Post by andrewp on Dec 13, 2023 12:03:02 GMT
With credit to greenhert for the original profile here
About half of the length of the long rugged Northern coastline of Cornwall is contained within the North Cornwall constituency. It’s a geographically large constituency- it’s about 45 miles, or over an hour in travelling time, from South West to North East and parts of this constituency feel a long way from the A30 trunk road and onward transportation.
North Cornwall has existed as a constituency since 1918, and although its boundaries have been tweaked several times, the towns of Launceston, Wadebridge and Bude have always been in its boundaries. The most significant boundary change came in 1983 when Bodmin, Cornwall's county town in the 19th and early 20th centuries (today it is the city of Truro; formerly it was Launceston), was moved from the eponymous constituency of Bodmin, renamed South East Cornwall that year.
Bodmin, ( population 17000) and nestling on low ground near the famous Bodmin Moor, was notable as the site of two notable Cornish rebellions during Tudor times. The most famous was Michael An Gof's rebellion of 1497 when an army of Cornishmen reached Blackheath before being defeated by a 25,000 strong army led by Baron Daubney in defence of King Henry VII. There was also the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, when Edward VI (via the Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour) imposed a Prayer Book on an area then known for strong Catholic loyalty and which had been hit particularly hard by earlier taxes. Bodmin is today known for historic sites and an unusually large Masonic lodge.
The other 2 inland towns are Launceston ( population 8400 and pronounced Lansun by locals) a hilly town off the A30 and dominated by a castle, and Wadebridge ( population 8000) which is situated on the River Camel and is probably the centre of the North Cornwall area as the former administrative centre of the now abolished North Cornwall District council area. The Cornwall Showground, site of the annual Royal Cornwall show is at Wadebridge.
A trip along the coast here takes us through many popular holiday destinations. The long coastline of this constituency starts in the West at Mawgan Porth. Travelling eastwards, the first settlement of note that we reach is Padstow on the River Camel. Padstow is a lovely old fishing port that has become trendy over recent years and is the home to a number of fish restaurant owned by the chef Rick Stein, and which has led to the town acquiring the nickname Padstein. Crossing the Camel Estuary from Padstow ( foot passengers only please, those in the car face a lengthy trip around the estuary via Wadebridge) we arrive at Rock, an exclusive village popular as a second home spot including for Gordon Ramsay. In Rock your friendly estate agent can currently offer you a very ordinary 2 bedroom bungalow for £600,000 or a building plot for £1.1 million. Leaving Rock, we move on through the popular holiday village of Polzeath and onto the fishing village of Port Isaac, perhaps most familiar to some as Portwenn, the setting for the ITV series Doc Martin. Travelling further eastwards we reach Boscastle, a village set in a valley and perhaps, sadly, best known for a flood in August 2004 when a torrent of water washed down the valley and through the village. No lives were lost but millions of pounds of damage was done to property. The final, and most North easterly, stop of our coastal trip is the town of Bude ( population 7.300) a resort town with a big sandy beach. Above the beach on a headland is a branch of sainsburys which must be a contender for the nicest supermarket location in England and whose plastic tunnel to keep customers and trolleys sheltered from the elements on the headland, has acquired a tongue in cheek reputation as one of the towns top tourist attractions thanks to trip advisor reviews.
Cornwall last elected councillors in the good Conservative year of 2021 and councillors currently in this constituency are 6 Conservatives, 5 Liberal Democrats, 3 Independent and 1 Independent Conservative. The Liberal Democrat strength in this constituency is particularly in the towns of Bodmin and Bude. The Conservatives are generally stronger in the coastal areas
As you would expect for a coastal constituency in Cornwall, there is an older population here. 26.2% of the population are aged over 65 ( 58th highest in England and Wales) and there are a relatively low number of younger people ( rank 535th in England and Wales for the 16-24 age group and 537th for the number of students) There is no large industry here, and the constituency ranks 1st of all constituencies in England and Wales for the percentage of people working for small employers. Qualification levels are somewhat below average and it is 97.3% white.
The constituency is slightly undersized at present so is topped up my moving westwards slightly and including about 5,000 voters in St Columb Major on the edge of Newquay. This doesnt make much difference to the political balance of the constituency. Many a sigh of relief will probably be heard in the area over the outcomes of these boundary changes. In a previous review where boundaries were drawn up for a 600 seat House of Commons one of the most controversial recommendations affected this area. On the principles used in that review, Cornwall would have been entitled to about 5.5 parliamentary constituencies so would have had to share ( shock horror) one constituency with Devon. This would have involved voters in this constituency being placed in a constituency also including Torrington across the border in Devon, in what was quickly nicknamed Devonwall. This would probably have led to half the votes being counted face up and half face down and thats before they had even started discussing the sweet refreshments for the count……..
