Post by iainbhx on Jan 10, 2024 7:02:40 GMT
Tipton and Wednesbury BC is not a completely new constituency, it is the successor seat of the old West Bromwich West, taking in the Northern part of that seat and around 72% of the electorate - Oldbury and Tividale go off to the new West Bromwich BC, it brings in Hateley Heath and Friar Park from the old West Bromwich East and Coseley East (there is no other Coseley ward) from Wolverhampton South East although Coseley East is a Dudley MBC ward, all other wards belong to Sandwell MBC. West Bromwich West, of course has been through a few changes itself, not least of which was bringing in Oldbury and Tivvy back in 1997. of course if you go back far enough, this somewhat resembles the 1918 Wednesbury, although it does not include Darlaston, a recreation of that seat would be something terrifying to behold.
West Bromwich West was, of course, Betty Boothroyd’s seat and she was the MP from 1974 when it was created to 2000 when she stood down, mainly in the Labour interest but for her last election she stood as the Speaker of the House. She was never seriously challenged in this very working class seat, the closest the Tories got was in 1987 when they reduced the majority to a mere 13.3%. She was succeed at the 2000 by-election by Adrian Bailey, who held the seat until he stood down 2019. probably seeing the writing on the wall. Bailey’s tenure saw the turnout drop further, this has never been a high turnout seat, and the rise of the vote to the right of the Conservative party in the form of the BNP, then UKIP. Tipton in particular flirted with the BNP and until the collapse of the BNP, they always got the vast majority of the right of the Conservatives vote in this seat usually at something like 7-9% with UKIP coming in at 2%, this was matched by council results. At their peak, the BNP held three council wards in Sandwell - Great Bridge, Princes End and Tividale - all within West Bromwich West and two of them within the new seat. UKIP whilst they achieved less success in their heyday in Sandwell only taking Princes End once, did have a higher overall voteshare, getting 22% across the borough when the BNP had topped out at 14%. UKIP coming second in the 2015 general with 25% of the vote and there still being a substantial Tory vote of 23% was perhaps an indicator of what happened in 2019.
Wednesbury - most people on here know Wednesbury for the unreasonableness legal case, but the town is ancient as indicated by its pagan name which was once Wodensbyri, there is some evidence for an iIron Age hill fort here. It was mainly a small market town with a pottery industry and some coal mining, as the canals arrived coal production grew, as did Wednesbury and nail making became the main industry. Then came Patent Shaft, it was a massive employer, not some much that Wednesbury became a company town, but when it was closed in 1980 Wednesbury took a massive hit from which it took a very long time to recover from. These days, there’s a huge retail park dominated by IKEA and distribution centres and it is the centre of operations for the Midland Metro (when it runs). Whilst still very working class, Wednesbury always seems more respectable than Darlo or Tipton, possibly because it was late to build council houses and had more private development near the centre than those two towns. Politically, Wednesbury was not so taken with Labour as other parts of the seat, Wednesbury North was one of the last Tory bastions in Sandwell until Bill Archer resigned, the Tories are still in a decent position there, but Sandwell Torydom isn’t quite respectable enough for Wednesbury, Wednesbury South went Labour many years before but there’s still a decent Tory vote there. Whilst both the BNP and UKIP have had decent votes in the Wednesbury wards, they’ve never broken through here. Oddly enough during the Tory wave in 2021, it was South that elected 1 Con, 1 Lab in an interesting double header.
