Post by batman on Dec 13, 2023 16:28:47 GMT
Edited to take the 2024 election result into account.
KENSINGTON AND BAYSWATER
This new constituency is not the first cross-borough seat to take in areas from the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and the City of Westminster; but while it has quite a bit in common with the Regent's Park and Kensington North seat which existed between 1997 and 2010 it has considerable differences too. This new seat does not include the most strongly Tory wards currently included in Westminster North, but does include a lot more of the Tory heartlands of Kensington, pretty much none of which were included in RPKN. This is a socially mixed and potentially finely-balanced seat, but is very slightly more Labour-inclined than the outgoing Kensington was. Labour started with, according to most authoritative sources, a very small notional lead here, but had to make do with only a small positive swing, despite the Labour share of the vote rising, which was not the case in quite a number of inner London constituencies in 2024. This is unquestionably a marginal, and will be generally be expected to be a low-swing seat.
Kensington must surely be one of the most socially polarised areas anywhere in Britain, quite possibly the most polarised. When the old Borough of Kensington had two small constituencies of its own, Labour after WWII always won North, invariably except in 1959 by comfortable if not large majorities, but the Conservatives always trounced their opponents in South, then as now an area ranging mainly from very prosperous to actually plutocratic, with very few more deprived enclaves mostly to be found in parts of Earl's Court where there is a little social housing in between the private apartments and houses. South was consistently one of the very safest Tory seats in the land in percentage terms. (This writer is acquainted with the unfortunate Labour candidate in the 1968 by-election, who finished a painfully distant third and who has lived in Richmond-upon-Thames for many years.) Once the two seats were united in 1974, or 1973 for GLC/ILEA elections, the Tory lead in the south of the new seat was always enough to outstrip the Labour lead in the north, although in good Labour years not by very much; this was despite some parts of the former Kensington South, mostly Earl's Court and Brompton, being instead included in the Chelsea constituency. After 13 years of alternative arrangements as described above, the unified Kensington constituency reappeared in 2010, but this time including Earl's Court and Brompton, the latter area, which includes Harrods, being if anything even wealthier than the rest of the southern part of the seat, though the distinction is a rather fine one. This seat was therefore regarded as totally secure for the Conservatives, who had a nationally famous MP, former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for the first five years of the revived seat's existence until his term ended under a cloud in 2015. He was succeeded by the far more obscure Lady Victoria Borwick, and not many people were prepared for the shock which came in the 2017 general election, when despite the boundaries being drawn less in their favour than between 1974 and 1997 Labour, in one of the biggest upsets of the election in terms of their gains rather than their losses (main rivals were Canterbury and Portsmouth South), on a large swing gained the unified Kensington seat for the first time ever. There is some evidence that, while Labour must still have been well behind the Conservatives in the southern eight or so wards in the seat, some habitual Conservative voters switched to the Liberal Democrats as a mostly anti-Brexit - this was a strongly Remain area - protest vote, particularly in the least Labour-inclined areas; certainly, during that campaign Lib Dem posters were much in evidence in traditionally heavily Tory parts of Kensington and South Kensington. In the southern portion of the seat, which forms a majority of its population, only in Holland & Pembridge wards are Labour even on the fringes of being competitive with the Tories, the other wards having Tory leads over Labour which range from merely comfortable to overwhelming. The anomalous ward is Earl's Court, once renowned as a centre of Australian residency in London but nowadays much less so. This is mostly prosperous but a little less overwhelmingly so than its neighbours in Kensington and Chelsea. It is currently shared (uniquely in the borough) between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, with Labour having a decent share in third place. The wards where the Tories enjoy larger leads over Labour are Abingdon, Campden, Norland (all in Kensington itself mostly), Courtfield, Queen's Gate and Brompton and Hans Town (mostly in the South Kensington community). Speculation that Labour might have a chance in Norland ward in the last two council elections proved very wide of the mark; it is drawn nowadays even less in favour of Labour than it used to be. This territory is mostly extremely wealthy, and ancestrally Tory, and it is remarkable that it was in a Labour seat at a time when Labour was still unable to form a government. The prevailing architecture is white 19th-century elegant townhouses, some divided into flats, many remaining as single residences, some streets perhaps being slightly reminiscent of a landlocked version of the more elegant parts of Brighton and Hove. There are many people from wealthy middle Eastern backgrounds but also White Other residents in executive positions: South Kensington has in the past been nicknamed Saudi Kensington, but if anything its remarkably large French population is more notable today. French voters, attracted by the presence of the Lycée Francais for partly Francophone education of their children, appear from French election results to be somewhat left of centre despite their very highly-paid jobs, but these voters, unless naturalised which most are not, cannot of course cast their ballots in Westminster elections. This constituency is one of several in and around central London where there are many residents who are not naturalised and therefore cannot vote to elect an MP here.
