Post by Robert Waller on Nov 30, 2023 21:27:09 GMT
The below is largely based on the previous profile by East Anglian Lefty, who has given his kind permission to update and add, which I have attempted to do. He is the first person "I" in the below.
The Harwich and North Essex seat was created in 2010 as the successor to North Essex. That seat formed a doughnut around Colchester and had been Conservative since its creation in 1997. The Fifth Periodical Boundary Review removed the south-western section of the constituency around Tiptree, whilst adding Harwich from the former Harwich constituency (the bulk of which formed the new Clacton seat.)
These changes cannot be said to have made the seat more cohesive. At the most basic level, the constituency is not contiguous by road, since the areas on the western bank of the River Colne (Rowhedge, Fingringhoe and Mersea Island) cannot be reached from the rest of the constituency without passing through Colchester. Moreover, the ferry port of Harwich fits poorly with the rural satellites of Colchester which make up the rest of the seat. It's very much a seat created to make the neighbouring seats work better and this is likely to continue under the new boundaries.
Harwich was a medieval borough and has a background as a naval town, since the Stour Estuary forms an excellent natural harbour. It was a major naval base in the World Wars and the town's dockyard was active into the nineteenth century. There is still a ferry connection to Hook of Holland, although the long-term prospects of this service are uncertain and the service to Esbjerg was withdrawn a few years ago. The service is primarily propped up by freight users and there were plans to augment this with a container port terminal at Bathside Bay. However, the planning permission required the developers to first upgrade the A120, which made the scheme uneconomic and now that Thames Gateway is on-stream it's unlikely the project will come to fruition.
At a local level, Harwich's wards (one of which is shared with the former company town of Parkeston, and several of which take the name Dovercourt, an older appellation than Harwich, having appeared in Domesday Book) are all held by Labour after May 2023, but it's politically competitive and that local dominance is chiefly due to an effective local Labour Party, centred around Ivan Henderson, who was MP for Harwich 1997-2005. In addition to the Tories, UKIP have also got decent results here in the past and I would assume the town returned a healthy Leave vote. Nevertheless, Labour have won the unified Harwich division on Essex county council ever since 1997, with a solitary Tory exception in 2009.
A branch line connects Harwich (and the rather grandly named Harwich International station at Parkeston) to the mainline to Norwich at Manningtree. Manningtree is by some accounts the smallest town in the country, but that's only true if you think that the parish boundaries bear any relationship to the real extent of the town, which they very much do not. In actuality Manningtree forms a single settlement with the neighbouring villages of Mistley and Lawford. Lawford used to have a strong railway vote and accordingly was once the strongest Labour ward in the Tendring district. That hasn't been the case for several decades now, but it still returns somewhat better Labour results than the rest of the constituency. In May 2023 in the elections for Tendring district council the Liberal Democrats gained two of the three Tory seats in the combined Lawford, Manningtree & Mistley ward.
This is very much not true of the villages further west in the Stour Valley. This area, often known as Constable Country after the 19th century landscape painter, is monolithically Conservative. It's a landscape of pleasant and very prosperous villages with social diversity limited to a hidden-away close or two of council housing in each village, which in most cases was originally built for agricultural labourers. Stour Valley ward was held by the Tories even in May 2023, when they lost so many council seats around the country, with Labour in a decent second place; but two years earlier the Conservatives had taken 67% in the larger Constable county electoral division to Labour’s 12%, which was still enough for the runner up spot – which was a more typical disparity.
South of Manningtree, the constituency skirts the eastern edge of Colchester, on its path to meeting the Colne at Wivenhoe. Like Harwich, Wivenhoe was historically a shipbuilding town, although in its case the vessels in question were yachts and the local captains were once highly sought after as skippers during Cowes Week. The last yard didn't close until the 1980s, but it ceased to define the town a couple of generations earlier. These days it is much better known as the location of the University of Essex, whose main campus sits in Wivenhoe Park, between Wivenhoe and Colchester. These days more students reside in Colchester than in Wivenhoe, but there's still a decent amount of accommodation on campus and not all of the undergraduates have yet been priced out of Wivenhoe itself.
