Cities of London and Westminster
Dec 12, 2023 12:12:28 GMT
Pete Whitehead, Robert Waller, and 5 more like this
Post by batman on Dec 12, 2023 12:12:28 GMT
edited to note the general election result here & elsewhere
CITIES OF LONDON AND WESTMINSTER
Surely no constituency in this country has been visited more by tourists or seen on television more frequently than this one. Here is the heart of the nation's major metropolis, replete with world-famous sights; and the boundary changes have actually increased the number of these sights still further. Here are, to make a modest selection, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey, the Tate & National Galleries, Marble Arch, Oxford Street the nation's prime shopping destination, Soho with its clubs & gay scene, the Bank of England, St Paul's Cathedral, and Speaker's Corner ; and to these are now added Abbey Road studios to go with other central London Beatles locations, most of Regent's Park including London Zoo, and the remarkably popular Madame Tussaud's. This is the commercial and office heartland of London, despite its partial usurpation by the Isle of Dogs, and its governmental headquarters, but notwithstanding this people do live here, and many of them can and do vote, although some famous residents, not least Jimi Hendrix who lived next door to Handel's 18th-century London home, have not been enfranchised. The constituency name first appeared in 1950, before which Westminster even on its older smaller boundaries had two divisions of its own, the City of London was despite its tiny resident population a two-member constituency, and there was a separate St Marylebone constituency as well as two Paddington divisions; part of the former Paddington South constituency now features here, too. All these constituencies (virtually no part of the former Paddington North seat, which was fairly safe Labour, appears in this division either pre-2024 or after boundary changes) were completely safe for the Conservatives and their allies, and this seat, whether under its current name or its 1974-2010 name of City of London & Westminster South, was in the safe Conservative column too, right up until the 2017 general election when Labour suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, became serious contenders here; and despite being beaten into third place in the 2019 general election thanks to the presence of a very high-profile Liberal Democrat candidate, the former Labour frontbencher Chuka Umunna, this remained the case despite the distinctly unfavourable boundary changes from Labour's point of view. The boundary change was necessary because, not uniquely in central London, the constituency was somewhat undersized in terms of electorate, and needed to be extended. This has been done, after some highly contrasting original proposals, by adding the Abbey Road and Regent's Park wards which up to 2024 had been the most Conservative element of the Westminster North constituency, which was always Labour since it was re-established in 2010. Parts of the previous boundary between the two Westminster seats, around the Baker Street and southern Regent's Park areas, were distinctly puzzling and seemingly illogical, so at least this rather strange anomaly has been ironed out.
To take the City of London first. It seems remarkable that an area at the core of a major metropolis should have a smaller population than it did hundreds of years ago, but that is indeed the case. It has throughout living memory and long before that been totally dominated by the financial sector and associated other businesses and much of it is eerily quiet at weekends when office workers are mostly not present - in stark contrast with, for example, Oxford Street or Covent Garden. It has a unique municipal situation, in several ways. Because its resident population is so small, its local elections (for what is called the City of London Corporation, the word council not being used) allow business as well as residential voting, the business vote having been abolished in the rest of the land by the postwar Labour government. It even retains its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police which operates in the rest of the Greater London Authority area. These elections are mostly competitions between independents, the only exception being that in recent years in particular Labour has contested some elections, and has managed to win some too. In between the offices, other grand non-residential buildings, shops, pubs and restaurants, there are very few residents, the main exception being the part-social, part-private late 20th century housing in the north of the city, close to Barbican and Moorgate tube stations. Part of this estate lies within the Borough of Islington, but part within the bounds of the City. In days gone by, the Tories would have had a clear lead amongst this tiny electorate, but elections now appear to be much more evenly contested. It is regarded as quite likely that Labour, not just because of their vote amongst the socially rented flats, achieved a small plurality over the Conservatives at the general election. The Boundary Commission has been for some reason very keen to separate the City of London from Westminster for parliamentary as well as municipal purposes, but has been forced to abandon this plan amidst local opposition.
