Post by Robert Waller on Dec 21, 2023 13:31:37 GMT
This is another merger of the previous profile by andrewteale (with his kind permission) and my own additions
There are no boundary changes affecting the Wythenshawe & Sale East seat in the most recent review. It could be argued that this is a somewhat artificial creation, but it has now survived two sets of inquiries and reports (before the 2010 election and that of the Commission that completed its work in 2023), and has become an established part of the electoral scene in the southern part of Greater Manchester.
The boundary review before the 1997 general election reduced the number of seats in Manchester and Trafford from eight to seven, necessitating a seat crossing the Manchester city boundary and taking in part of Trafford. The result was the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. On the Trafford side of the boundary line is three-fifths of Sale, a town which is dominated by straight lines radiating from Manchester. To the west is the old Roman road from Chester to York, now the A56 and the constituency boundary; in the middle is the Bridgewater Canal; and next to the canal is the Altrincham branch of Manchester's Metrolink tram network.
The Metrolink opened in 1992, taking over a railway line which had existed since 1849 and had turned Sale into a middle-class commuter area. Sale's middle-classness can be inferred not just from its housing but from its sports. The building of a motorway along the Mersey valley between Sale and Stretford led to a large gravel pit being excavated, which was flooded and turned into Sale Water Park, a watersports centre. The Sale Harriers athletics club is long-established and produced the sprinter Darren Campbell, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics as part of the GB sprint relay team. But in possibly the ultimate indication of poshness in the North West, Sale supports a professional rugby union team, Sale Sharks, although due to the lack of a good venue in the town they now play on the other side of the Ship Canal in the new Salford City Stadium at Barton-upon-Irwell. Probably Sale's most famous resident is the physicist James Joule, after whom the SI unit of energy is named; Joule is buried in Brooklands Cemetery.
Nonetheless, the Sale section (23,400 electors) is outvoted by Wythenshawe (around 53,500), 11 square miles of council housing built by the City of Manchester from the 1920s as an overspill estate. Wythenshawe is one of the stronger candidates for the perennially contested title of "Europe's largest council estate". Effectively, it's a municipal New Town. Intended as a garden city-type development to attract skilled workers, Wythenshawe turned out to be the exact opposite; it says something that much of the Channel 4 series Shameless was filmed here. There is some local employment from the large Sharston Industrial Estate and from Wythenshawe Hospital, a large teaching hospital associated with Manchester University. However, one of Wythenshawe's wards (Benchill ward, since abolished in boundary changes) came in right at the bottom of the 2000 English indices of multiple deprivation, and the other wards aren't much better.
In the small area details of the 2021 census the internal variation within Wythenshawe & Sale East may be quantified. In the household deprivation statistics, there is a range from Sale Central MSOA, which has only 40.8% household with any form of deprivation and Sale East (only 39.7%) through Sale Moor (49.9%) to Northenden (50.9%), Woodhouse Park (& Airport (but there aren’t many voters in the airport itself) 64.2% and most of all, Benchill South & Wythenshawe Central MSOA - at 68.3%, one of the three highest rates in any in Manchester. Benchill South & Wythenshawe Central (mainly in Sharston ward now) also has the highest proportion still living in social rented housing, at over 66%; in most of Wythenshawe the figure was just under 50% in 2021, but only 18% in Northenden, 24% in Sale Moor and a mere 6 to 7% in the rest of Sale. The occupational class range is substantial. In Sale Central over half (52%) work in professional and managerial jobs, but in the whole of the Wythenshawe estate that figure is less than 25% and in Benchill and the heart of the estate under 20%. In the Wythenshawe section residents with no educational qualifications consistently number between 25% and 30%, in Sale Central and Sale East over half have degrees, in the former 55%.