North Cornwall is one of, if not, the longest continuous Liberal versus Conservative marginal constituencies in the country, having been competitive between those 2 parties since the 1920s. There is a liberal tradition here. The wining party has won by fewer than 2,000 votes no fewer than 11 times and the majority has only reached five figures twice- for the Liberal Democrats in 1997 and then for the Conservatives in 2019. The Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have held this constituency for a total of 63 years across 4 spells and the constituency has changed hands between those two parties as many as seven times since its creation.
Notable MPs for this constituency include Sir Francis Dyke Acland, Bt., Tom Horabin, who defected to Labour in 1947 and stood for Labour in Exeter in 1950, James Scott-Hopkins, who served as a Conservative MEP for 15 years after he retired from West Derbyshire (where he was elected in 1967 after losing this seat in 1966), and John Pardoe, Deputy Leader of the Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe. The current MP is Scott Mann, who won the seat in 2015 from the Liberal Democrats' Dan Rogerson on a 10% swing. The old Cornish liberal tradition is apparently fading away and in 2019, following Mr Rogerson's departure from the parliamentary scene here, the Liberal Democrats dropped to 30.8%, their lowest ever vote share in this constituency, and the Conservative majority shot up to 14,572. This is the only constituency in England where Labour has never finished higher than third and it usually had the weakest Labour vote in the country-Labour lost their deposit continuously in this seat from 1955 to 1983 inclusive and again did so in 2010. It also featured their joint-lowest Labour vote in England (and fifth lowest in the UK) in 2015 (5.4%), and in both 2010 and 2015 Labour finished fourth.
North Cornwall is estimated to have voted about 60% to leave the EU in 2016 and that is likely to be one of the factors that influenced the sharp swing away from the Liberal Democrat’s and to the Conservatives in 2019. Given that the party recently had a full slate of MPs from Cornwall, it is strange to think that this is now 1 of only 2 of the six Cornish constituencies where the Liberal Democrat’s achieved second place in 2019. Aside from St Ives, this is now the only even remote target for the party but a swing of 15% looks like a stiff ask even with the unpopularity of the current government. A sharp swing back to the Liberal Democrat’s as the Brexit referendum recedes into history looks likely, but the task to gain the seat in one go looks an extremely stiff one.
About half of the length of the long rugged Northern coastline of Cornwall is contained within the North Cornwall constituency. It’s a geographically large constituency- it’s about 45 miles, or over an hour in travelling time, from South West to North East and parts of this constituency feel a long way from the A30 trunk road and onward transportation.
North Cornwall has existed as a constituency since 1918, and although its boundaries have been tweaked several times, the towns of Launceston, Wadebridge and Bude have always been in its boundaries. The most significant boundary change came in 1983 when Bodmin, Cornwall's county town in the 19th and early 20th centuries (today it is the city of Truro; formerly it was Launceston), was moved from the eponymous constituency of Bodmin, renamed South East Cornwall that year.
Bodmin, ( population 17000) and nestling on low ground near the famous Bodmin Moor, was notable as the site of two notable Cornish rebellions during Tudor times. The most famous was Michael An Gof's rebellion of 1497 when an army of Cornishmen reached Blackheath before being defeated by a 25,000 strong army led by Baron Daubney in defence of King Henry VII. There was also the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, when Edward VI (via the Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour) imposed a Prayer Book on an area then known for strong Catholic loyalty and which had been hit particularly hard by earlier taxes. Bodmin is today known for historic sites and an unusually large Masonic lodge.
The other 2 inland towns are Launceston ( population 8400 and pronounced Lansun by locals) a hilly town off the A30 and dominated by a castle, and Wadebridge ( population 8000) which is situated on the River Camel and is probably the centre of the North Cornwall area as the former administrative centre of the now abolished North Cornwall District council area. The Cornwall Showground, site of the annual Royal Cornwall show is at Wadebridge.
