 3,400 voters between them. The former elected a Tory in May 2023, the latter Labour in 2019 as well as 2023, so there should be no significnant difference created by the notional calculations.
Labour’s dominance in local elections in 2023 should not be regarded as a portent for the next general election. They had taken 37 council seats out of 48 in May 2019, just one fewer than in 2023, only 7 months before their Westminster disaster in Bassetlaw. Folk here quite clearly see a difference between municipal and local Labour and the party as a whole, the one that did not try very hard to get Brexit done, apart from all their other problems. Although there may be some swing back in 2024, it is highly unlikely it will reverse the 18% of 2017-19 (and the candidate in 2019 was called Keir).
What changed and why this catastrophic reverse in 2019 with the largest swing and vote change seen in the election? A number of reasons. Long-term gradual demographic change. Consequent cultural change. Decline of Coal, rail and therefore trades union solidarity. Large and widespread private sector new build over 2-3 decades. The retirement of Mann. It was not the sort of place that would warm at all to the Corbyn type. And there a monumental breakdown of Labour party relations locally and nationally, leading to walkouts and even hostility by Mann and his faction and his strong local following, plus dispute and deselection over candidate selection, including last minute imposition on diktat from London. This was a set of interlocking circumstances that got just about as bad as it could be with a result that was obvious well in advance of election day.
Some relevant statistics:
Last LAB member 2019
Previous Last CON 1929
Last (and only) LIB 1910
Lowest and Highest LAB Majorities 2.67 1935 (special situation inter party fight Nat-Lab)
7.86 1983 (Thatcher highwater)
36.40 1997 (Blair highwater)
This was never a monolithic seat but a solid, stolid, dependable seat for an unbroken 90-years. It is no longer that, and while Labour did regain with a swing of nearly 20 per cent in July 2024, Bassetlaw must now be regarded as 'solidly, maybe dependably, marginal'.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 21.5% 184/575
Owner occupied 67.4% 245/575
Private rented 16.8% 344/575
Social rented 15.8% 255/575
White 96.3% 115/575
Black 0.7% 402/575
Asian 1.3% 471/575
Managerial & professional 27.4% 438/575
Routine & Semi-routine 32.2% 35/575
Degree level 24.9% 494/575
No qualifications 21.9% 119/575
Students 4.3% 529/575
General Election 2024: Bassetlaw
Labour Jo White 18,476 41.2 +13.2
Conservative Brendan Clarke-Smith 12,708 28.3 –26.1
Reform UK Frank Ward 9,751 21.7 +10.8
Liberal Democrats Helen Tamblyn-Saville 1,996 4.5 –2.3
Green Rachel Reeves 1,947 4.3 N/A
Lab Majority 5,768 12.9 N/A
Turnout 44,878 57.4 −6.2
Registered electors 78,173
Labour gain from Conservative
Swing +19.6
General Election 2019: Bassetlaw
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Brendan Clarke-Smith 28,078 55.2 +11.9
Labour Keir Morrison 14,065 27.7 -24.9
Brexit Party Debbie Soloman 5,366 10.6
Liberal Democrats Helen Tamblyn-Saville 3,332 6.6 +4.4
C Majority 14,013 27.5
2019 electorate 80,035
Turnout 50,841 63.5 -3.0
Conservative gain from Labour
Swing 18.4% Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Bassetlaw consists of
95.7% of Bassetlaw
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/east-midlands/East%20Midlands_003_Bassetlaw_Portrait.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
This is a really interesting constituency. It is a rarity in being named after an ancient wapentake rather than by town or geographical positioning. It would be much better named as Worksop, Worksop and Retford or North Nottinghamshire; then we would all know where the damn place really is! North Notts would in fact be fine and serve all and every purpose. But, I am a traditionalist and a conservative and so I suppose I should root for the old name to be continued. I don't. North Notts would be better in every way. And, frankly, there is no love lost between Worksop and Retford so the anonymity of North Notts would placate the rivalry.
This is a homogeneous (and also divergent) but shrinking seat (ever retreating southern bounds) at the very top of the county of Nottinghamshire and as such it is damn near to the centre of everything. It is equidistant from the East and West coasts and pretty much half way from Channel coast to the top of the central belt of Scotland. It has a border with a lot of other constituencies and every single one of them is now Conservative and if I had been told that would happen any time between 1959 and 1997 I would have laughed out loud.
In geographical and geological terms it is interesting in being ill-drained and very wet with a water table extremely close to the surface over much of its area, but sitting on rafts of coal seams difficult to win. Only mining, canal and railway have kept it more usable by intensive pumping and draining. Coal mining and the residual authority charged with the closed sites keep the water table lower than the natural level. Worksop and the district of Warsop also once in the constituency are based on the word 'soppe' for a perpetual marsh. This is a wet area subject to minor but persistent flooding.