One thing you might notice from the map of the constituency's wards is that Woodhouse Park ward is much larger than the rest. The ward's population is actually concentrated in the northern corner; the rest of the area (forming the city of Manchester's only parish, Ringway) is almost completely filled by the buildings, apron and one of the runways of Manchester Airport, Britain's third busiest airport and busiest outside London. The Manchester Airport Group - which in recent years has expanded outside the city to take over East Midlands and London Stansted airports - underpins the constituency's economy in more ways than the obvious one, as Manchester city council is the airport's largest shareholder with a 35.5% stake. The dividends paid by the airport to Manchester and the other nine Greater Manchester boroughs have proved a very useful source of income for the conurbation's local government.
The airport is the best-connected location in a constituency criss-crossed by motorways. The constituency's only railway station is located there, and in recent years the Metrolink people have opened a new tram line connecting Wythenshawe with the airport, Sale Water Park and Manchester beyond. Trams on this route start at the very early time of 4 a.m., in order to get the airport's morning shift into work. High Speed 2 was planned to include a Manchester Airport station.
Being on the south side of the Mersey, the whole of this constituency was originally part of Cheshire, and until the Second World War it) was part of the Altrincham constituency which was as safe Tory as you might expect. The growth of Wythenshawe meant that by 1935 Altrincham was twice the size of every other seat in Cheshire; in the general election of that year the Tory candidate, journalist, First World War hero and former Governor of Kenya Lt-Col Sir Edward Grigg, polled over 50,000 votes to 21-and-a-half thousand for Labour. Unsurprisingly this was one of the seats which was split up in the interim 1945 boundary review, with Sale becoming part of the new Altrincham and Sale constituency (which has basically persisted ever since, although with less and less of Sale as time has gone on) and Wythenshawe going into the short-lived Bucklow constituency along with such middle-class towns as Cheadle, Hale and Lymm and a significant rural area (the Bucklow Rural District). In the '45 election Bucklow was comfortably Conservative, returning new MP Lt. William Shepherd, director of Manchester Chamber of Commerce and recently returned from the campaign in France, Belgium and the Netherlands; he defeated the Labour candidate by 30165 votes to 22497.
Wythenshawe finally got a seat of its own (as Manchester Wythenshawe) for the 1950 general election. Shepherd moved to the new seat of Cheadle, leaving Manchester city councillor and catering firm manager Eveline Hill to defend Wythenshawe for the Tories; and defend it she did, surviving adverse boundary changes in 1955 to hold her increasingly marginal seat until 1964. This wasn't because Wythenshawe was a particularly Tory area (far from it) but because the seat as then drawn included the rich and (at the time) strongly Conservative suburb of Didsbury on the other side of the Mersey.
The Labour candidate who defeated Hill was Alf Morris, brother of another Labour MP for Manchester and uncle of Estelle Morris, an Education secretary under Tony Blair. Having seen his father die a long and lingering death as a result of First World War injuries (losing a leg and a eye, and being gassed), Morris became a tireless campaigner for disability rights: in 1970 he successfully negotiated through Parliament the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, the world's first legislation giving rights to the disabled, and in 1974 Morris was appointed by Wilson as the world's first ever Minister for the Disabled. After his first election, Morris was never seriously threatened at the ballot box and bequeathed a large majority upon his retirement in 1997.
That large majority was inherited by Paul Goggins, a Salford city councillor whose career had been in childcare and children's charities, and who claimed to have been from the family which inspired the character of Mrs Goggins in the Postman Pat stories. With Labour now in government nationally Goggins got onto the junior ministerial ladder, serving in the Home Office as prisons minister and later in the Northern Ireland office.
Paul Goggins died aged just 60 at the start of 2014, after collapsing while running. The resulting by-election in February 2014 safely returned new Labour candidate Mike Kane, who is very much from the same mould as Goggins: history in local government (in this case Manchester city council), Roman Catholic, Man City fan. Like Goggins, Kane has gone down the ministerial route, although in a shadow capacity; he was the shadow schools minister throughout the Corbyn era, and Keir Starmer has appointed Kane as a shadow minister for regional transport.