Wivenhoe has a somewhat bohemian reputation with all the accoutrements that suggests (large numbers of resident artists, an excellent bookshop, a nice Syrian cafe, a very pleasant community-run pub, etc. etc.) Its voting record also reflects that, as it has voted Labour more often than not in the past two decades. At a local level it has made a rapid turn to the Lib Dems in the past few years, who have somewhat confusingly managed to mobilise NIMBY opinion behind them and against a scheme they presided over whilst they led the borough council. In general elections it's still probably Labour who are the main challenger to the Tories here, although the Lib Dems (and indeed the Greens) have better prospects with the promiscuous progressives of Wivenhoe than they do with the pocketbook voters of Harwich. In May 2021 the LDs gained Wivenhoe St Andrews electoral division from Labour in the county council elections, and in 2023 they won the smaller Wivenhoe ward on Colchester borough council in a veritable landslide, taking 73.6% of the vote in a four party contest.
Passing through the village of Alresford (mostly 1960s bungalows and the major Lib Dem stronghold in the constituency) we come to the fishing port of Brightlingsea. This used to be an island and the locals still resent the fact it isn't any more. I could make the usual inbreeding jokes for a couple of paragraphs, but instead I'll just say that whilst it's usually Tory, it's a fairly working-class town and given to a decent level of political volatility. In local elections it has predominantly elected Independents since 2011 and entirely since 2015 at Tendring borough council level, but for Essex county council it is a different story: Conservative since 1997 with the solitary exception of a UKIP win in 2013, one of eight divisions in the county that elected Kippers that year.
There's much less volatility on the other side of the river. Rowhedge is marginal, but usually votes Labour in local elections and is at worst competitive in national elections, whilst Mersea Island is even more Conservative than Constable Country. Unlike Brightlingsea, it actually is an island at high tide. There's been a causeway linking it to the mainland for about 1300 years and some day they will reconcile themselves to this. Historically the local economy was centred around fishing and whilst that is much diminished, the oyster fisheries remain nationally well-known.
In the boundary changes finalised in 2023, and enacted by an Order in Council in November of that same year, Harwich and North Essex gains just over 8,500 electors in the form of the Colchester ward of Old Heath & The Hythe, but loses almost the same amount in total a few hundred back to Colchester but mainly to Clacton in the shape of the wards of The Bentleys & Frating, and Great Oakley & Wix, including villages such as Great Bentley. The Bentleys & Frating ward was safely Conservative in the most recent Tendring district elections in May 2023, but the other two were won by Independents.
Demographically, Harwich and North Essex is very owner occupied and has a 94% predominance of white residents, but it is almost exactly half way up the lists of occupational class variables such as professional and managerial workers and decidedly below average as far as being educated to degree level is concerned; and this is not because of the presence of Essex University, as only 7.6% of residents in the 2021 census were full time students. This constituency is too remote from major population centres like London to have a very high professional and managerial percentage; it exceeds 40% only in the Stour valley MSOA around Boxted (west of Manningtree) where it reached 43%. Also above average for the seat are Manningtree and Mistley (36%), and Mersea Island, particularly the eastern part (39%), along with Wivenhoe & University (35%).
The last named’s figures are heavily skewed by the presence of full time students (24%(, of course, and it has the highest number of residents who already have degrees (37%) as well, just ahead of the Stour Valley (36%). On the other hand the Harwich MSOAs are well below the average in that category, especially in Parkeston, where only 14.8% have degrees, which is extremely low for Britain in 2021, even by the standards of the Essex east coast around Clacton, which has some of the lowest figures in the nation. This is not because of the age profile either, as Harwich is much younger than parts of the constituency like Brightlingsea (28% over 65) and West Mersea (36.5%). It is because both Harwich/Dovercourt and Parkeston are very working class, with over 35% in routine and semi-routine jobs, and around 25% with no educational qualifications. These numbers are not quite as high as parts of Clacton and Jaywick at the other (south) end of the Tendring district but it does emphasise how different the Harwich section of this seat is from the North Essex parts.