Tipton - Black Country folk like to rag on Tipton at lot, hence references to Tipton Baths as the Costa Del Tipton, “Lost City” (Moat Farm Estate, Ocker Hill) as the worst and most lawless council estate in the world and the legendary rough pubs of the area. We do get a bit defensive when outsiders have a go, Tipton are our inbred, barely literate, Epsilon sub-moron whipping boys, not yours. Tipton was built on coal and iron much like a lot of the Black Country put particularly on steel and there were no large employers but lots of smaller ones, GKN briefly became that large employer through various ventures before its 1986 withdrawal from the steel market. Tipton was its own urban district which became a municipal borough in the 1930’s, it was known for building a lot more council houses than most of the Black Country Boroughs and by the time it was merged into West Bromwich in 1966, over half the housing in Tipton MB was council housing. Ocker Hill (46.8%) and Tibbington (44.7%) still have a lot of properties for social rent. Tipton was even special in regards to electricity, it was the hub of the supply network of the West Midlands Joint Electricity Authority and distributed at the slightly unusual voltage of 33kV and the more normal 6.6kV, this legacy network based on Ocker Hill power station became the Tipton Division of the MEB which was legendary within the company for doing things differently, very differently, As the deindustrialisation of the Black Country occurred, the old network became much smaller and eventually Tipton Division disappeared, but the MEB was one of the major employers in the area. Tipton along with Brierley Hill probably took the biggest hit from deindustrialisation of the area and unlike Brierley Hill which got the Enterprise Zone which became Merry Hill, Tipton got nowt initially, although since the 90’s there has been a great deal of regeneration on the many, many brownfield sites. It is essentially made up of the three wards Tipton Green, Princes End and Great Bridge and despite a lot of regeneration and new housing being built on brownfield, they all remain pretty rough and ready places to live. The former football player Steve Bull is very much an archetypical son of Tipton.
Politically Tipton has been complicated, during the 70’s Tipton Green was very marginal and sometimes elected a Conservative and they became fairly safe for Labour in the 1980s unless something happened, like in 1988 when Labour put up an Asian candidate who had a heavy swing against him and Tipton elected a Tory, this was repeated in 1992 with an even heavier loss for Labour, although 1992 was probably the last really good year for the Tories in Sandwell as they took 15 wards including all three in Tipton. However, it sets the scene for the next fifteen years of Tiptonian politics because Tipton is fairly racist now and back then it was a lot worse. Tipton took to having White Ind Labour candidates to stand against the Asian candidates and they won, it took until 1996 at the fifth attempt for Mr Haque to scrape home in what otherwise had been a 60% Lab ward and of course when he was up for re-election, the BNP had arrived on the scene. In 2004 assisted by enragement at the discovery of the “Tipton Taliban” in Afghanistan in 2001 who were sent to Gitmo and which made already poor community relations worse. In the all ups of 2004 all three Tipton wards were a mess and the BNP got a councillor elected in Princes End and in 2006 it was Princes End and Great Bridge which elected the BNP. Princes end now has 3 Tory councillors and Great Bridge now has one, only Tipton Green remains all Labour and with 3 Asian councillors.
Coseley was a mainly agricultural area for longer than several of its neighbours and was known more for its light industry rather than coal and steel. Car parts and cookers and didn’t suffer so heavily from closures until much later than the rest of the area and so it retained more prosperity. Whilst Coseley UDC did build a lot of council houses, there was also some substantial private development, but this was mainly in the west of the district rather than the east which has moved into the seat but has left Coseley with a slightly more up-market feel than some of its surroundings. Coseley East has, I believe, only not been Labour once in local elections since 1973, although the BNP came very close in 2003, closer than the Tories managed in their wave year of 2021.
Friar Park and Hateley Heath - these two wards have mixed allegiances, Friar Park was part of the old West Brom County Borough before it got big but has been part of the Wednesbury township ever since, Hateley Heath was split between Wednesbury and West Bromwich and whilst there was some private housing development in the 1930’s around Hill Top (much of which is now outside of the ward), there was mass building of council houses on both sides. A lot of houses have been sold off, but the Friar Park MSOA is still 48.9% social housing. Politically, both wards are dominated by Labour but both saw fairly high BNP/UKIP votes and Friar Park did go Tory in the wave year of 2021.