Kane's majority has been above 10,000 votes in all three general elections since the 2014 by-election, with the December 2019 general election giving him a 53-30 lead over the Conservatives. If local election results are any guide, then the local Conservatives are in trouble as they have lost their last local councillor in the constituency: in Sale's Brooklands ward, which was safely Conservative up until the EU referendum of 2016, voted Labour in 2018 for the first time ever and the party won a second seat in 2019. In May 2023 after boundary changes meant that Brooklands now has three council seats, Labour took all of them. Priory ward (covering Sale town centre) had been safe Labour since 1994 and in 2023 was replaced by a ward actually named Sale Central; Labour’s top candidate polled 63.1% compared with 21.6% for the equivalent Tory. Sale Moor is traditionally more marginal but hasn't voted Conservative since they entered government and in 2023 Labour beat them by well over two to one there too as well.
As you might expect, things are even more dire for Conservatism in Manchester. The last time the Tories won a ward within the city boundaries was in 1992; in this century they have targeted Manchester's Brooklands ward a few times but would appear to have basically given up, polling only 12% there in 2023. The other four Manchester wards within the constituency boundary were all safely Labour, until in May 2021 the Greens gained Woodhouse Park, the furthest ‘out’ or south ward – and they have repeated that success in 2022 and 2023, so they have all three of their Manchester councillors on the ward now. Labour held the other four Manchester wards in this seat with the party consistently polling between 63% and 71% - the lowest in Northenden, the highest in Sharston. The last Lib Dem holdout in Wythenshawe & Sale East in Northenden ward was defeated in 2014. In the last general election in December 2019 the LDs finished a distant third with 7.0%, and the Greens did even worse, finishing fifth with only 3.5%, behind the Brexit party. Adding up all the votes in May 2023 across the Trafford and Manchester wards within this seat, Labour were massively ahead with 58.5% to 19.6% for the Conservatives, 15.9% for the Greens and 6.1% for the Lib Dems.
It is striking that despite the great differences in occupational class and educational qualifications between the Sale wards and Wythenshawe, as time has gone by the two parts of the seat have considerably converged as the years have passed, with both preferring solidly Labour by the early 2020s. This is because of the general dealignment of class grounds for voting, increasing opposition to the Conservatives among graduates, and the effects of attitudes to the Brexit issue. Another element is the long term move away from the Tories in Greater Manchester, especially those areas closer to or within the eponymous city itself; this is not as strong as that sub-regional trend affecting Merseyside and Liverpool, but it might be noted that the neighbouring and nearby seats of Manchester Withington (and indeed Moss Side) and Stockport were won by the Conservatives well within living memory.
So it would appear that Mike Kane has a safe seat for as long as he wants it. Whether Wythenshawe can shake off its Shameless reputation by the end of his term is quite another question.
2021 Census
Age 65+ 14.7% 449/575
Owner occupied 50.5% 499/575
Private rented 16.7% 351/575
Social rented 32.8% 21/575
White 80.1% 408/575
Black 4.8% 139/575
Asian 8.3% 189/575
Managerial & professional 31.1% 324/575
Routine & Semi-routine 25.6% 220/575
Degree level 33.4% 247/575
No qualifications 20.7% 157/575
Students 6.2% 227/575
General Election 2019: Wythenshawe and Sale East
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Labour Mike Kane 23,855 53.3 -8.9
Conservative Peter Harrop 13,459 30.1 +0.5
Liberal Democrats Simon Lepori 3,111 7.0 +3.7
Brexit Party Julie Fousert 2,717 6.1 New
Green Robert Nunney 1,559 3.5 +2.2
Communist League Caroline Bellamy 58 0.1 New
Lab Majority 10,396 23.2 -9.4
2019 electorate 76,313
Turnout 44,884 58.8 -1.2
Labour hold
Swing 4.7 Lab to C
Boundary Changes and 2019 Notional results
N/A
Unchanged seat
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/north-west/North%20West_283_Wythenshawe%20and%20Sale%20East_Portrait.pdf
There are no boundary changes affecting the Wythenshawe & Sale East seat in the most recent review. It could be argued that this is a somewhat artificial creation, but it has now survived two sets of inquiries and reports (before the 2010 election and that of the Commission that completed its work in 2023), and has become an established part of the electoral scene in the southern part of Greater Manchester.
