Post by batman on Jan 10, 2024 12:11:00 GMT
edited to take into account the 2024 general election etc.
BERMONDSEY AND OLD SOUTHWARK
The revised boundary changes after review retained the name of this constituency, while chopping off parts of it in the west and south of the outgoing seat. This was therefore the first boundary review for well over half a century in which there has not been a name change in this constituency or its linear predecessors. Since 1950, at which time the seat was called simply Bermondsey, this constituency has still had only 3 MPs, well below average for parliamentary constituencies in that period, and all have been prominent in various ways at various times. The chances of another MP being returned here in the forthcoming general election were notionally slightly increased by the boundary changes, but not much. Since 2015, when the Liberal Democrat vote went into freefall in most of Britain, the MP here has been Labour's Neil Coyle, who was deprived of his party's whip for some of the last parliament, but who was readmitted after a year, vowing to take steps to avoid a repeat of his previous behaviour related to problems he has admitted to having with alcoholism; in the 2024 general election, he successfully defended this constituency in the Labour interest, and in fact achieved a very small positive swing from the second-placed Liberal Democrats (although both parties' vote share went down). Essentially, this territory is mostly working-class and inner-city - indeed parts of it are an integral part of central London and are within the Congestion Charge zone - and has a strongly Labour heritage, but it is a heritage which had an almighty interruption for several decades before being restored in 2015. Although it has some similarities in certain respects with Peckham to its south, and the boundary between the two seats however named can at times appear pretty seamless, it has a much larger White British community and parts of it can reasonably described as amongst the most traditionally Cockney terrain one could possibly find, even though it lies on the south side of the River Thames. Nevertheless, there has been a Black community for quite a long time too, and this has grown a good deal in recent decades, mostly augmented by people of African rather than Caribbean heritage. One prominent member of Bermondsey's Black Caribbean community has been former World Welterweight boxing champion Lloyd Honeyghan, who was born in Jamaica but from early childhood was brought up here. There is also a growing Latin American population especially in the south of the constituency. In some of the areas closest to the Thames, the industrial landscape has been transformed into a mostly high-class owner-occupied residential one, in a manner similar to what has occurred in recent decades on the other side of the river. This has been a contributory factor to there being a continuing anti-Labour vote which is enough to elect a decent number of councillors; in this constituency, the anti-Labour vote has been almost totally dominated by the Liberal Democrats for more than a generation, although Grant Shapps cut his political teeth for the Conservatives here in the 1997 general election, and although there was a sharp swing from the Lib Dems to the Greens in the 2024 election. This constituency was simply Bermondsey from 1950 to 1974; then acquired a Southwark prefix reflecting the creation of the London boroughs of today in the mid-60s; then Southwark AND Bermondsey in 1983; then Southwark North and Bermondsey in 1997; and then finally its present name in 2010. In 2024, this name was retained, despite the major surgery to the constituency which took place.
Southwark is an ancient town which has a relatively small cathedral and therefore a diocese. Like Bermondsey, it was a very small and compact independent borough until the creation of the London boroughs as we now know them in the 1960s. Before 1950, also like Bermondsey, it had several tiny constituencies, one of which, Southwark Central, was held for Labour in a 1948 by-election by a young man called Roy Jenkins, the unification of Southwark's seats in 1950 causing him to seek a seat elsewhere, which he found in the shape of Birmingham Stechford. All of the Southwark and Bermondsey constituencies were won overwhelmingly by Labour in 1945, and had been Labour-held in 1935 too though not in 1931. Southwark as an independent constituency post-1950 never caused Labour the remotest electoral difficulties either. From 1959 until his resignation in 1972 it was held by right-wing Labour cabinet minister (in the 1960s) Ray Gunter, Labour MPs in this part of the world having since WWII been generally on the Right of the Party, a tradition which continues with Coyle today. Here is the traditional heart of Southwark, Shakespeare's recreated Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern gallery housed in a converted industrial building, the aforementioned Southwark Cathedral, the skyscraper The Shard, the Imperial War Museum hard by the borough boundary with Lambeth in the west, the famous bridges London Bridge and the unique retractable Tower Bridge, and the distinctly confusingly-named Borough Market, which is not really