The surface was coated by English Oak as part of the once huge Sherwood Forest that ran from a bit south of Doncaster to just north of Nottingham. That was a value and one reason for the collection of great houses known as The Dukeries (for which there was once a named railway station) of Worksop, Welbeck, Thoresby, Clumber and Rufford. All amazing buildings and estates at their full extent, all large and Worksop at its height the largest house in Britain (once principal seat of the Duke of Norfolk). Oak that fed into support of the coal mines, the properties and the navy. The boats of the Pilgrim Fathers were built of Bassetlaw oak and partly in this constituency.
Coal and power generation were latterly the drivers of the economy aided by the transverse east-west Chesterfield Canal that passes through Worksop and Retford from Trent to Chesterfield, and the GCR (former Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln) original and continuing main line; and by the north-south A1 (Great North Road), the East Coast mainline (former Great Northern) and close proximity of the M1 slightly to the west. This is well served by infrastructure. The canal was an oddity in always being horse-drawn until the end of commercial traffic 60s/70s with river silt from Humber for knife-grinding at Sheffield.
The politics and associations are as rich and interesting as the cultural and geographic position. This was Conservative from 1885 foundation to an early Labour capture in 1929 and then Labour for 90-years until 2019 and the Johnson landslide in the Midlands and the North. Except for very brief incursions of Liberal tenure 1906-1910 by Frank Newnes son of the famous publisher and newspaper owner George Newnes: and Malcolm MacDonald (son of the Labour Leader and PM Ramsay MacDonald) who was briefly National Labour from 1931-35.
Other notable members being Fred Bellenger 33 years to 1968, Joe Ashton 33 years to 2001, and John Mann 18 years to retirement in 2019. Those three men suited the constituency very well indeed and in my opinion the constituency would have been lost in 1983 but for Ashton and earlier than 2019 but for Mann. I met and liked both of the latter MPs and respected them. I voted for Ashton in 1997 without hesitation. The party was a good machine and full of hard workers and with some sound councillors. Even in the most recent period they could hold and win council seats here.
For example, in the most recent Bassetlaw council elections in May 2023 Labour won 38 of the 48 seats, including nine of the ten in the four Retford wards (missing only one of the three in East) and all 18 in the six Worksop wards. Within the Bassetlaw constituency they also took Harworth (3), Welbeck, Sturton, Sutton (cum Lound), Langold and Blyth (all single member wards) and, yes, Carlton (all three council seats). The Tories were left with only the village wards of Clayworth, East Markham, Everton and Ranskill, though Independents also took other rural north Nottinghamshire wards such as Beckingham and Misterton. This shows that the long tradition of Labour voting at local level has not died. For example, Worksop SE has an unbroken history of such, dating back 50 years to Bassetlaw’s inaugural elections on 1973. South East is centred on Manton, effectively the colliery village of the pit of that name, set on the land of the Duke of Newcastle, which was sunk from 1903 and closed in 1994.
This was only one of the mines in the immediate Worksop area, the penultimate one to close being Shireoaks (1990) north west of the town, which also generated a pit village called Rhodesia (all in Worksop NW ward, Labour since 1973 with two brief Independent interruptions. Mining was also to be found at Firbeck Colliery (Langold village), which only had a short life cycle between 1923 and 1968, and Harworth (Bircotes village), sunk 1921 and closed in 2006. Most of these north Nottinghamshire pits were relatively late to develop because the coal seams slope downwards west to east, so the western mines, in Derbyshire for example, were worked and exhausted first and the later ones being deeper; also making them later to close in England, like those further south in the ‘Dukeries’ in Newark, then Sherwood constituencies. Bassetlaw definitely counts as an ‘ex-mining’ constituency. Harworth is almost in Yorkshire, and indeed almost all the mines in Bassetlaw were in the South Yorkshire area of the NUM at the time of the 1984-5 strike.
Retford, though not a mining town despite the brief existence (1965-93) of Bevercotes Colliery to its south in East Markham ward, also has something of a Labour tradition, its West and South wards usually having been won by them and North slightly more often than not. This is largely due to the high proportion of social rented housing in the north west sector of the town (Hallcroft and beyond) and south west (Ordsall). These are also the most working class areas, along with the town centre around Spital Hill and along the Leverton Road. Retford’s more upmarket areas are on its north eastern and south eastern edges, along with the ‘Holly Road triangle’ (inner east) and the development of Heathfield Gardens (inner north). Retford East (or officially East Retford East) is definitely the best ward for the Conservatives, but even that is not rock solid at municipal level.