The wards in the present constituency which are in the City of Westminster are a distinctly mixed bag. Until very recently, they were quite heavily dominated by the Conservatives, but Labour made substantial gains here in their triumphant 2022 local elections, including in some wards which have not even hinted in the past that they could ever be won by Labour. Still in the Conservative column are Marylebone, Pimlico North, St James's, and above all Knightsbridge & Belgravia, which is quite possibly the wealthiest council ward in the whole of Britain, amidst strong competition from some near or immediate neighbours and perhaps the odd one in the Cheshire Gin and Jag Belt, or maybe Sandbanks in Poole. Knightsbridge & Belgravia is still hugely safe for the Conservatives, and has had many famous residents over the years, not least Margaret Thatcher, although even here Labour's vote is distinctly higher than it was not many years ago. Labour did not even stand in 2010, when the 3 successful Conservative candidates were opposed only by a solitary Green. It is full of embassies as well as often sumptuous private residences. The other remaining Conservative wards are less monolithic, though Labour are fairly weak (perhaps not surprisingly) in mostly very well-heeled Marylebone where the Liberal Democrats, unusually for Westminster, are fairly close challengers. This ward unlike its neighbours crosses the Marylebone Road and includes the eponymous railway station and its immediate surrounds. There is a coherent Labour vote in the other two named wards and both have been treated fairly seriously by the party in the past. St James's has some very wealthy residents amongst its palace, luxury hotels and gentlemen's clubs (I use that expression in its traditional sense), but also includes the Westminster section of the more mixed Covent Garden area, and Pimlico North is fairly socially mixed although again its houses tend towards the seriously upmarket even by the very high standards of this area. One ward was split between Labour and the Conservatives in the last local elections in 2022, Vincent Square, which is not dissimilar to Pimlico North but perhaps has a slightly higher council estate element. The ward was targeted unsuccessfully by Labour in 2018 but they were able to win 2 of the 3 seats four years later. Rather remarkably, the remaining Westminster wards in the constituency as it stands, Pimlico South, West End and most remarkably of all Hyde Park, were all won by Labour in 2022, though none of them by large majorities. Pimlico South in various previous forms has often had Labour councillors in the past, and features a major postwar council estate, Churchill Gardens, which does not generally follow the politics of the eponymous former Prime Minister. It comes as a surprise that some privately-built housing in Westminster was once of very poor, even slum, quality, but that was the case with some of the 19th-century terraces which were replaced here, mostly because of German wartime bombing. While what is now Pimlico South has a fairly long Labour heritage, West End in contrast was never regarded as anything but a totally safe Tory ward until recently. Labour amidst the gloom of their failed 2018 attempt to gain control of Westminster council managed a historic inaugural gain of a seat in the ward, which was consolidated into a clear outright victory in 2022; however, the Tories regained a seat comfortably but not overwhelmingly in a council by-election not long after the 2024 general election. This is a geographically large ward as so much of its acreage is commercial rather than residential. It takes in Soho, Chinatown, Mayfair, Oxford Street and surrounds, plus the Westminster element (a minority most would say) of Fitzrovia. It comes as a surprise, walking through much of this territory particularly Mayfair, that this area could possibly be represented by Labour councillors, but there is the odd smattering of social housing here and there, and some privately rented housing of less than luxurious quality. The Tories did not do their cause any good in 2018, in a ward containing Soho, by fielding a candidate who declared that gay sex was sinful, and promptly lost. Hyde Park however was the Labour gain that seemed to top them all. This ward was the base of the nationally (in)famous former Tory leader of the council, Lady Shirley Porter. Facing opposite the eponymous park close to Marble Arch and Speaker's Corner, it is replete with mostly very expensive privately-built houses and flats of varied vintage, with only a small number of more modest dwellings (amongst which perhaps could be counted the Park West flats overlooking the Edgware Road, and some dwellings closer towards Paddington Station), and almost no social housing at all. But again many of the wealthier properties are occupied by foreign nationals who cannot vote, and the Tories to some extent signed their own political death-warrant in the wards overlooking Hyde Park by their incompetent handling of the Marble Arch Mound fiasco. Labour's narrow outright victory is even more extraordinary when one considers that the party did not even contest the ward in the 2010 elections, this being along with Knightsbridge & Belgravia the only London ward not to be contested by Labour in that election. Even in the 2022 local elections, when Labour gained so much ground in the Westminster wards, the Tories did retain a lead over Labour in this majority part of the constituency; but in the 2024 general election, Labour squeezed the Liberal Democrat vote very hard to ensure that they built up the small lead they needed to win the seat. The Lib Dems suffered a 17% drop in their share of the vote, one of the very highest anywhere, despite a voluble (but pretty much solo) campaign by their candidate Edward Lucas; the Green vote rose by over 5%, but the net effect of this was a rise in Labour's share of fully 10%, very high by inner London standards in 2024. The Tories will note that ReformUK managed 2,752 votes, and comfortably saved their deposit in what would generally not be regarded as very fertile territory for them; this was very slightly higher than the eventual Labour majority, which nevertheless was not exactly a really narrow one given that this was Labour's first-ever win in the constituency. Only a very small part of the seat around Paddington has ever had a Labour MP before.
