Post by Robert Waller on Nov 11, 2023 19:16:18 GMT
This is based on a original profile by yellowperil on South Thanet, plus commentary on boundary changes by Pete Whitehead, and additions by myself - ward level election results 2023, 2021 census analysis, and concluding paragraph.
The Isle of Thanet, separated from the English mainland by the Wantsum channel in the west and by the estuary of the Great Stour to the south, was originally a genuine island before the Wantsum silted up, in the seventeenth century-the last ship to navigate the Wantsum did so in 1672. The South Thanet constituency, created in 1983 however was not confined to the southern half of the Isle, but crosses the Stour to include an area of mainland Kent to the south, now forming two wards of Dover district, the town and Cinque Port of Sandwich , and the large rural ward to the west of Sandwich including the two sizeable villages of Ash and Wingham, and known as Little Stour and Ashstone. Of the part genuinely within South Thanet the two main towns are Ramsgate and Broadstairs, but it also includes the Cliftonville area of Margate, so the North Foreland is apparently within South Thanet. To sum up, then, South Thanet has been neither confined to Thanet nor to the South of the isle, facts which will come as no surprise to students here of the names given to constituencies. Now, in the latest boundary changes, the seat remains essentially intact but the name is appropriately changed to East Thanet (there was a Thanet East between February 1974 and 1983).
According to those ever reliable sources of British history, Sellar and Yeatman, Thanet is where all successful invasions of these islands began, and we now can be sure Julius Caesar did indeed land at Pegwell Bay in 55 BC, Claudius at Richborough on the mainland side of the Wantsum in 43AD. Rather more dubiously Hengist and Horsa may have begun the Jutish conquest of Kent at Ebbsfleet sometime in the fifth century, while St Augustine also made landfall at Ebbsfleet in 597AD. Perhaps we need these days to say Ebbsfleet on Thanet specifically to distinguish it from the other Ebbsfleet at the other end of Kent which is the one with the International Railway Station and the National League football team! There is also the replica Viking ship Hugin beached up at Pegwell Bay. Anyway, to this day the good folk of South Thanet look nervously across the channel ready to repel further continental invaders.
To turn to more recent Thanet history- between the creation of South Thanet constituency in 1983 and the present day there have been four MPs, three of them Conservative (Jonathan Aitken,1983-97), Laura Sandys (2010-15) and the present incumbent, Craig Mackinlay (from 2015), and one Labour, Stephen Ladyman (1997-2010). Whether that makes this constituency a bellwether, as some have claimed, might be a matter of interpretation. It has also had some fairly high profile unsuccessful candidates, notably Nigel Farage (and not to mention Al Murray) in 2015.
Given that there have only have been 4 MPs it might seem that having two of them fall seriously foul of the law is a rather high strike rate. Aitken was of course to fall foul of the perjury laws, finding out the hard way that the so called sword of truth was indeed the sword of Damocles, and finishing up behind bars. I believe all these years later he is back in prison but now because he is now ordained and back as a prison chaplain. Mackinlay's run in with the law over election expenses over the 2015 election has only relatively recently been resolved in his favour, which has enabled him to be back as the current MP, but with his minders taking the rap. I do not intend to say anything more about these unsavoury episodes.
Given that South Thanet as a constituency has been genuinely highly contested and having changed hands twice, it is quite interesting to see where the respective party strengths lie. Remembering there are the two wards of Dover DC which are strongly Conservative, we need to look at the wards of Thanet DC which lie in the South Thanet constituency, and those form basically those on the eastern half of the island, from Pegwell Bay round to Cliftonville. Broadly, before the rise of UKIP, Ramsgate was broadly Labour, and so was Margate within Thanet North, and the Labour strength in Margate tended to spill over into Cliftonville West particularly, and some neighbouring wards, within Thanet South. The rest of the Thanet south constituency, mainly Broadstairs, and the more rural parts, was pretty solidly Tory, though if you go back to 2003 Bradstowe ward, basically central Broadstairs, did have a single Lib Dem topping the poll. By 2011 the councillor divide within the South Thanet constituency was 19-15 in favour of Labour on the island part of the constituency, and the 6 Conservative Dover district councillors will just bring it up to a marginal Tory lead, 21-19.