Despite the social and economic characteristics of Harwich itself, overall this is a prosperous area of pleasant villages and small towns. Whilst Labour can hold a narrow lead in most of the towns in good years, that's always likely to be outweighed by an immense Conservative lead in the villages and in better Conservative years they can sweep the towns too. In every election since its creation, the Tory majority has been over 10,000 and Labour have held second place (though they've made some frankly shocking decisions about candidate selection in some of those elections.) Looking forward, this isn't very much reason to expect that overall political picture to change.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 24.1% 103/575
Owner occupied 72.7% 108/575
Private rented 17.3% 324/575
Social rented 10.0% 520/575
White 93.9% 220/575
Black 1.5% 271/575
Asian 2.0% 396/575
Managerial & professional 32.7% 286/575
Routine & Semi-routine 23.0% 306/575
Degree level 27.8% 402/575
No qualifications 18.0% 266/575
Students 7.6% 161/575
General Election 2019: Harwich and North Essex
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Bernard Jenkin 31,830 61.3 +2.8
Labour Stephen Rice 11,648 22.4 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Mike Beckett 5,866 11.3 +5.9
Green Peter Banks 1,945 3.7 +1.7
Independent Richard Browning-Smith 411 0.8 New
Independent Tony Francis 263 0.5 New
C Majority 20,182 38.8 +10.8
Turnout 51,963 70.1 -1.6
Conservative hold
Swing 5.4 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Harwich and North Essex consists of
91.7% of Harwich and North Essex
9.0% of Colchester
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/eastern/Eastern_067_Harwich%20and%20North%20Essex_Landscape.pdf
Notional result 2019 on the new boundaries (Rallings /Thrasher)
The Harwich and North Essex seat was created in 2010 as the successor to North Essex. That seat formed a doughnut around Colchester and had been Conservative since its creation in 1997. The Fifth Periodical Boundary Review removed the south-western section of the constituency around Tiptree, whilst adding Harwich from the former Harwich constituency (the bulk of which formed the new Clacton seat.)
These changes cannot be said to have made the seat more cohesive. At the most basic level, the constituency is not contiguous by road, since the areas on the western bank of the River Colne (Rowhedge, Fingringhoe and Mersea Island) cannot be reached from the rest of the constituency without passing through Colchester. Moreover, the ferry port of Harwich fits poorly with the rural satellites of Colchester which make up the rest of the seat. It's very much a seat created to make the neighbouring seats work better and this is likely to continue under the new boundaries.
Harwich was a medieval borough and has a background as a naval town, since the Stour Estuary forms an excellent natural harbour. It was a major naval base in the World Wars and the town's dockyard was active into the nineteenth century. There is still a ferry connection to Hook of Holland, although the long-term prospects of this service are uncertain and the service to Esbjerg was withdrawn a few years ago. The service is primarily propped up by freight users and there were plans to augment this with a container port terminal at Bathside Bay. However, the planning permission required the developers to first upgrade the A120, which made the scheme uneconomic and now that Thames Gateway is on-stream it's unlikely the project will come to fruition.
At a local level, Harwich's wards (one of which is shared with the former company town of Parkeston, and several of which take the name Dovercourt, an older appellation than Harwich, having appeared in Domesday Book) are all held by Labour after May 2023, but it's politically competitive and that local dominance is chiefly due to an effective local Labour Party, centred around Ivan Henderson, who was MP for Harwich 1997-2005. In addition to the Tories, UKIP have also got decent results here in the past and I would assume the town returned a healthy Leave vote. Nevertheless, Labour have won the unified Harwich division on Essex county council ever since 1997, with a solitary Tory exception in 2009.