The former Kensington North constituency, as its run of unbroken Labour victories would suggest, is a very different matter. As with many other inner London areas, the years of WWII wrought major social changes, and here the 19th-century villas became much less favoured by the wealthy than their counterparts slightly further south. From the late 1940s onwards a large Caribbean community soon took root, prompting pre-war British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley to stand here in the 1959 general election for his Union Movement (very definitely not the TUC). Although many of these residents & their descendants moved a little further afield, this community remains, alongside other minority communities such as from parts of the Middle East, and a remaining White British population which itself is very socially mixed. The Notting Hill Carnival remains as a celebration of the Caribbean community's culture. These areas are variously known as North Kensington or Notting Hill (Notting Hill Gate underground station, however, lies much further south, closer to central Kensington though somewhat north of the town centre), with one smaller district still occasionally known as Kensal Town. There has long been substantial deprivation in parts of North Kensington, movingly described in his books by Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary, who grew up in what is now Golborne ward (in fact, it was then, too) in grinding poverty in an already-condemned council flat. The condemned flats and slums have gone but much deprivation still remains. Not only in Golborne but also in the present-day Dalgarno and Notting Dale wards Labour can rack up very large percentage majorities over the Tories in local elections. Roughly since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, there has been a little re-gentrification in parts, especially in St Helens ward (known as the former home of David Cameron) which lies north of the A40 former motorway, and in Colville ward which lies to its south. St Helens has been won by Labour in the last two council elections but still had Conservative councillors until 2018. Colville, parts of which physically look more elegant than for example Golborne, is not good territory for the Tories still, but the Liberal Democrats were able to beat Labour for a time there until the Coalition eventually put paid to their electoral hopes in the area. This group of five wards is a strong Labour voting block, with Labour enjoying very strong leads in at least three of them, but it is less populous than the southern part of the seat. In order to win Kensington in 2017, and come within an ace of holding on in 2019, Labour must have racked up a very large lead indeed in these five wards put together. Days after Emma Dent Coad's historic win, one of the council blocks south of the A40, close to Latimer Road tube station, Grenfell Tower, was engulfed by a huge fire which cost many lives, and it remains encased by covers and unlived-in today. She remains a councillor today, for St Helens ward, but has parted company with the Labour Party, and stood in this new constituency as an independent, polling 4.4% and although fairly narrowly losing her deposit.