Then we come to the great UKIP tsunami. By the time of the 2015 local elections the map looked very different. The biggest shift is Labour to UKIP, with the Tory wards changing rather less completely. Overall, within the island part of South Thanet constituency, Conservatives fell back from 15 to11 councillors, but Labour crashed from 19 to 3, and UKIP finished up with 20. The Tories were still comfortably ahead in the Dover district wards, so that meant the councillor count was actually 21 Con, UKIP 20, Lab 3, but the momentum was clearly with UKIP. How much was this surge coming here anyway, which is why Farage chose it as his 2015 general election battleground., and how much was the big swing occasioned by the fact of a high profile general election battle going on simultaneously with the locals, it's difficult to say, but the general election result pretty well matched those local results.
And after the tsunami? The seat distribution on the South Thanet bit of Thanet district in 2019, put Labour back in the lead, just: Lab 15, Con 13, Thanet Independents 3, Greens 2, Independent 1. Then add in now 4 seats for the Dover district wards and the Tories snuck in front, 17-15. Sound familiar?
Anyway, although a lot of the journalistic attention on this constituency has focused on the MPs' behaviour and the visiting celebs and all that circus, it is worth remembering that there are a lot of bread and butter issues which may be of more concern to the locals. Certainly Ramsgate and Cliftonville share many of the characteristics of many south coast resorts which have seen far better days and are now struggling to reverse age and decay. Ramsgate has the added problem of a ferry port which doesn't quite manage the necessary infrastructure to survive in the twenty-first century. There is the perennial problem of what to do with Manston airport, with its huge runway and hardly any traffic. It almost mirrors the problem of Ramsgate harbour - there somehow feels as though there ought to be potential there, but the infrastructure to make it work just isn't there and without massive infrastructure works both port and airport were just in the wrong place. Then there was the area's biggest employer involving some very sophisticated advanced science - that's Pfizers, of course- announced it would close their Sandwich plant. On the whole there have been some valiant attempts to ride these major storms, but unemployment rates are stubbornly high by the standards of South East England.
Although both Thanet seats as currently drawn are within quota, the need for North Thanet to absorb some excess voters from Canterbury (which pushed it over quota) has led to a complete reconfiguration of the boundaries in this area. This constituency loses the Dover district wards of Little Stour & Ashstone and Sandwich (some 11,000 voters) and gains over 12,000 in Central Margate, Dane Valley and Salmestone wards from North Thanet. This is the (even) grottier end of Margate and effectively this swaps out the most Conservative part of South Thanet for the most Labour part of North Thanet. The seat is renamed 'East Thanet', reviving a name used from 1974-83 (though that only included Broadstairs and Ramsgate, not any of Margate). This does clearly make the seat more vulnerable to Labour. There's also a decent chance that Nigel Farage would have won here in 2015 had the seat been fought on these boundaries.
Some of the reasons for the likely strength of Labour’s challenge are revealed in the demographic statistics of the newly drawn East Thanet constituency. This is a fairly working class seat. Its proportion in routine and semi-routine jobs is higher than either South Thanet or North Thanet were, and at 27.1% is nearly as high as those in professional and managerial occupations (27.1%). This puts East Thanet more than two thirds of the way down the list of parliamentary constituencies in England and Wales as far as this socio-economic variable is concerned. The ‘working class’ categories reach their peak in the Census areas of Newington (36%, inland from Ramsgate, which is also 36% social rented in housing) and Cliftonville East and Salmestone, both in Margate, and both over 30%. But the figures are fairly ‘flat’ and consistent, with the highest percentage of professionals and managerials being only 37%, in Broadstairs North.
Educational qualifications follow the same pattern. Only just over a quarter of residents have degrees which is not largely a result of age, as in many seats by the sea, as East Thanet is only slightly more elderly than average; central Margate and the western section of Cliftonville have a young age profile, while the highest area for holders of degrees is Broadstairs South MSOA, which is also older than average. As far as housing tenure goes, at less than 60% East Thanet has significantly fewer owner occupiers than its predecessor South Thanet, and the private rented rate has risen to 28.4%, only about one eighth of the way down the national list. This rises to 57% in Cliftonville East, 49% in Margate Town, and 45% in Ramsgate Harbour – all on the seaside. This indicator coincides with the presence of East Thanet’s ethnic minority population, with the white percentage being lowest at just under 85% in Cliftonville West.
Turning to the latest council elections, in May 2023, Labour gained a number of seats within East Thanet: all three in Northwood, two to complete a clean sweep in Dane Valley, one to complete the set in Beacon Road (inland between Broadstairs and Margate, around the community called Reading Street), and two out of the three in Viking which covers the southern half of Broadstairs. Labour already held Margate Central and Salmestone, wards which are transferred in from North Thanet, Nethercourt, Newington, Eastcliff (in central Ramsgate), the multiply deprived Cliftonville West, and Sir Moses Montefiore ward (north of Ramsgate around the slightly unfortunately named Dumpton Park and West Dumpton). The name the ward actually has is because this is where the pioneering Jewish financier and philanthropist bought a country estate in 1831. Overall the score between Labour and Conservative was a decisive 27 to 9 in terms of councillors elected in May 2023.