A branch line connects Harwich (and the rather grandly named Harwich International station at Parkeston) to the mainline to Norwich at Manningtree. Manningtree is by some accounts the smallest town in the country, but that's only true if you think that the parish boundaries bear any relationship to the real extent of the town, which they very much do not. In actuality Manningtree forms a single settlement with the neighbouring villages of Mistley and Lawford. Lawford used to have a strong railway vote and accordingly was once the strongest Labour ward in the Tendring district. That hasn't been the case for several decades now, but it still returns somewhat better Labour results than the rest of the constituency. In May 2023 in the elections for Tendring district council the Liberal Democrats gained two of the three Tory seats in the combined Lawford, Manningtree & Mistley ward.
This is very much not true of the villages further west in the Stour Valley. This area, often known as Constable Country after the 19th century landscape painter, is monolithically Conservative. It's a landscape of pleasant and very prosperous villages with social diversity limited to a hidden-away close or two of council housing in each village, which in most cases was originally built for agricultural labourers. Stour Valley ward was held by the Tories even in May 2023, when they lost so many council seats around the country, with Labour in a decent second place; but two years earlier the Conservatives had taken 67% in the larger Constable county electoral division to Labour’s 12%, which was still enough for the runner up spot – which was a more typical disparity.
South of Manningtree, the constituency skirts the eastern edge of Colchester, on its path to meeting the Colne at Wivenhoe. Like Harwich, Wivenhoe was historically a shipbuilding town, although in its case the vessels in question were yachts and the local captains were once highly sought after as skippers during Cowes Week. The last yard didn't close until the 1980s, but it ceased to define the town a couple of generations earlier. These days it is much better known as the location of the University of Essex, whose main campus sits in Wivenhoe Park, between Wivenhoe and Colchester. These days more students reside in Colchester than in Wivenhoe, but there's still a decent amount of accommodation on campus and not all of the undergraduates have yet been priced out of Wivenhoe itself.
Wivenhoe has a somewhat bohemian reputation with all the accoutrements that suggests (large numbers of resident artists, an excellent bookshop, a nice Syrian cafe, a very pleasant community-run pub, etc. etc.) Its voting record also reflects that, as it has voted Labour more often than not in the past two decades. At a local level it has made a rapid turn to the Lib Dems in the past few years, who have somewhat confusingly managed to mobilise NIMBY opinion behind them and against a scheme they presided over whilst they led the borough council. In general elections it's still probably Labour who are the main challenger to the Tories here, although the Lib Dems (and indeed the Greens) have better prospects with the promiscuous progressives of Wivenhoe than they do with the pocketbook voters of Harwich. In May 2021 the LDs gained Wivenhoe St Andrews electoral division from Labour in the county council elections, and in 2023 they won the smaller Wivenhoe ward on Colchester borough council in a veritable landslide, taking 73.6% of the vote in a four party contest.
Passing through the village of Alresford (mostly 1960s bungalows and the major Lib Dem stronghold in the constituency) we come to the fishing port of Brightlingsea. This used to be an island and the locals still resent the fact it isn't any more. I could make the usual inbreeding jokes for a couple of paragraphs, but instead I'll just say that whilst it's usually Tory, it's a fairly working-class town and given to a decent level of political volatility. In local elections it has predominantly elected Independents since 2011 and entirely since 2015 at Tendring borough council level, but for Essex county council it is a different story: Conservative since 1997 with the solitary exception of a UKIP win in 2013, one of eight divisions in the county that elected Kippers that year.
There's much less volatility on the other side of the river. Rowhedge is marginal, but usually votes Labour in local elections and is at worst competitive in national elections, whilst Mersea Island is even more Conservative than Constable Country. Unlike Brightlingsea, it actually is an island at high tide. There's been a causeway linking it to the mainland for about 1300 years and some day they will reconcile themselves to this. Historically the local economy was centred around fishing and whilst that is much diminished, the oyster fisheries remain nationally well-known.