For a number of reasons, despite occupying a larger acreage than the previous unified Kensington constituency, Kensington in common with some other seats close to central London had fallen below electoral quota, and in 2024 was enlarged both in its northern and its southern end. The enlargement in the southern end was modest. Until then, the Brompton and Hans Town ward, a mighty Conservative stronghold, had been split between the Kensington constituency and Chelsea & Fulham. This situation was brought to an end as its southern end has now joined this constituency, so that wealthy streets like Cadogan Square and Cadogan Place now come under Kensington and Bayswater. This certainly will have added to the Conservative tally, but this area has a modest number of voters, so that the impact, though definite, was rather slight. The addition of the word Bayswater to the constituency name is fully justified by the adding of the Lancaster Gate and Bayswater wards of the City of Westminster to the seat. Bayswater rather charmingly is named after a spring which bears the name of a monk, Bainiardus (it can be rendered in different ways sometimes). It is a mostly elegant-looking area north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens bearing, for the most part, the W2 postcode which it shares with Paddington, but that station and area mostly remains in the Cities of London and Westminster seat. The Lancaster Gate ward in the east of the Bayswater community was a long-time Conservative stronghold, but a variety of factors including a small but significant past ward boundary change have weakened its Conservative allegiance gradually, until for the first time it was able to elect Labour councillors in the 2022 local elections, the ward being shared with the Conservatives. Bayswater ward, although it lost a small council estate amongst other bits in the aforementioned boundary change, has more of a Labour heritage, and has a reputation as a rather multicultural area in recent years; however, here too there was a long unbroken sequence of Conservative local election wins until Labour finally won in 2022. Nevertheless, once the axe fell, it fell rather spectacularly, and Labour has suddenly sprouted a fairly healthy-looking majority in the ward. Although these wards still tend towards the prosperous for the most part, they are fairly socially mixed, and it was estimated that Labour, in the light of their easy retention of Westminster North in the 2019 general election, would have gained at least a small lead in the two wards put together in that election. This probably put this new constituency very slightly in the notionally-Labour column. Dent Coad's candidacy was expected by many to make the party's job potentially a bit harder, but in the end they were able to make light of it, though not with the hugest comfort.
This is another very interesting, and very mixed, seat. In days gone by the Conservatives would have expected to prevail in this mixture, which is socially predominantly not deprived or working class, despite some significant pockets which are. The Conservatives' national standing in 2024 meant that it was always going to be an uphall battle for them, though the outgoing Kensington MP Felicity Buchan was prepared to try her luck, and the swing to Labour in the end was a long way below the national average. This seat has the potential for very close contests in the future, but in the short term Labour's Joe Powell nevertheless holds a narrow but not impossibly narrow majority; although the 2024 result for Labour was underwhelming, it was still fairly comfortably their best-ever showing in these parts, and time will tell if the Tories are able to recapture this territory, much of which has been ancestrally theirs.
KENSINGTON AND BAYSWATER
This new constituency is not the first cross-borough seat to take in areas from the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and the City of Westminster; but while it has quite a bit in common with the Regent's Park and Kensington North seat which existed between 1997 and 2010 it has considerable differences too. This new seat does not include the most strongly Tory wards currently included in Westminster North, but does include a lot more of the Tory heartlands of Kensington, pretty much none of which were included in RPKN. This is a socially mixed and potentially finely-balanced seat, but is very slightly more Labour-inclined than the outgoing Kensington was. Labour started with, according to most authoritative sources, a very small notional lead here, but had to make do with only a small positive swing, despite the Labour share of the vote rising, which was not the case in quite a number of inner London constituencies in 2024. This is unquestionably a marginal, and will be generally be expected to be a low-swing seat.