There were also some Green gains, one from Labour in (Ramsgate) Central Harbour to give them two out of three there, and one from the Tories in St Peter’s, inland from Broadstairs, to give them two out of there there as well. The Conservatives were left only with Bradstowe (the most affluent part of the seat, northern Broadstairs), Cliftonville East, absolutely the best end of Margate, if that is saying much, and the large rural Thanet Villages ward. Adding up the votes across the whole of East Thanet, as Adam Gray has done, sums to Labour 36.6%, Conservatve 26.3% and Green 24.5%.
A decisive lead of over 10% just a year or so before a general election has to be held looks fairly convincing; East Thanet may be drawn on the most favourable lines any Thanet seat ever has been for Labour (even the former Thanet East from the 1970s did not include the parts of Margate now to be added). Given Stephen Ladyman’s success in the Blair years in South Thanet, it would now be a major surprise, even though technically it needs a swing of nearly 10%, if Labour did not gain East Thanet at the next general election.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 22.0% 169/575
Owner occupied 58.4% 418/575
Private rented 28.4% 76/575
Social rented 13.2% 374/575
White 92.2% 257/575
Black 1.2% 303/575
Asian 2.6% 356/575
Managerial & professional 27.5% 435/575
Routine & Semi-routine 27.1% 162/575
Degree level 26.6% 449/575
No qualifications 21.7% 128/575
Students 5.2% 350/575
General Election 2019: South Thanet
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Craig Mackinlay 27,084 56.1 +5.3
Labour Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt 16,497 34.2 -3.7
Liberal Democrats Martyn Pennington 2,727 5.7 +2.7
Green Rebecca Wing 1,949 4.0 +2.4
C Majority 10,587 21.9 +9.0
2019 electorate 73,302
Turnout 48,257 65.8 −3.0
Conservative hold
Swing 4.5 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
East Thanet consists of
84.1% of South Thanet
17.4% of North Thanet
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_311_East%20Thanet_Portrait.pdf
2019 Notional result - East Thanet (Rallings & Thrasher)
The Isle of Thanet, separated from the English mainland by the Wantsum channel in the west and by the estuary of the Great Stour to the south, was originally a genuine island before the Wantsum silted up, in the seventeenth century-the last ship to navigate the Wantsum did so in 1672. The South Thanet constituency, created in 1983 however was not confined to the southern half of the Isle, but crosses the Stour to include an area of mainland Kent to the south, now forming two wards of Dover district, the town and Cinque Port of Sandwich , and the large rural ward to the west of Sandwich including the two sizeable villages of Ash and Wingham, and known as Little Stour and Ashstone. Of the part genuinely within South Thanet the two main towns are Ramsgate and Broadstairs, but it also includes the Cliftonville area of Margate, so the North Foreland is apparently within South Thanet. To sum up, then, South Thanet has been neither confined to Thanet nor to the South of the isle, facts which will come as no surprise to students here of the names given to constituencies. Now, in the latest boundary changes, the seat remains essentially intact but the name is appropriately changed to East Thanet (there was a Thanet East between February 1974 and 1983).
According to those ever reliable sources of British history, Sellar and Yeatman, Thanet is where all successful invasions of these islands began, and we now can be sure Julius Caesar did indeed land at Pegwell Bay in 55 BC, Claudius at Richborough on the mainland side of the Wantsum in 43AD. Rather more dubiously Hengist and Horsa may have begun the Jutish conquest of Kent at Ebbsfleet sometime in the fifth century, while St Augustine also made landfall at Ebbsfleet in 597AD. Perhaps we need these days to say Ebbsfleet on Thanet specifically to distinguish it from the other Ebbsfleet at the other end of Kent which is the one with the International Railway Station and the National League football team! There is also the replica Viking ship Hugin beached up at Pegwell Bay. Anyway, to this day the good folk of South Thanet look nervously across the channel ready to repel further continental invaders.
To turn to more recent Thanet history- between the creation of South Thanet constituency in 1983 and the present day there have been four MPs, three of them Conservative (Jonathan Aitken,1983-97), Laura Sandys (2010-15) and the present incumbent, Craig Mackinlay (from 2015), and one Labour, Stephen Ladyman (1997-2010). Whether that makes this constituency a bellwether, as some have claimed, might be a matter of interpretation. It has also had some fairly high profile unsuccessful candidates, notably Nigel Farage (and not to mention Al Murray) in 2015.