The boundary review before the 1997 general election reduced the number of seats in Manchester and Trafford from eight to seven, necessitating a seat crossing the Manchester city boundary and taking in part of Trafford. The result was the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. On the Trafford side of the boundary line is three-fifths of Sale, a town which is dominated by straight lines radiating from Manchester. To the west is the old Roman road from Chester to York, now the A56 and the constituency boundary; in the middle is the Bridgewater Canal; and next to the canal is the Altrincham branch of Manchester's Metrolink tram network.
The Metrolink opened in 1992, taking over a railway line which had existed since 1849 and had turned Sale into a middle-class commuter area. Sale's middle-classness can be inferred not just from its housing but from its sports. The building of a motorway along the Mersey valley between Sale and Stretford led to a large gravel pit being excavated, which was flooded and turned into Sale Water Park, a watersports centre. The Sale Harriers athletics club is long-established and produced the sprinter Darren Campbell, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics as part of the GB sprint relay team. But in possibly the ultimate indication of poshness in the North West, Sale supports a professional rugby union team, Sale Sharks, although due to the lack of a good venue in the town they now play on the other side of the Ship Canal in the new Salford City Stadium at Barton-upon-Irwell. Probably Sale's most famous resident is the physicist James Joule, after whom the SI unit of energy is named; Joule is buried in Brooklands Cemetery.
Nonetheless, the Sale section (23,400 electors) is outvoted by Wythenshawe (around 53,500), 11 square miles of council housing built by the City of Manchester from the 1920s as an overspill estate. Wythenshawe is one of the stronger candidates for the perennially contested title of "Europe's largest council estate". Effectively, it's a municipal New Town. Intended as a garden city-type development to attract skilled workers, Wythenshawe turned out to be the exact opposite; it says something that much of the Channel 4 series Shameless was filmed here. There is some local employment from the large Sharston Industrial Estate and from Wythenshawe Hospital, a large teaching hospital associated with Manchester University. However, one of Wythenshawe's wards (Benchill ward, since abolished in boundary changes) came in right at the bottom of the 2000 English indices of multiple deprivation, and the other wards aren't much better.
In the small area details of the 2021 census the internal variation within Wythenshawe & Sale East may be quantified. In the household deprivation statistics, there is a range from Sale Central MSOA, which has only 40.8% household with any form of deprivation and Sale East (only 39.7%) through Sale Moor (49.9%) to Northenden (50.9%), Woodhouse Park (& Airport (but there aren’t many voters in the airport itself) 64.2% and most of all, Benchill South & Wythenshawe Central MSOA - at 68.3%, one of the three highest rates in any in Manchester. Benchill South & Wythenshawe Central (mainly in Sharston ward now) also has the highest proportion still living in social rented housing, at over 66%; in most of Wythenshawe the figure was just under 50% in 2021, but only 18% in Northenden, 24% in Sale Moor and a mere 6 to 7% in the rest of Sale. The occupational class range is substantial. In Sale Central over half (52%) work in professional and managerial jobs, but in the whole of the Wythenshawe estate that figure is less than 25% and in Benchill and the heart of the estate under 20%. In the Wythenshawe section residents with no educational qualifications consistently number between 25% and 30%, in Sale Central and Sale East over half have degrees, in the former 55%.