To all of this, after a major rethink by the Boundary Commission, were added the Westminster wards of Abbey Road and Regent's Park, the latter in particular being a logical addition to the existing seat. Regent's Park ward in Westminster is a major political contrast with its Labour-voting namesake in neighbouring Camden, which lies within Sir Keir Starmer's constituency. The Westminster majority of the park includes its best-known elements, including London Zoo. Overlooking the park are some villas of huge opulence, but the Conservatives enjoy strong support in the often elegant 19th- and 20th-century apartments the other side of the canal too. There is a fair-sized Jewish community in this area, although Jewish residents can be found scattered around pretty much all of the existing constituency. There is a Labour vote, particularly within the council-estate minority in the ward, but Labour has fallen well short in its recent attempts to break through here, even in their very good year of 2022. Abbey Road ward, the only part of the constituency which will now seem to be not really in central London and to have something of a suburban character, albeit a very graceful and partly 19th-century suburban character, includes the rest of the St John's Wood community, the majority of which is very well-to-do albeit with small pockets of relative deprivation. The ward has very little social housing. It has two particularly well-known sights, Lord's Cricket Ground which is still regarded as the worldwide headquarters of the game, and the famous recording studio where groundbreaking records by artists very much including the Beatles have been made. The zebra crossing close to the studio (which in fact has been moved a few feet since) was of course immortalised on the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover. For a number of years, Abbey Road was quite a bit safer for the Conservatives than Regent's Park, but this is no longer the case as while Labour at best flatlined in Regent's Park in the 2022 local elections they ate quite a bit into the Conservative majority here. The ward has a coherent Labour vote, though the Tories still won comfortably enough in 2022. The addition of these two wards added quite a bit to the notional Conservative majority, and probably added over one per cent to the swing required for Labour to win Cities of London and Westminster overall. Labour's hope was that working the wards harder than before could yield additional support, and bearing in mind the overall result it seems likely that the party came close to nullifying the Conservative lead in them, though it is probably more likely than not that the Tories still enjoyed a very slight plurality over Labour in these two wards.
Cities of London and Westminster does not have a pro-Labour heritage. This was a totally safe Conservative seat for many years, and some elements of the Conservative vote, as in neighbouring seats in Kensington & Chelsea, are extremely wealthy and remain very difficult to convert away from their usual voting habits. It was reasonable to surmise that the swing to Labour might turn out to be quite a bit less than the national average, for this and other reasons, but in the end at 9% it was not that far off the national average after all, so voraciously did Labour eat into the previously high Liberal Democrat vote, an attack which met little resistance, really. Even in 2019, when Labour was beaten into third place, the swing from Labour to Conservative was still well below the national average, and Labour thus required a relatively modest swing of around 7% after the boundary change, which in the end proved fairly comfortably within their capabilities. Thus fell one of the very few remaining inner city Tory seats in Britain, and none now remain except to an extent Leicester East. The 2019 victor, Nickie Aiken of the Conservatives, decided not to stand for re-election, and this will not have particularly helped the Conservative cause either. The inaugural Labour MP is Rachel Blake, former Deputy Mayor of Tower Hamlets. This remains a marginal, but Labour's majority is not a tiny one, and the seat will be very keenly fought when the next election comes around.