Given that there have only have been 4 MPs it might seem that having two of them fall seriously foul of the law is a rather high strike rate. Aitken was of course to fall foul of the perjury laws, finding out the hard way that the so called sword of truth was indeed the sword of Damocles, and finishing up behind bars. I believe all these years later he is back in prison but now because he is now ordained and back as a prison chaplain. Mackinlay's run in with the law over election expenses over the 2015 election has only relatively recently been resolved in his favour, which has enabled him to be back as the current MP, but with his minders taking the rap. I do not intend to say anything more about these unsavoury episodes.
Given that South Thanet as a constituency has been genuinely highly contested and having changed hands twice, it is quite interesting to see where the respective party strengths lie. Remembering there are the two wards of Dover DC which are strongly Conservative, we need to look at the wards of Thanet DC which lie in the South Thanet constituency, and those form basically those on the eastern half of the island, from Pegwell Bay round to Cliftonville. Broadly, before the rise of UKIP, Ramsgate was broadly Labour, and so was Margate within Thanet North, and the Labour strength in Margate tended to spill over into Cliftonville West particularly, and some neighbouring wards, within Thanet South. The rest of the Thanet south constituency, mainly Broadstairs, and the more rural parts, was pretty solidly Tory, though if you go back to 2003 Bradstowe ward, basically central Broadstairs, did have a single Lib Dem topping the poll. By 2011 the councillor divide within the South Thanet constituency was 19-15 in favour of Labour on the island part of the constituency, and the 6 Conservative Dover district councillors will just bring it up to a marginal Tory lead, 21-19.
Then we come to the great UKIP tsunami. By the time of the 2015 local elections the map looked very different. The biggest shift is Labour to UKIP, with the Tory wards changing rather less completely. Overall, within the island part of South Thanet constituency, Conservatives fell back from 15 to11 councillors, but Labour crashed from 19 to 3, and UKIP finished up with 20. The Tories were still comfortably ahead in the Dover district wards, so that meant the councillor count was actually 21 Con, UKIP 20, Lab 3, but the momentum was clearly with UKIP. How much was this surge coming here anyway, which is why Farage chose it as his 2015 general election battleground., and how much was the big swing occasioned by the fact of a high profile general election battle going on simultaneously with the locals, it's difficult to say, but the general election result pretty well matched those local results.
And after the tsunami? The seat distribution on the South Thanet bit of Thanet district in 2019, put Labour back in the lead, just: Lab 15, Con 13, Thanet Independents 3, Greens 2, Independent 1. Then add in now 4 seats for the Dover district wards and the Tories snuck in front, 17-15. Sound familiar?
Anyway, although a lot of the journalistic attention on this constituency has focused on the MPs' behaviour and the visiting celebs and all that circus, it is worth remembering that there are a lot of bread and butter issues which may be of more concern to the locals. Certainly Ramsgate and Cliftonville share many of the characteristics of many south coast resorts which have seen far better days and are now struggling to reverse age and decay. Ramsgate has the added problem of a ferry port which doesn't quite manage the necessary infrastructure to survive in the twenty-first century. There is the perennial problem of what to do with Manston airport, with its huge runway and hardly any traffic. It almost mirrors the problem of Ramsgate harbour - there somehow feels as though there ought to be potential there, but the infrastructure to make it work just isn't there and without massive infrastructure works both port and airport were just in the wrong place. Then there was the area's biggest employer involving some very sophisticated advanced science - that's Pfizers, of course- announced it would close their Sandwich plant. On the whole there have been some valiant attempts to ride these major storms, but unemployment rates are stubbornly high by the standards of South East England.
Although both Thanet seats as currently drawn are within quota, the need for North Thanet to absorb some excess voters from Canterbury (which pushed it over quota) has led to a complete reconfiguration of the boundaries in this area. This constituency loses the Dover district wards of Little Stour & Ashstone and Sandwich (some 11,000 voters) and gains over 12,000 in Central Margate, Dane Valley and Salmestone wards from North Thanet. This is the (even) grottier end of Margate and effectively this swaps out the most Conservative part of South Thanet for the most Labour part of North Thanet. The seat is renamed 'East Thanet', reviving a name used from 1974-83 (though that only included Broadstairs and Ramsgate, not any of Margate). This does clearly make the seat more vulnerable to Labour. There's also a decent chance that Nigel Farage would have won here in 2015 had the seat been fought on these boundaries.