In the boundary changes finalised in 2023, and enacted by an Order in Council in November of that same year, Harwich and North Essex gains just over 8,500 electors in the form of the Colchester ward of Old Heath & The Hythe, but loses almost the same amount in total a few hundred back to Colchester but mainly to Clacton in the shape of the wards of The Bentleys & Frating, and Great Oakley & Wix, including villages such as Great Bentley. The Bentleys & Frating ward was safely Conservative in the most recent Tendring district elections in May 2023, but the other two were won by Independents.
Demographically, Harwich and North Essex is very owner occupied and has a 94% predominance of white residents, but it is almost exactly half way up the lists of occupational class variables such as professional and managerial workers and decidedly below average as far as being educated to degree level is concerned; and this is not because of the presence of Essex University, as only 7.6% of residents in the 2021 census were full time students. This constituency is too remote from major population centres like London to have a very high professional and managerial percentage; it exceeds 40% only in the Stour valley MSOA around Boxted (west of Manningtree) where it reached 43%. Also above average for the seat are Manningtree and Mistley (36%), and Mersea Island, particularly the eastern part (39%), along with Wivenhoe & University (35%).
The last named’s figures are heavily skewed by the presence of full time students (24%(, of course, and it has the highest number of residents who already have degrees (37%) as well, just ahead of the Stour Valley (36%). On the other hand the Harwich MSOAs are well below the average in that category, especially in Parkeston, where only 14.8% have degrees, which is extremely low for Britain in 2021, even by the standards of the Essex east coast around Clacton, which has some of the lowest figures in the nation. This is not because of the age profile either, as Harwich is much younger than parts of the constituency like Brightlingsea (28% over 65) and West Mersea (36.5%). It is because both Harwich/Dovercourt and Parkeston are very working class, with over 35% in routine and semi-routine jobs, and around 25% with no educational qualifications. These numbers are not quite as high as parts of Clacton and Jaywick at the other (south) end of the Tendring district but it does emphasise how different the Harwich section of this seat is from the North Essex parts.
Despite the social and economic characteristics of Harwich itself, overall this is a prosperous area of pleasant villages and small towns. Whilst Labour can hold a narrow lead in most of the towns in good years, that's always likely to be outweighed by an immense Conservative lead in the villages and in better Conservative years they can sweep the towns too. In every election since its creation, the Tory majority has been over 10,000 and Labour have held second place (though they've made some frankly shocking decisions about candidate selection in some of those elections.) Looking forward, this isn't very much reason to expect that overall political picture to change.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 24.1% 103/575
Owner occupied 72.7% 108/575
Private rented 17.3% 324/575
Social rented 10.0% 520/575
White 93.9% 220/575
Black 1.5% 271/575
Asian 2.0% 396/575
Managerial & professional 32.7% 286/575
Routine & Semi-routine 23.0% 306/575
Degree level 27.8% 402/575
No qualifications 18.0% 266/575
Students 7.6% 161/575
General Election 2019: Harwich and North Essex
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Bernard Jenkin 31,830 61.3 +2.8
Labour Stephen Rice 11,648 22.4 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Mike Beckett 5,866 11.3 +5.9
Green Peter Banks 1,945 3.7 +1.7
Independent Richard Browning-Smith 411 0.8 New
Independent Tony Francis 263 0.5 New
C Majority 20,182 38.8 +10.8
Turnout 51,963 70.1 -1.6
Conservative hold
Swing 5.4 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Harwich and North Essex consists of
91.7% of Harwich and North Essex
9.0% of Colchester
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/eastern/Eastern_067_Harwich%20and%20North%20Essex_Landscape.pdf
Notional result 2019 on the new boundaries (Rallings /Thrasher)
| Con | 31668 | 58.6% |
| Lab | 14017 | 25.9% |
| LD | 5801 | 10.7% |
| Grn | 1924 | 3.6% |
| Oths | 674 | 1.3% |
| Majority | 17651 | 32.6% |