CITIES OF LONDON AND WESTMINSTER
Surely no constituency in this country has been visited more by tourists or seen on television more frequently than this one. Here is the heart of the nation's major metropolis, replete with world-famous sights; and the boundary changes have actually increased the number of these sights still further. Here are, to make a modest selection, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey, the Tate & National Galleries, Marble Arch, Oxford Street the nation's prime shopping destination, Soho with its clubs & gay scene, the Bank of England, St Paul's Cathedral, and Speaker's Corner ; and to these are now added Abbey Road studios to go with other central London Beatles locations, most of Regent's Park including London Zoo, and the remarkably popular Madame Tussaud's. This is the commercial and office heartland of London, despite its partial usurpation by the Isle of Dogs, and its governmental headquarters, but notwithstanding this people do live here, and many of them can and do vote, although some famous residents, not least Jimi Hendrix who lived next door to Handel's 18th-century London home, have not been enfranchised. The constituency name first appeared in 1950, before which Westminster even on its older smaller boundaries had two divisions of its own, the City of London was despite its tiny resident population a two-member constituency, and there was a separate St Marylebone constituency as well as two Paddington divisions; part of the former Paddington South constituency now features here, too. All these constituencies (virtually no part of the former Paddington North seat, which was fairly safe Labour, appears in this division either pre-2024 or after boundary changes) were completely safe for the Conservatives and their allies, and this seat, whether under its current name or its 1974-2010 name of City of London & Westminster South, was in the safe Conservative column too, right up until the 2017 general election when Labour suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, became serious contenders here; and despite being beaten into third place in the 2019 general election thanks to the presence of a very high-profile Liberal Democrat candidate, the former Labour frontbencher Chuka Umunna, this remained the case despite the distinctly unfavourable boundary changes from Labour's point of view. The boundary change was necessary because, not uniquely in central London, the constituency was somewhat undersized in terms of electorate, and needed to be extended. This has been done, after some highly contrasting original proposals, by adding the Abbey Road and Regent's Park wards which up to 2024 had been the most Conservative element of the Westminster North constituency, which was always Labour since it was re-established in 2010. Parts of the previous boundary between the two Westminster seats, around the Baker Street and southern Regent's Park areas, were distinctly puzzling and seemingly illogical, so at least this rather strange anomaly has been ironed out.
To take the City of London first. It seems remarkable that an area at the core of a major metropolis should have a smaller population than it did hundreds of years ago, but that is indeed the case. It has throughout living memory and long before that been totally dominated by the financial sector and associated other businesses and much of it is eerily quiet at weekends when office workers are mostly not present - in stark contrast with, for example, Oxford Street or Covent Garden. It has a unique municipal situation, in several ways. Because its resident population is so small, its local elections (for what is called the City of London Corporation, the word council not being used) allow business as well as residential voting, the business vote having been abolished in the rest of the land by the postwar Labour government. It even retains its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police which operates in the rest of the Greater London Authority area. These elections are mostly competitions between independents, the only exception being that in recent years in particular Labour has contested some elections, and has managed to win some too. In between the offices, other grand non-residential buildings, shops, pubs and restaurants, there are very few residents, the main exception being the part-social, part-private late 20th century housing in the north of the city, close to Barbican and Moorgate tube stations. Part of this estate lies within the Borough of Islington, but part within the bounds of the City. In days gone by, the Tories would have had a clear lead amongst this tiny electorate, but elections now appear to be much more evenly contested. It is regarded as quite likely that Labour, not just because of their vote amongst the socially rented flats, achieved a small plurality over the Conservatives at the general election. The Boundary Commission has been for some reason very keen to separate the City of London from Westminster for parliamentary as well as municipal purposes, but has been forced to abandon this plan amidst local opposition.