in Borough in its traditional sense but is actually next door to Southwark Cathedral which in turn is very close to London Bridge and its eponymous station. Borough Market, a mostly indoor market nowadays converted mostly into trendy delis and designer-basic eateries, is quite a major attraction and can get extremely busy. Borough as a community really lies more or less equidistant between Southwark and Elephant & Castle, but its High Street actually reaches into the heart of Southwark, hence the name of the market, and it is quite hard to determine where Southwark ends and Borough begins. Southwark is a mixture of offices, some of them ultra-modern, shops and restaurants and a variety of residential property. As with all of the constituency quite a lot of the latter is council-built, but there are privately-owned homes, some of them very exclusive indeed, privately rented property and also some charity housing. The advent of a large number of luxury flats has helped retain a strong anti-Labour vote in some parts of Southwark, and the Lib Dems retain some support in the humbler dwellings too, especially anecdotally the charity flats & amongst private renters. This part of the constituency is perhaps just about the best for the Lib Dems, although its eastern end, which is in the London Bridge and West Bermondsey ward, has a small but clear Labour lead. The Lib Dems are fairly dominant in the Borough and Bankside ward, which does include its fair share of luxury housing, but that is hardly absent in London Bridge and West Bermondsey ward as well. They also win in the St George's ward to the west of central Southwark, which bears the name of the Roman Catholic cathedral and includes the Imperial War Museum, but not always by much, and it is quite likely that Labour will have achieved a small lead in the ward in the 2024 election. Labour has especially since 2015 tended to do well in the council-built estates and less well elsewhere, but that is a generalisation which does have some exceptions. One important employer here is Guy's Hospital, a long-established hospital in the shadow of The Shard. The public sector is well-represented amongst the electorate in this constituency. There is a strong literary heritage in Southwark as befits the home of the Globe Theatre, and some of the most historic pubs along or just off Borough High Street can boast not only Shakespeare but also Marlowe, Jonson and Dickens as their past customers, in some cases probably truthfully.
Bermondsey lies just to the east of Southwark and has an even stronger reputation as a working-class area; it is much more heavily residential and is a mixture of often quite elderly council estates and modern riverside luxury housing. It like Southwark is a very old part of London, its name meaning something like the island or marshy ground of a man called Beorma; a different Beorma (presumably) also gave his name to what we now know as the city of Birmingham. North Bermondsey ward, which includes some of the most luxurious riverside homes in the community, is fairly firmly held by the Liberal Democrats, but more working-class and off-the-beaten-track South Bermondsey ward has a clear but not large Labour lead. Labour's seats in this constituency have almost all been won by the Liberals/Liberal Democrats at various points between 1986 and 2014, the Lib Dems tending to be for most of this period, as is mostly the case still today, stronger the further north and closer to the Thames you get. Historically part of the old borough of Bermondsey are the areas of Rotherhithe and the (former) Surrey Docks, or Surrey Quays as they tend to be known often now. These docks were once the most intensely working-class part even of this predominantly working-class constituency and the safest Labour territory of all, but of course the docks fell into increasing disuse and were closed decades ago, and in place of the docks came offices and often high-class modern residential development. Not many years ago there was a relatively promising electoral position for the Conservatives here, uniquely for the northern half of the London Borough of Southwark, but this has now faded, and it is the Liberal Democrats who carry the non-Labour standard here. Labour has retained a decent vote here, not just in the council estates, but the Lib Dems hold all of the 3 seats in Surrey Docks ward. Between the former docks and Bermondsey lies the much more unreconstructed community of Rotherhithe, which before 1950 gave its name to a small parliamentary division of the borough of Bermondsey. For some years Liberal/Liberal Democrat wins in council elections were frequent here too, but Labour is in a strong position in Rotherhithe ward now, enjoying an unequivocal two-to-one lead over them. While in some parts of the country class-based voting has seen a steep decline, it has somewhat re-established itself here, as Labour certainly does best in the least trendy & most council-estate-dominated parts of this constituency, even if as with a number of neighbouring constituencies the picture is somewhat complicated by the fact that some council tenants nowadays, with buying homes so expensive in London, actually have quite highly-paid managerial or professional jobs.