One thing you might notice from the map of the constituency's wards is that Woodhouse Park ward is much larger than the rest. The ward's population is actually concentrated in the northern corner; the rest of the area (forming the city of Manchester's only parish, Ringway) is almost completely filled by the buildings, apron and one of the runways of Manchester Airport, Britain's third busiest airport and busiest outside London. The Manchester Airport Group - which in recent years has expanded outside the city to take over East Midlands and London Stansted airports - underpins the constituency's economy in more ways than the obvious one, as Manchester city council is the airport's largest shareholder with a 35.5% stake. The dividends paid by the airport to Manchester and the other nine Greater Manchester boroughs have proved a very useful source of income for the conurbation's local government.
The airport is the best-connected location in a constituency criss-crossed by motorways. The constituency's only railway station is located there, and in recent years the Metrolink people have opened a new tram line connecting Wythenshawe with the airport, Sale Water Park and Manchester beyond. Trams on this route start at the very early time of 4 a.m., in order to get the airport's morning shift into work. High Speed 2 was planned to include a Manchester Airport station.
Being on the south side of the Mersey, the whole of this constituency was originally part of Cheshire, and until the Second World War it) was part of the Altrincham constituency which was as safe Tory as you might expect. The growth of Wythenshawe meant that by 1935 Altrincham was twice the size of every other seat in Cheshire; in the general election of that year the Tory candidate, journalist, First World War hero and former Governor of Kenya Lt-Col Sir Edward Grigg, polled over 50,000 votes to 21-and-a-half thousand for Labour. Unsurprisingly this was one of the seats which was split up in the interim 1945 boundary review, with Sale becoming part of the new Altrincham and Sale constituency (which has basically persisted ever since, although with less and less of Sale as time has gone on) and Wythenshawe going into the short-lived Bucklow constituency along with such middle-class towns as Cheadle, Hale and Lymm and a significant rural area (the Bucklow Rural District). In the '45 election Bucklow was comfortably Conservative, returning new MP Lt. William Shepherd, director of Manchester Chamber of Commerce and recently returned from the campaign in France, Belgium and the Netherlands; he defeated the Labour candidate by 30165 votes to 22497.
Wythenshawe finally got a seat of its own (as Manchester Wythenshawe) for the 1950 general election. Shepherd moved to the new seat of Cheadle, leaving Manchester city councillor and catering firm manager Eveline Hill to defend Wythenshawe for the Tories; and defend it she did, surviving adverse boundary changes in 1955 to hold her increasingly marginal seat until 1964. This wasn't because Wythenshawe was a particularly Tory area (far from it) but because the seat as then drawn included the rich and (at the time) strongly Conservative suburb of Didsbury on the other side of the Mersey.
The Labour candidate who defeated Hill was Alf Morris, brother of another Labour MP for Manchester and uncle of Estelle Morris, an Education secretary under Tony Blair. Having seen his father die a long and lingering death as a result of First World War injuries (losing a leg and a eye, and being gassed), Morris became a tireless campaigner for disability rights: in 1970 he successfully negotiated through Parliament the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, the world's first legislation giving rights to the disabled, and in 1974 Morris was appointed by Wilson as the world's first ever Minister for the Disabled. After his first election, Morris was never seriously threatened at the ballot box and bequeathed a large majority upon his retirement in 1997.
That large majority was inherited by Paul Goggins, a Salford city councillor whose career had been in childcare and children's charities, and who claimed to have been from the family which inspired the character of Mrs Goggins in the Postman Pat stories. With Labour now in government nationally Goggins got onto the junior ministerial ladder, serving in the Home Office as prisons minister and later in the Northern Ireland office.
Paul Goggins died aged just 60 at the start of 2014, after collapsing while running. The resulting by-election in February 2014 safely returned new Labour candidate Mike Kane, who is very much from the same mould as Goggins: history in local government (in this case Manchester city council), Roman Catholic, Man City fan. Like Goggins, Kane has gone down the ministerial route, although in a shadow capacity; he was the shadow schools minister throughout the Corbyn era, and Keir Starmer has appointed Kane as a shadow minister for regional transport.