A trip along the coast here takes us through many popular holiday destinations. The long coastline of this constituency starts in the West at Mawgan Porth. Travelling eastwards, the first settlement of note that we reach is Padstow on the River Camel. Padstow is a lovely old fishing port that has become trendy over recent years and is the home to a number of fish restaurant owned by the chef Rick Stein, and which has led to the town acquiring the nickname Padstein. Crossing the Camel Estuary from Padstow ( foot passengers only please, those in the car face a lengthy trip around the estuary via Wadebridge) we arrive at Rock, an exclusive village popular as a second home spot including for Gordon Ramsay. In Rock your friendly estate agent can currently offer you a very ordinary 2 bedroom bungalow for £600,000 or a building plot for £1.1 million. Leaving Rock, we move on through the popular holiday village of Polzeath and onto the fishing village of Port Isaac, perhaps most familiar to some as Portwenn, the setting for the ITV series Doc Martin. Travelling further eastwards we reach Boscastle, a village set in a valley and perhaps, sadly, best known for a flood in August 2004 when a torrent of water washed down the valley and through the village. No lives were lost but millions of pounds of damage was done to property. The final, and most North easterly, stop of our coastal trip is the town of Bude ( population 7.300) a resort town with a big sandy beach. Above the beach on a headland is a branch of sainsburys which must be a contender for the nicest supermarket location in England and whose plastic tunnel to keep customers and trolleys sheltered from the elements on the headland, has acquired a tongue in cheek reputation as one of the towns top tourist attractions thanks to trip advisor reviews.
Cornwall last elected councillors in the good Conservative year of 2021 and councillors currently in this constituency are 6 Conservatives, 5 Liberal Democrats, 3 Independent and 1 Independent Conservative. The Liberal Democrat strength in this constituency is particularly in the towns of Bodmin and Bude. The Conservatives are generally stronger in the coastal areas
As you would expect for a coastal constituency in Cornwall, there is an older population here. 26.2% of the population are aged over 65 ( 58th highest in England and Wales) and there are a relatively low number of younger people ( rank 535th in England and Wales for the 16-24 age group and 537th for the number of students) There is no large industry here, and the constituency ranks 1st of all constituencies in England and Wales for the percentage of people working for small employers. Qualification levels are somewhat below average and it is 97.3% white.
The constituency is slightly undersized at present so is topped up my moving westwards slightly and including about 5,000 voters in St Columb Major on the edge of Newquay. This doesnt make much difference to the political balance of the constituency. Many a sigh of relief will probably be heard in the area over the outcomes of these boundary changes. In a previous review where boundaries were drawn up for a 600 seat House of Commons one of the most controversial recommendations affected this area. On the principles used in that review, Cornwall would have been entitled to about 5.5 parliamentary constituencies so would have had to share ( shock horror) one constituency with Devon. This would have involved voters in this constituency being placed in a constituency also including Torrington across the border in Devon, in what was quickly nicknamed Devonwall. This would probably have led to half the votes being counted face up and half face down and thats before they had even started discussing the sweet refreshments for the count……..
North Cornwall is one of, if not, the longest continuous Liberal versus Conservative marginal constituencies in the country, having been competitive between those 2 parties since the 1920s. There is a liberal tradition here. The wining party has won by fewer than 2,000 votes no fewer than 11 times and the majority has only reached five figures twice- for the Liberal Democrats in 1997 and then for the Conservatives in 2019. The Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have held this constituency for a total of 63 years across 4 spells and the constituency has changed hands between those two parties as many as seven times since its creation.
Notable MPs for this constituency include Sir Francis Dyke Acland, Bt., Tom Horabin, who defected to Labour in 1947 and stood for Labour in Exeter in 1950, James Scott-Hopkins, who served as a Conservative MEP for 15 years after he retired from West Derbyshire (where he was elected in 1967 after losing this seat in 1966), and John Pardoe, Deputy Leader of the Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe. The current MP is Scott Mann, who won the seat in 2015 from the Liberal Democrats' Dan Rogerson on a 10% swing. The old Cornish liberal tradition is apparently fading away and in 2019, following Mr Rogerson's departure from the parliamentary scene here, the Liberal Democrats dropped to 30.8%, their lowest ever vote share in this constituency, and the Conservative majority shot up to 14,572. This is the only constituency in England where Labour has never finished higher than third and it usually had the weakest Labour vote in the country-Labour lost their deposit continuously in this seat from 1955 to 1983 inclusive and again did so in 2010. It also featured their joint-lowest Labour vote in England (and fifth lowest in the UK) in 2015 (5.4%), and in both 2010 and 2015 Labour finished fourth.
North Cornwall is estimated to have voted about 60% to leave the EU in 2016 and that is likely to be one of the factors that influenced the sharp swing away from the Liberal Democrat’s and to the Conservatives in 2019. Given that the party recently had a full slate of MPs from Cornwall, it is strange to think that this is now 1 of only 2 of the six Cornish constituencies where the Liberal Democrat’s achieved second place in 2019. Aside from St Ives, this is now the only even remote target for the party but a swing of 15% looks like a stiff ask even with the unpopularity of the current government. A sharp swing back to the Liberal Democrat’s as the Brexit referendum recedes into history looks likely, but the task to gain the seat in one go looks an extremely stiff one.