Some of the reasons for the likely strength of Labour’s challenge are revealed in the demographic statistics of the newly drawn East Thanet constituency. This is a fairly working class seat. Its proportion in routine and semi-routine jobs is higher than either South Thanet or North Thanet were, and at 27.1% is nearly as high as those in professional and managerial occupations (27.1%). This puts East Thanet more than two thirds of the way down the list of parliamentary constituencies in England and Wales as far as this socio-economic variable is concerned. The ‘working class’ categories reach their peak in the Census areas of Newington (36%, inland from Ramsgate, which is also 36% social rented in housing) and Cliftonville East and Salmestone, both in Margate, and both over 30%. But the figures are fairly ‘flat’ and consistent, with the highest percentage of professionals and managerials being only 37%, in Broadstairs North.
Educational qualifications follow the same pattern. Only just over a quarter of residents have degrees which is not largely a result of age, as in many seats by the sea, as East Thanet is only slightly more elderly than average; central Margate and the western section of Cliftonville have a young age profile, while the highest area for holders of degrees is Broadstairs South MSOA, which is also older than average. As far as housing tenure goes, at less than 60% East Thanet has significantly fewer owner occupiers than its predecessor South Thanet, and the private rented rate has risen to 28.4%, only about one eighth of the way down the national list. This rises to 57% in Cliftonville East, 49% in Margate Town, and 45% in Ramsgate Harbour – all on the seaside. This indicator coincides with the presence of East Thanet’s ethnic minority population, with the white percentage being lowest at just under 85% in Cliftonville West.
Turning to the latest council elections, in May 2023, Labour gained a number of seats within East Thanet: all three in Northwood, two to complete a clean sweep in Dane Valley, one to complete the set in Beacon Road (inland between Broadstairs and Margate, around the community called Reading Street), and two out of the three in Viking which covers the southern half of Broadstairs. Labour already held Margate Central and Salmestone, wards which are transferred in from North Thanet, Nethercourt, Newington, Eastcliff (in central Ramsgate), the multiply deprived Cliftonville West, and Sir Moses Montefiore ward (north of Ramsgate around the slightly unfortunately named Dumpton Park and West Dumpton). The name the ward actually has is because this is where the pioneering Jewish financier and philanthropist bought a country estate in 1831. Overall the score between Labour and Conservative was a decisive 27 to 9 in terms of councillors elected in May 2023.
There were also some Green gains, one from Labour in (Ramsgate) Central Harbour to give them two out of three there, and one from the Tories in St Peter’s, inland from Broadstairs, to give them two out of there there as well. The Conservatives were left only with Bradstowe (the most affluent part of the seat, northern Broadstairs), Cliftonville East, absolutely the best end of Margate, if that is saying much, and the large rural Thanet Villages ward. Adding up the votes across the whole of East Thanet, as Adam Gray has done, sums to Labour 36.6%, Conservatve 26.3% and Green 24.5%.
A decisive lead of over 10% just a year or so before a general election has to be held looks fairly convincing; East Thanet may be drawn on the most favourable lines any Thanet seat ever has been for Labour (even the former Thanet East from the 1970s did not include the parts of Margate now to be added). Given Stephen Ladyman’s success in the Blair years in South Thanet, it would now be a major surprise, even though technically it needs a swing of nearly 10%, if Labour did not gain East Thanet at the next general election.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 22.0% 169/575
Owner occupied 58.4% 418/575
Private rented 28.4% 76/575
Social rented 13.2% 374/575
White 92.2% 257/575
Black 1.2% 303/575
Asian 2.6% 356/575
Managerial & professional 27.5% 435/575
Routine & Semi-routine 27.1% 162/575
Degree level 26.6% 449/575
No qualifications 21.7% 128/575
Students 5.2% 350/575
General Election 2019: South Thanet
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Craig Mackinlay 27,084 56.1 +5.3
Labour Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt 16,497 34.2 -3.7
Liberal Democrats Martyn Pennington 2,727 5.7 +2.7
Green Rebecca Wing 1,949 4.0 +2.4
C Majority 10,587 21.9 +9.0
2019 electorate 73,302
Turnout 48,257 65.8 −3.0
Conservative hold
Swing 4.5 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
East Thanet consists of
84.1% of South Thanet
17.4% of North Thanet
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_311_East%20Thanet_Portrait.pdf
2019 Notional result - East Thanet (Rallings & Thrasher)
| Con | 25616 | 53.5% |
| Lab | 18031 | 37.6% |
| LD | 2486 | 5.2% |
| Green | 1791 | 3.7% |
| | ||
| Majority | 7585 | 15.8% |