Demographics, the seat is majority white ranging from 59% is Hateley Heath to 87% in Coseley East, with significant South Asian minorities in most wards ranging from 16% Sikh in Wednesbury South to 3% Sikh in Princes End, Muslims outnumber Sikhs in Tipton Green, Great Bridge and Wednesbury North, which is partly down to the high levels of social housing in those wards and previous Sandwell housing polices. The Black population of the seat is mainly Afro-Caribbean spread through much of the seat and well integrated. Social housing ranges from 44% in Princes End to 27% in Coseley East, well above national average and unemployment ranges from 4.2% in Wednesbury South to 6.9% in Princes End all above the national averages. The seat is also very high for routine and semi-routine work one of the most working class seats in England.
The seat as a whole can best be described as somewhat resentful, especially amongst the white population although the Tipton area is clearly the worst for that. It has suffered a lot of decline over the last 50 years and whilst there has been some regeneration it has not fully adjusted to the new reality. It put much of its faith in Labour, but it is felt that Sandwell Labour has not really paid it back, it feels very much the neglected corner. It says something when all 5 Labour councillors in Tipton are of South Asian origin despite the Tipton township being over 70% white. Hence it’s flirtations with far-right and right-populist groups and more recently in 2019 and 2021 with the Conservatives. Turnout can best be said to be poor throughout the seat and there is certainly differential turnout in local elections.
If anything the new seat is a slight improvement for Labour overall, it loses Oldbury which is very solid for it and probably voted Labour in 2019, but it also loses Tividale, which is as bad as Tipton for flirtations with the populist right and currently has 2 Tory councillors. It gains Coseley East, Friar Park and Hateley Heath - Hateley Heath probably voted Labour in 2019, Friar Park probably didn’t but is better for Labour than Tivvy although the turnout in both of these is dismal. Coseley East almost certainly voted Tory in the 2019 GE, but has been fairly solid for Labour at the local level. Overall, this is probably a slight improvement and a better base to build an election campaign on. Local election results show solid leads for Labour, but this is on very low turnouts in most wards and whilst I would expect a sub-50% turnout here next time unless Reform catches fire, it still means there’s a lot of people staying home who are probably less inclined to Labour than people who vote. If this seat stays Tory, it’s the sign that 2019 was probably a realignment election, if it doesn’t, I would’t expect it to be glad, confident morning here again for Labour but a much more marginal seat than it has been in the past. I don’t think Sunak will have the appeal hee that Boris did.
West Bromwich West was, of course, Betty Boothroyd’s seat and she was the MP from 1974 when it was created to 2000 when she stood down, mainly in the Labour interest but for her last election she stood as the Speaker of the House. She was never seriously challenged in this very working class seat, the closest the Tories got was in 1987 when they reduced the majority to a mere 13.3%. She was succeed at the 2000 by-election by Adrian Bailey, who held the seat until he stood down 2019. probably seeing the writing on the wall. Bailey’s tenure saw the turnout drop further, this has never been a high turnout seat, and the rise of the vote to the right of the Conservative party in the form of the BNP, then UKIP. Tipton in particular flirted with the BNP and until the collapse of the BNP, they always got the vast majority of the right of the Conservatives vote in this seat usually at something like 7-9% with UKIP coming in at 2%, this was matched by council results. At their peak, the BNP held three council wards in Sandwell - Great Bridge, Princes End and Tividale - all within West Bromwich West and two of them within the new seat. UKIP whilst they achieved less success in their heyday in Sandwell only taking Princes End once, did have a higher overall voteshare, getting 22% across the borough when the BNP had topped out at 14%. UKIP coming second in the 2015 general with 25% of the vote and there still being a substantial Tory vote of 23% was perhaps an indicator of what happened in 2019.