The wards in the present constituency which are in the City of Westminster are a distinctly mixed bag. Until very recently, they were quite heavily dominated by the Conservatives, but Labour made substantial gains here in their triumphant 2022 local elections, including in some wards which have not even hinted in the past that they could ever be won by Labour. Still in the Conservative column are Marylebone, Pimlico North, St James's, and above all Knightsbridge & Belgravia, which is quite possibly the wealthiest council ward in the whole of Britain, amidst strong competition from some near or immediate neighbours and perhaps the odd one in the Cheshire Gin and Jag Belt, or maybe Sandbanks in Poole. Knightsbridge & Belgravia is still hugely safe for the Conservatives, and has had many famous residents over the years, not least Margaret Thatcher, although even here Labour's vote is distinctly higher than it was not many years ago. Labour did not even stand in 2010, when the 3 successful Conservative candidates were opposed only by a solitary Green. It is full of embassies as well as often sumptuous private residences. The other remaining Conservative wards are less monolithic, though Labour are fairly weak (perhaps not surprisingly) in mostly very well-heeled Marylebone where the Liberal Democrats, unusually for Westminster, are fairly close challengers. This ward unlike its neighbours crosses the Marylebone Road and includes the eponymous railway station and its immediate surrounds. There is a coherent Labour vote in the other two named wards and both have been treated fairly seriously by the party in the past. St James's has some very wealthy residents amongst its palace, luxury hotels and gentlemen's clubs (I use that expression in its traditional sense), but also includes the Westminster section of the more mixed Covent Garden area, and Pimlico North is fairly socially mixed although again its houses tend towards the seriously upmarket even by the very high standards of this area. One ward was split between Labour and the Conservatives in the last local elections in 2022, Vincent Square, which is not dissimilar to Pimlico North but perhaps has a slightly higher council estate element. The ward was targeted unsuccessfully by Labour in 2018 but they were able to win 2 of the 3 seats four years later. Rather remarkably, the remaining Westminster wards in the constituency as it stands, Pimlico South, West End and most remarkably of all Hyde Park, were all won by Labour in 2022, though none of them by large majorities. Pimlico South in various previous forms has often had Labour councillors in the past, and features a major postwar council estate, Churchill Gardens, which does not generally follow the politics of the eponymous former Prime Minister. It comes as a surprise that some privately-built housing in Westminster was once of very poor, even slum, quality, but that was the case with some of the 19th-century terraces which were replaced here, mostly because of German wartime bombing. While what is now Pimlico South has a fairly long Labour heritage, West End in contrast was never regarded as anything but a totally safe Tory ward until recently. Labour amidst the gloom of their failed 2018 attempt to gain control of Westminster council managed a historic inaugural gain of a seat in the ward, which was consolidated into a clear outright victory in 2022; however, the Tories regained a seat comfortably but not overwhelmingly in a council by-election not long after the 2024 general election. This is a geographically large ward as so much of its acreage is commercial rather than residential. It takes in Soho, Chinatown, Mayfair, Oxford Street and surrounds, plus the Westminster element (a minority most would say) of Fitzrovia. It comes as a surprise, walking through much of this territory particularly Mayfair, that this area could possibly be represented by Labour councillors, but there is the odd smattering of social housing here and there, and some privately rented housing of less than luxurious quality. The Tories did not do their cause any good in 2018, in a ward containing Soho, by fielding a candidate who declared that gay sex was sinful, and promptly lost. Hyde Park however was the Labour gain that seemed to top them all. This ward was the base of the nationally (in)famous former Tory leader of the council, Lady Shirley Porter. Facing opposite the eponymous park close to Marble Arch and Speaker's Corner, it is replete with mostly very expensive privately-built houses and flats of varied vintage, with only a small number of more modest dwellings (amongst which perhaps could be counted the Park West flats overlooking the Edgware Road, and some dwellings closer towards Paddington Station), and almost no social housing at all. But again many of the wealthier properties are occupied by foreign nationals who cannot vote, and the Tories to some extent signed their own political death-warrant in the wards overlooking Hyde Park by their incompetent handling of the Marble Arch Mound fiasco. Labour's narrow outright victory is even more extraordinary when one considers that the party did not even contest the ward in the 2010 elections, this being along with Knightsbridge & Belgravia the only London ward not to be contested by Labour in that election. Even in the 2022 local elections, when Labour gained so much ground in the Westminster wards, the Tories did retain a lead over Labour in this majority part of the constituency; but in the 2024 general election, Labour squeezed the Liberal Democrat vote very hard to ensure that they built up the small lead they needed to win the seat. The Lib Dems suffered a 17% drop in their share of the vote, one of the very highest anywhere, despite a voluble (but pretty much solo) campaign by their candidate Edward Lucas; the Green vote rose by over 5%, but the net effect of this was a rise in Labour's share of fully 10%, very high by inner London standards in 2024. The Tories will note that ReformUK managed 2,752 votes, and comfortably saved their deposit in what would generally not be regarded as very fertile territory for them; this was very slightly higher than the eventual Labour majority, which nevertheless was not exactly a really narrow one given that this was Labour's first-ever win in the constituency. Only a very small part of the seat around Paddington has ever had a Labour MP before.