The constituency following the boundary changes was completed by Chaucer ward, named after yet another literary figure with links to this constituency. This writer enjoys a drink at the Royal Oak pub near Borough station, the closest pub still existing to the site of the historic Tabard from which Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims set off (indeed, it was the venue for the last Vote UK Forum social). Chaucer ward is a decent size and takes in territory stretching from the southern end of Borough High Street to Elephant & Castle. There are quite a lot of students here compared with the rest of the constituency and some of the larger council estates to be found. Labour has only occasionally lost elections in Chaucer ward even in the heyday of the Liberals/Liberal Democrats in this area and this is by far the party's strongest ward in the constituency, well ahead even of Rotherhithe. There is some gentrification to be found, and the odd elegant square, but this mostly remains an area which is not generally sought-after. Some of the many often excellent pubs to be found in Borough still retain an unmistakeably Cockney atmosphere both in terms of architecture and clientele although City workers can often be found there too. The Elephant is still something of a concrete jungle but as one travels north from there the streets become ever more characterful and historic.
Labour used to enjoy routinely monolithic and crushing majorities in this seat, however named. Its MP from 1950 until his resignation in 1983 was Bob Mellish, a docker's son who rose to become the Chief Whip of the Labour Party both in opposition and in government. He however frowned upon what he saw as the infiltration of his local party by middle-class left-wing trendies. After he announced his retirement, at which point he still took the Labour Whip, the local party selected the young Australian-born CLP secretary, Peter Tatchell, to replace him. Tatchell was not only seen as left-wing, but was also generally known to be gay, which in those days was a much greater barrier to parliamentary office than it is today. Mellish resigned the Labour whip in late 1982 and decided to resign from parliament early, forcing a by-election in early 1983. His associate John O'Grady, like Mellish from working-class London Catholic stock and a former local Council leader, announced that he would stand in opposition to Tatchell as "Real Labour", and looked as if he might have a chance of winning at first in a constituency which patently even at that high-water mark for the Conservatives had precious few Tory voters, but as the campaign progressed some felt that he had overreached himself and voters who wanted to vote against Tatchell and Labour swung behind the Liberal Simon Hughes, who had been a distant runner-up to Labour in the 1981 GLC election in the constituency. Labour's difficulties were severely compounded by the chaos in its leading ranks, as the then Party leader Michael Foot appeared to disown Tatchell's candidacy, though some thought that he either misheard or misunderstood the question; this necessitated a rapid assertion from the then Party General Secretary, Jim Mortimer (a former near neighbour of this writer) that Labour did indeed want Tatchell to win the election. Hughes was a young barrister who campaigned effectively, using a London black taxi with a folksy personalised number-plate as a trademark vehicle for his campaigning, and he crushed Tatchell by two to one; there were rumours that Liberal campaigners on the doorstep were using ill-disguised anti-gay slurs against Tatchell, though these did not feature in any of the official publicity used by the Hughes campaign, unlike that of O'Grady. He proved to be an extremely effective constituency MP, no matter what one's opinion of him was in other respects, and a strange pattern emerged for many elections that, every time Labour managed to eat into his majority, he struck back immediately at the next time of asking and widened it again. This he did in 1992, 2001 and 2010, before the axe finally fell with a big swing to Labour in 2015. Hughes was a prominent figure in his party, sometimes seen as on its left wing in a vague sense, and was openly sceptical about the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition at times although never actually disavowing it altogether. He attempted to retrieve his seat in 2017 without success and now has retired from electoral politics. Coyle has hit the headlines predominantly because of his problems as described above and now hopes to sail to calmer personal waters. Although the boundary changes did not help him and Labour, the party appears to have opened up a strong lead in Rotherhithe and an overwhelming one in Chaucer, and must have remained ahead in at least two other wards with the Lib Dems probably only strongly ahead in one at the most; life has undoubtedly become much harder for the latter since Hughes's departure from the scene, though they retain good support in some areas. However, their hopes of competing truly effectively with Labour were ultimately stymied by a sharp increase in the Green vote, in common with almost all inner south London, and this seems to have been more at the Lib Dems' expense than Labour's. This left Coyle, and Labour, in a very comfortable-looking lead. This seat is a fascinating fusion of the historic, containing a strong reminder that the White working class has far from disappeared from inner London even though there are also many Black & other ethnic minority voters, with the much more modern and upmarket, symbolised perhaps by The Shard, but which has a strong component especially closest to the Thames. While Labour appears to have rediscovered its mojo in these parts, the days when they could command monolithic, near-universal support have not yet returned, and this can perhaps be characterised as a reasonably, rather than overwhelmingly, safe Labour seat.