Within Worksop there is no doubt where the most upmarket sectors are: one is in South ward, climbing up leafy Sparken Hill towards College Pines golf club (the former Ryder Cup player Lee Westwood is from Worksop, and Worksop Golf Club itself is also in South ward, though Westwood started off at Kilton Forest GC in Worksop East ward) and the private boarding school Worksop College, alma mater of the cricketer Joe Root, although only after he spent most of his schooldays at the state school King Ecgbert’s, Dore, Sheffield. A much newer middle class residential area is in the extensive owner occupied housing estates to both sides of Gateford Road (not as far out as ex-colliery Shiroeaks) in Worksop N and NW wards. Figures for residents with no educational qualification vary from under 5% in parts of the new housing near Gateford to nearly 50% in sections of the Manton council estate. With a population of 43,000 in the 2021 census, Worksop is large enough to have considerable internal variations, as to a slightly lesser extent is Retford (23,700).
There are only minor boundary changes in the 2023 review. Although the Commission did originally propose to change the name to Worksop & Retford (not North Nottinghamshire, though), in the revised and final reports they changed their minds back to Bassetlaw. The only change in lines is that Newark constituency is expanded northwards to include two additional District of Bassetlaw wards: Clayworth and Sturton, with about 3,400 voters between them. The former elected a Tory in May 2023, the latter Labour in 2019 as well as 2023, so there should be no significnant difference created by the notional calculations.
Labour’s dominance in local elections in 2023 should not be regarded as a portent for the next general election. They had taken 37 council seats out of 48 in May 2019, just one fewer than in 2023, only 7 months before their Westminster disaster in Bassetlaw. Folk here quite clearly see a difference between municipal and local Labour and the party as a whole, the one that did not try very hard to get Brexit done, apart from all their other problems. Although there may be some swing back in 2024, it is highly unlikely it will reverse the 18% of 2017-19 (and the candidate in 2019 was called Keir).
What changed and why this catastrophic reverse in 2019 with the largest swing and vote change seen in the election? A number of reasons. Long-term gradual demographic change. Consequent cultural change. Decline of Coal, rail and therefore trades union solidarity. Large and widespread private sector new build over 2-3 decades. The retirement of Mann. It was not the sort of place that would warm at all to the Corbyn type. And there a monumental breakdown of Labour party relations locally and nationally, leading to walkouts and even hostility by Mann and his faction and his strong local following, plus dispute and deselection over candidate selection, including last minute imposition on diktat from London. This was a set of interlocking circumstances that got just about as bad as it could be with a result that was obvious well in advance of election day.
Some relevant statistics:
Last LAB member 2019
Previous Last CON 1929
Last (and only) LIB 1910
Lowest and Highest LAB Majorities 2.67 1935 (special situation inter party fight Nat-Lab)
7.86 1983 (Thatcher highwater)
36.40 1997 (Blair highwater)
This was never a monolithic seat but a solid, stolid, dependable seat for an unbroken 90-years. It is no longer that, and while Labour did regain with a swing of nearly 20 per cent in July 2024, Bassetlaw must now be regarded as 'solidly, maybe dependably, marginal'.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 21.5% 184/575
Owner occupied 67.4% 245/575
Private rented 16.8% 344/575
Social rented 15.8% 255/575
White 96.3% 115/575
Black 0.7% 402/575
Asian 1.3% 471/575
Managerial & professional 27.4% 438/575
Routine & Semi-routine 32.2% 35/575
Degree level 24.9% 494/575
No qualifications 21.9% 119/575
Students 4.3% 529/575
General Election 2024: Bassetlaw
Labour Jo White 18,476 41.2 +13.2
Conservative Brendan Clarke-Smith 12,708 28.3 –26.1
Reform UK Frank Ward 9,751 21.7 +10.8
Liberal Democrats Helen Tamblyn-Saville 1,996 4.5 –2.3
Green Rachel Reeves 1,947 4.3 N/A
Lab Majority 5,768 12.9 N/A
Turnout 44,878 57.4 −6.2
Registered electors 78,173
Labour gain from Conservative
Swing +19.6
General Election 2019: Bassetlaw
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Brendan Clarke-Smith 28,078 55.2 +11.9
Labour Keir Morrison 14,065 27.7 -24.9
Brexit Party Debbie Soloman 5,366 10.6
Liberal Democrats Helen Tamblyn-Saville 3,332 6.6 +4.4
C Majority 14,013 27.5
2019 electorate 80,035
Turnout 50,841 63.5 -3.0
Conservative gain from Labour
Swing 18.4% Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Bassetlaw consists of
95.7% of Bassetlaw
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/east-midlands/East%20Midlands_003_Bassetlaw_Portrait.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
| Con | 25941 | 54.4% |
| Lab | 13353 | 28.0% |
| Brexit | 5173 | 10.9% |
| LD | 3210 | 6.7% |
| Majority | 12588 | 26.4% |