Kensington must surely be one of the most socially polarised areas anywhere in Britain, quite possibly the most polarised. When the old Borough of Kensington had two small constituencies of its own, Labour after WWII always won North, invariably except in 1959 by comfortable if not large majorities, but the Conservatives always trounced their opponents in South, then as now an area ranging mainly from very prosperous to actually plutocratic, with very few more deprived enclaves mostly to be found in parts of Earl's Court where there is a little social housing in between the private apartments and houses. South was consistently one of the very safest Tory seats in the land in percentage terms. (This writer is acquainted with the unfortunate Labour candidate in the 1968 by-election, who finished a painfully distant third and who has lived in Richmond-upon-Thames for many years.) Once the two seats were united in 1974, or 1973 for GLC/ILEA elections, the Tory lead in the south of the new seat was always enough to outstrip the Labour lead in the north, although in good Labour years not by very much; this was despite some parts of the former Kensington South, mostly Earl's Court and Brompton, being instead included in the Chelsea constituency. After 13 years of alternative arrangements as described above, the unified Kensington constituency reappeared in 2010, but this time including Earl's Court and Brompton, the latter area, which includes Harrods, being if anything even wealthier than the rest of the southern part of the seat, though the distinction is a rather fine one. This seat was therefore regarded as totally secure for the Conservatives, who had a nationally famous MP, former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for the first five years of the revived seat's existence until his term ended under a cloud in 2015. He was succeeded by the far more obscure Lady Victoria Borwick, and not many people were prepared for the shock which came in the 2017 general election, when despite the boundaries being drawn less in their favour than between 1974 and 1997 Labour, in one of the biggest upsets of the election in terms of their gains rather than their losses (main rivals were Canterbury and Portsmouth South), on a large swing gained the unified Kensington seat for the first time ever. There is some evidence that, while Labour must still have been well behind the Conservatives in the southern eight or so wards in the seat, some habitual Conservative voters switched to the Liberal Democrats as a mostly anti-Brexit - this was a strongly Remain area - protest vote, particularly in the least Labour-inclined areas; certainly, during that campaign Lib Dem posters were much in evidence in traditionally heavily Tory parts of Kensington and South Kensington. In the southern portion of the seat, which forms a majority of its population, only in Holland & Pembridge wards are Labour even on the fringes of being competitive with the Tories, the other wards having Tory leads over Labour which range from merely comfortable to overwhelming. The anomalous ward is Earl's Court, once renowned as a centre of Australian residency in London but nowadays much less so. This is mostly prosperous but a little less overwhelmingly so than its neighbours in Kensington and Chelsea. It is currently shared (uniquely in the borough) between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, with Labour having a decent share in third place. The wards where the Tories enjoy larger leads over Labour are Abingdon, Campden, Norland (all in Kensington itself mostly), Courtfield, Queen's Gate and Brompton and Hans Town (mostly in the South Kensington community). Speculation that Labour might have a chance in Norland ward in the last two council elections proved very wide of the mark; it is drawn nowadays even less in favour of Labour than it used to be. This territory is mostly extremely wealthy, and ancestrally Tory, and it is remarkable that it was in a Labour seat at a time when Labour was still unable to form a government. The prevailing architecture is white 19th-century elegant townhouses, some divided into flats, many remaining as single residences, some streets perhaps being slightly reminiscent of a landlocked version of the more elegant parts of Brighton and Hove. There are many people from wealthy middle Eastern backgrounds but also White Other residents in executive positions: South Kensington has in the past been nicknamed Saudi Kensington, but if anything its remarkably large French population is more notable today. French voters, attracted by the presence of the Lycée Francais for partly Francophone education of their children, appear from French election results to be somewhat left of centre despite their very highly-paid jobs, but these voters, unless naturalised which most are not, cannot of course cast their ballots in Westminster elections. This constituency is one of several in and around central London where there are many residents who are not naturalised and therefore cannot vote to elect an MP here.
The former Kensington North constituency, as its run of unbroken Labour victories would suggest, is a very different matter. As with many other inner London areas, the years of WWII wrought major social changes, and here the 19th-century villas became much less favoured by the wealthy than their counterparts slightly further south. From the late 1940s onwards a large Caribbean community soon took root, prompting pre-war British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley to stand here in the 1959 general election for his Union Movement (very definitely not the TUC). Although many of these residents & their descendants moved a little further afield, this community remains, alongside other minority communities such as from parts of the Middle East, and a remaining White British population which itself is very socially mixed. The Notting Hill Carnival remains as a celebration of the Caribbean community's culture. These areas are variously known as North Kensington or Notting Hill (Notting Hill Gate underground station, however, lies much further south, closer to central Kensington though somewhat north of the town centre), with one smaller district still occasionally known as Kensal Town. There has long been substantial deprivation in parts of North Kensington, movingly described in his books by Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary, who grew up in what is now Golborne ward (in fact, it was then, too) in grinding poverty in an already-condemned council flat. The condemned flats and slums have gone but much deprivation still remains. Not only in Golborne but also in the present-day Dalgarno and Notting Dale wards Labour can rack up very large percentage majorities over the Tories in local elections. Roughly since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, there has been a little re-gentrification in parts, especially in St Helens ward (known as the former home of David Cameron) which lies north of the A40 former motorway, and in Colville ward which lies to its south. St Helens has been won by Labour in the last two council elections but still had Conservative councillors until 2018. Colville, parts of which physically look more elegant than for example Golborne, is not good territory for the Tories still, but the Liberal Democrats were able to beat Labour for a time there until the Coalition eventually put paid to their electoral hopes in the area. This group of five wards is a strong Labour voting block, with Labour enjoying very strong leads in at least three of them, but it is less populous than the southern part of the seat. In order to win Kensington in 2017, and come within an ace of holding on in 2019, Labour must have racked up a very large lead indeed in these five wards put together. Days after Emma Dent Coad's historic win, one of the council blocks south of the A40, close to Latimer Road tube station, Grenfell Tower, was engulfed by a huge fire which cost many lives, and it remains encased by covers and unlived-in today. She remains a councillor today, for St Helens ward, but has parted company with the Labour Party, and stood in this new constituency as an independent, polling 4.4% and although fairly narrowly losing her deposit.