Wednesbury - most people on here know Wednesbury for the unreasonableness legal case, but the town is ancient as indicated by its pagan name which was once Wodensbyri, there is some evidence for an iIron Age hill fort here. It was mainly a small market town with a pottery industry and some coal mining, as the canals arrived coal production grew, as did Wednesbury and nail making became the main industry. Then came Patent Shaft, it was a massive employer, not some much that Wednesbury became a company town, but when it was closed in 1980 Wednesbury took a massive hit from which it took a very long time to recover from. These days, there’s a huge retail park dominated by IKEA and distribution centres and it is the centre of operations for the Midland Metro (when it runs). Whilst still very working class, Wednesbury always seems more respectable than Darlo or Tipton, possibly because it was late to build council houses and had more private development near the centre than those two towns. Politically, Wednesbury was not so taken with Labour as other parts of the seat, Wednesbury North was one of the last Tory bastions in Sandwell until Bill Archer resigned, the Tories are still in a decent position there, but Sandwell Torydom isn’t quite respectable enough for Wednesbury, Wednesbury South went Labour many years before but there’s still a decent Tory vote there. Whilst both the BNP and UKIP have had decent votes in the Wednesbury wards, they’ve never broken through here. Oddly enough during the Tory wave in 2021, it was South that elected 1 Con, 1 Lab in an interesting double header.
Tipton - Black Country folk like to rag on Tipton at lot, hence references to Tipton Baths as the Costa Del Tipton, “Lost City” (Moat Farm Estate, Ocker Hill) as the worst and most lawless council estate in the world and the legendary rough pubs of the area. We do get a bit defensive when outsiders have a go, Tipton are our inbred, barely literate, Epsilon sub-moron whipping boys, not yours. Tipton was built on coal and iron much like a lot of the Black Country put particularly on steel and there were no large employers but lots of smaller ones, GKN briefly became that large employer through various ventures before its 1986 withdrawal from the steel market. Tipton was its own urban district which became a municipal borough in the 1930’s, it was known for building a lot more council houses than most of the Black Country Boroughs and by the time it was merged into West Bromwich in 1966, over half the housing in Tipton MB was council housing. Ocker Hill (46.8%) and Tibbington (44.7%) still have a lot of properties for social rent. Tipton was even special in regards to electricity, it was the hub of the supply network of the West Midlands Joint Electricity Authority and distributed at the slightly unusual voltage of 33kV and the more normal 6.6kV, this legacy network based on Ocker Hill power station became the Tipton Division of the MEB which was legendary within the company for doing things differently, very differently, As the deindustrialisation of the Black Country occurred, the old network became much smaller and eventually Tipton Division disappeared, but the MEB was one of the major employers in the area. Tipton along with Brierley Hill probably took the biggest hit from deindustrialisation of the area and unlike Brierley Hill which got the Enterprise Zone which became Merry Hill, Tipton got nowt initially, although since the 90’s there has been a great deal of regeneration on the many, many brownfield sites. It is essentially made up of the three wards Tipton Green, Princes End and Great Bridge and despite a lot of regeneration and new housing being built on brownfield, they all remain pretty rough and ready places to live. The former football player Steve Bull is very much an archetypical son of Tipton.
Politically Tipton has been complicated, during the 70’s Tipton Green was very marginal and sometimes elected a Conservative and they became fairly safe for Labour in the 1980s unless something happened, like in 1988 when Labour put up an Asian candidate who had a heavy swing against him and Tipton elected a Tory, this was repeated in 1992 with an even heavier loss for Labour, although 1992 was probably the last really good year for the Tories in Sandwell as they took 15 wards including all three in Tipton. However, it sets the scene for the next fifteen years of Tiptonian politics because Tipton is fairly racist now and back then it was a lot worse. Tipton took to having White Ind Labour candidates to stand against the Asian candidates and they won, it took until 1996 at the fifth attempt for Mr Haque to scrape home in what otherwise had been a 60% Lab ward and of course when he was up for re-election, the BNP had arrived on the scene. In 2004 assisted by enragement at the discovery of the “Tipton Taliban” in Afghanistan in 2001 who were sent to Gitmo and which made already poor community relations worse. In the all ups of 2004 all three Tipton wards were a mess and the BNP got a councillor elected in Princes End and in 2006 it was Princes End and Great Bridge which elected the BNP. Princes end now has 3 Tory councillors and Great Bridge now has one, only Tipton Green remains all Labour and with 3 Asian councillors.