Kane's majority has been above 10,000 votes in all three general elections since the 2014 by-election, with the December 2019 general election giving him a 53-30 lead over the Conservatives. If local election results are any guide, then the local Conservatives are in trouble as they have lost their last local councillor in the constituency: in Sale's Brooklands ward, which was safely Conservative up until the EU referendum of 2016, voted Labour in 2018 for the first time ever and the party won a second seat in 2019. In May 2023 after boundary changes meant that Brooklands now has three council seats, Labour took all of them. Priory ward (covering Sale town centre) had been safe Labour since 1994 and in 2023 was replaced by a ward actually named Sale Central; Labour’s top candidate polled 63.1% compared with 21.6% for the equivalent Tory. Sale Moor is traditionally more marginal but hasn't voted Conservative since they entered government and in 2023 Labour beat them by well over two to one there too as well.
As you might expect, things are even more dire for Conservatism in Manchester. The last time the Tories won a ward within the city boundaries was in 1992; in this century they have targeted Manchester's Brooklands ward a few times but would appear to have basically given up, polling only 12% there in 2023. The other four Manchester wards within the constituency boundary were all safely Labour, until in May 2021 the Greens gained Woodhouse Park, the furthest ‘out’ or south ward – and they have repeated that success in 2022 and 2023, so they have all three of their Manchester councillors on the ward now. Labour held the other four Manchester wards in this seat with the party consistently polling between 63% and 71% - the lowest in Northenden, the highest in Sharston. The last Lib Dem holdout in Wythenshawe & Sale East in Northenden ward was defeated in 2014. In the last general election in December 2019 the LDs finished a distant third with 7.0%, and the Greens did even worse, finishing fifth with only 3.5%, behind the Brexit party. Adding up all the votes in May 2023 across the Trafford and Manchester wards within this seat, Labour were massively ahead with 58.5% to 19.6% for the Conservatives, 15.9% for the Greens and 6.1% for the Lib Dems.
It is striking that despite the great differences in occupational class and educational qualifications between the Sale wards and Wythenshawe, as time has gone by the two parts of the seat have considerably converged as the years have passed, with both preferring solidly Labour by the early 2020s. This is because of the general dealignment of class grounds for voting, increasing opposition to the Conservatives among graduates, and the effects of attitudes to the Brexit issue. Another element is the long term move away from the Tories in Greater Manchester, especially those areas closer to or within the eponymous city itself; this is not as strong as that sub-regional trend affecting Merseyside and Liverpool, but it might be noted that the neighbouring and nearby seats of Manchester Withington (and indeed Moss Side) and Stockport were won by the Conservatives well within living memory.
So it would appear that Mike Kane has a safe seat for as long as he wants it. Whether Wythenshawe can shake off its Shameless reputation by the end of his term is quite another question.
2021 Census
Age 65+ 14.7% 449/575
Owner occupied 50.5% 499/575
Private rented 16.7% 351/575
Social rented 32.8% 21/575
White 80.1% 408/575
Black 4.8% 139/575
Asian 8.3% 189/575
Managerial & professional 31.1% 324/575
Routine & Semi-routine 25.6% 220/575
Degree level 33.4% 247/575
No qualifications 20.7% 157/575
Students 6.2% 227/575
General Election 2019: Wythenshawe and Sale East
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Labour Mike Kane 23,855 53.3 -8.9
Conservative Peter Harrop 13,459 30.1 +0.5
Liberal Democrats Simon Lepori 3,111 7.0 +3.7
Brexit Party Julie Fousert 2,717 6.1 New
Green Robert Nunney 1,559 3.5 +2.2
Communist League Caroline Bellamy 58 0.1 New
Lab Majority 10,396 23.2 -9.4
2019 electorate 76,313
Turnout 44,884 58.8 -1.2
Labour hold
Swing 4.7 Lab to C
Boundary Changes and 2019 Notional results
N/A
Unchanged seat
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/north-west/North%20West_283_Wythenshawe%20and%20Sale%20East_Portrait.pdf