For a number of reasons, despite occupying a larger acreage than the previous unified Kensington constituency, Kensington in common with some other seats close to central London had fallen below electoral quota, and in 2024 was enlarged both in its northern and its southern end. The enlargement in the southern end was modest. Until then, the Brompton and Hans Town ward, a mighty Conservative stronghold, had been split between the Kensington constituency and Chelsea & Fulham. This situation was brought to an end as its southern end has now joined this constituency, so that wealthy streets like Cadogan Square and Cadogan Place now come under Kensington and Bayswater. This certainly will have added to the Conservative tally, but this area has a modest number of voters, so that the impact, though definite, was rather slight. The addition of the word Bayswater to the constituency name is fully justified by the adding of the Lancaster Gate and Bayswater wards of the City of Westminster to the seat. Bayswater rather charmingly is named after a spring which bears the name of a monk, Bainiardus (it can be rendered in different ways sometimes). It is a mostly elegant-looking area north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens bearing, for the most part, the W2 postcode which it shares with Paddington, but that station and area mostly remains in the Cities of London and Westminster seat. The Lancaster Gate ward in the east of the Bayswater community was a long-time Conservative stronghold, but a variety of factors including a small but significant past ward boundary change have weakened its Conservative allegiance gradually, until for the first time it was able to elect Labour councillors in the 2022 local elections, the ward being shared with the Conservatives. Bayswater ward, although it lost a small council estate amongst other bits in the aforementioned boundary change, has more of a Labour heritage, and has a reputation as a rather multicultural area in recent years; however, here too there was a long unbroken sequence of Conservative local election wins until Labour finally won in 2022. Nevertheless, once the axe fell, it fell rather spectacularly, and Labour has suddenly sprouted a fairly healthy-looking majority in the ward. Although these wards still tend towards the prosperous for the most part, they are fairly socially mixed, and it was estimated that Labour, in the light of their easy retention of Westminster North in the 2019 general election, would have gained at least a small lead in the two wards put together in that election. This probably put this new constituency very slightly in the notionally-Labour column. Dent Coad's candidacy was expected by many to make the party's job potentially a bit harder, but in the end they were able to make light of it, though not with the hugest comfort.
This is another very interesting, and very mixed, seat. In days gone by the Conservatives would have expected to prevail in this mixture, which is socially predominantly not deprived or working class, despite some significant pockets which are. The Conservatives' national standing in 2024 meant that it was always going to be an uphall battle for them, though the outgoing Kensington MP Felicity Buchan was prepared to try her luck, and the swing to Labour in the end was a long way below the national average. This seat has the potential for very close contests in the future, but in the short term Labour's Joe Powell nevertheless holds a narrow but not impossibly narrow majority; although the 2024 result for Labour was underwhelming, it was still fairly comfortably their best-ever showing in these parts, and time will tell if the Tories are able to recapture this territory, much of which has been ancestrally theirs.