To all of this, after a major rethink by the Boundary Commission, were added the Westminster wards of Abbey Road and Regent's Park, the latter in particular being a logical addition to the existing seat. Regent's Park ward in Westminster is a major political contrast with its Labour-voting namesake in neighbouring Camden, which lies within Sir Keir Starmer's constituency. The Westminster majority of the park includes its best-known elements, including London Zoo. Overlooking the park are some villas of huge opulence, but the Conservatives enjoy strong support in the often elegant 19th- and 20th-century apartments the other side of the canal too. There is a fair-sized Jewish community in this area, although Jewish residents can be found scattered around pretty much all of the existing constituency. There is a Labour vote, particularly within the council-estate minority in the ward, but Labour has fallen well short in its recent attempts to break through here, even in their very good year of 2022. Abbey Road ward, the only part of the constituency which will now seem to be not really in central London and to have something of a suburban character, albeit a very graceful and partly 19th-century suburban character, includes the rest of the St John's Wood community, the majority of which is very well-to-do albeit with small pockets of relative deprivation. The ward has very little social housing. It has two particularly well-known sights, Lord's Cricket Ground which is still regarded as the worldwide headquarters of the game, and the famous recording studio where groundbreaking records by artists very much including the Beatles have been made. The zebra crossing close to the studio (which in fact has been moved a few feet since) was of course immortalised on the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover. For a number of years, Abbey Road was quite a bit safer for the Conservatives than Regent's Park, but this is no longer the case as while Labour at best flatlined in Regent's Park in the 2022 local elections they ate quite a bit into the Conservative majority here. The ward has a coherent Labour vote, though the Tories still won comfortably enough in 2022. The addition of these two wards added quite a bit to the notional Conservative majority, and probably added over one per cent to the swing required for Labour to win Cities of London and Westminster overall. Labour's hope was that working the wards harder than before could yield additional support, and bearing in mind the overall result it seems likely that the party came close to nullifying the Conservative lead in them, though it is probably more likely than not that the Tories still enjoyed a very slight plurality over Labour in these two wards.
Cities of London and Westminster does not have a pro-Labour heritage. This was a totally safe Conservative seat for many years, and some elements of the Conservative vote, as in neighbouring seats in Kensington & Chelsea, are extremely wealthy and remain very difficult to convert away from their usual voting habits. It was reasonable to surmise that the swing to Labour might turn out to be quite a bit less than the national average, for this and other reasons, but in the end at 9% it was not that far off the national average after all, so voraciously did Labour eat into the previously high Liberal Democrat vote, an attack which met little resistance, really. Even in 2019, when Labour was beaten into third place, the swing from Labour to Conservative was still well below the national average, and Labour thus required a relatively modest swing of around 7% after the boundary change, which in the end proved fairly comfortably within their capabilities. Thus fell one of the very few remaining inner city Tory seats in Britain, and none now remain except to an extent Leicester East. The 2019 victor, Nickie Aiken of the Conservatives, decided not to stand for re-election, and this will not have particularly helped the Conservative cause either. The inaugural Labour MP is Rachel Blake, former Deputy Mayor of Tower Hamlets. This remains a marginal, but Labour's majority is not a tiny one, and the seat will be very keenly fought when the next election comes around.