Coseley was a mainly agricultural area for longer than several of its neighbours and was known more for its light industry rather than coal and steel. Car parts and cookers and didn’t suffer so heavily from closures until much later than the rest of the area and so it retained more prosperity. Whilst Coseley UDC did build a lot of council houses, there was also some substantial private development, but this was mainly in the west of the district rather than the east which has moved into the seat but has left Coseley with a slightly more up-market feel than some of its surroundings. Coseley East has, I believe, only not been Labour once in local elections since 1973, although the BNP came very close in 2003, closer than the Tories managed in their wave year of 2021.
Friar Park and Hateley Heath - these two wards have mixed allegiances, Friar Park was part of the old West Brom County Borough before it got big but has been part of the Wednesbury township ever since, Hateley Heath was split between Wednesbury and West Bromwich and whilst there was some private housing development in the 1930’s around Hill Top (much of which is now outside of the ward), there was mass building of council houses on both sides. A lot of houses have been sold off, but the Friar Park MSOA is still 48.9% social housing. Politically, both wards are dominated by Labour but both saw fairly high BNP/UKIP votes and Friar Park did go Tory in the wave year of 2021.
Demographics, the seat is majority white ranging from 59% is Hateley Heath to 87% in Coseley East, with significant South Asian minorities in most wards ranging from 16% Sikh in Wednesbury South to 3% Sikh in Princes End, Muslims outnumber Sikhs in Tipton Green, Great Bridge and Wednesbury North, which is partly down to the high levels of social housing in those wards and previous Sandwell housing polices. The Black population of the seat is mainly Afro-Caribbean spread through much of the seat and well integrated. Social housing ranges from 44% in Princes End to 27% in Coseley East, well above national average and unemployment ranges from 4.2% in Wednesbury South to 6.9% in Princes End all above the national averages. The seat is also very high for routine and semi-routine work one of the most working class seats in England.
The seat as a whole can best be described as somewhat resentful, especially amongst the white population although the Tipton area is clearly the worst for that. It has suffered a lot of decline over the last 50 years and whilst there has been some regeneration it has not fully adjusted to the new reality. It put much of its faith in Labour, but it is felt that Sandwell Labour has not really paid it back, it feels very much the neglected corner. It says something when all 5 Labour councillors in Tipton are of South Asian origin despite the Tipton township being over 70% white. Hence it’s flirtations with far-right and right-populist groups and more recently in 2019 and 2021 with the Conservatives. Turnout can best be said to be poor throughout the seat and there is certainly differential turnout in local elections.
If anything the new seat is a slight improvement for Labour overall, it loses Oldbury which is very solid for it and probably voted Labour in 2019, but it also loses Tividale, which is as bad as Tipton for flirtations with the populist right and currently has 2 Tory councillors. It gains Coseley East, Friar Park and Hateley Heath - Hateley Heath probably voted Labour in 2019, Friar Park probably didn’t but is better for Labour than Tivvy although the turnout in both of these is dismal. Coseley East almost certainly voted Tory in the 2019 GE, but has been fairly solid for Labour at the local level. Overall, this is probably a slight improvement and a better base to build an election campaign on. Local election results show solid leads for Labour, but this is on very low turnouts in most wards and whilst I would expect a sub-50% turnout here next time unless Reform catches fire, it still means there’s a lot of people staying home who are probably less inclined to Labour than people who vote. If this seat stays Tory, it’s the sign that 2019 was probably a realignment election, if it doesn’t, I would’t expect it to be glad, confident morning here again for Labour but a much more marginal seat than it has been in the past. I don’t think Sunak will have the appeal hee that Boris did.
