Post by andrewp on Jan 14, 2024 13:56:03 GMT
This profile contains elements of my previous Swansea East and is updated by me but owes much to the excellent Neath content from 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️
Wales loses 8 seats, or 20% of its parliamentary representation, in the parliamentary boundary review which reported in 2023, and on which boundaries the 2024 General election will be fought. The results of this review are a number of constituency names which appear to be the merger of two longstanding constituencies. There have been parliamentary constituencies called both Neath, and Swansea East, since 1918. This however is not an equal merger. The new seat contains about two thirds (68% or 39000 voters) of the current Neath constituency- essentially all of that seat except the Upper Swansea valley area which is moved into the vast Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe constituency. These electors are joined by ‘ Swansea East’ - three and a half divisions from the current Swansea East constituency, Llansamlet, Brynmaen, St Thomas and half of Waterfront ward. These divisions include about 22,000 voters ( just over a third of the current Swansea East). Most of the current Swansea East moves into the new Swansea West. This new seat then is topped up by about 8000 voters in Coedffranc community to the immediate West of Neath town which despite being more or less one built up area with Neath have previously been in the Aberavon constituency. This area contains the villages of Skewen and Jersey Marine between Neath town and Swansea, west of the Neath estuary) Finally about 6000 voters in Clydach, to the North of Swansea, arrive from the Gower constituency. Clydach developed on the route from the coal mines of the Upper Swansea Valley to the port at Swansea, first on the Swansea canal and then on the railway.
Neath (Welsh: Castell-nedd) is an ancient market town on the edge of the South Wales coalfield. The Romans built the fort of Nidum on the Blaenhonddan bank of the river where the Via Julia from Gloucester/Caerleon/Cardiff/Cowbridge/Ewenny to Carmarthen crossed the River Neath and was joined by another Roman Road (problematically called, as with most Roman Roads, Sarn Helen, after the mother of Constantine and finder of the True Cross) along the top of the Hirfynydd and over the Beacons to Brecon. The ancient church of St Illtyd in a hollow on the north-eastern edge of the town was reputedly founded by the saint himself in the sixth century (the current masonry only dates back to the 13th). Richard de Grenville, the Norman Lord of Neath under his feudal master Robert Earl of Gloucester, built a castle at Neath in the early 12th century, at the point where the Gnoll Brook (now forming the town's water supply at the Gnoll Interceptor) then entered the river – at that time it flowed along Water Street and Old Market Street, presumably washing all the nasties of butchery into the castle moat to discourage the Welsh. And the Welsh needed some discouragement: multiple attacks on the town occurred over the centuries that followed, ranging from mugging the Normans on the way to church (St Thomas's Church in the town centre was supposedly built so that the Normans did not have to brave the walk to Llantwit), burning the town, and Morgan Gam ("the Crooked")'s brief capture of the castle in 1231 in the name of Llywelyn Fawr ("the Great") of Gwynedd. At about the same time as the Normans built their castle, the Cistercian order built a large abbey (reputedly the largest in Wales) across the river conveniently (for quarrying) near the Roman fort.
Farming, especially of livestock, has historically formed a significant part of the local economy, and there was still a cattle market in the town centre into the 1950s. The Industrial Revolution's effects were somewhat muted by the inadequacies of the Corporation Quay in the face of competition from Swansea and Port Talbot docks, and the Corporation's long losing battle against the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway's bridge across the estuary. Coal mining was relatively small-scale for South Wales and bedevilled by the faults that delimit the broad Vale of Neath. The collieries, generally drift mines, near the town had short, if tragic histories. That drift mining was physically possible actually kept mining going long past when it had become uneconomical elsewhere, as we tragically saw when four miners lost their lives in an accident in 2011 at the Gleision drift mine in Cilybebyll in the Pontardawe part of the constituency. Metal work was an important sector, including iron works at Neath Abbey (where 19th century scholar Samuel Prideaux Tregelles incongruously worked at one point), tin works at Aberdulais (now under the care of the National Trust), and the large Metal Box works in the Melincryddan (universally abbreviated to "the Melin") section of the town, these last works closing in the 1960s before being partially revived by Crown Packaging, closing again in 2015.
Despite the decline of industry, Neath itself has continued to be a prosperous town – average earnings in Neath Port Talbot County Borough stand at £409 per week, the second-highest figure in Wales. This is probably helped by the hourly Intercity rail service to Swansea in one direction and Cardiff and London Paddington in the other, which combined with much lower house prices than in the cities makes the town an attractive place to live for well-paid commuters.
The usual piece of trivia cited about Neath are that the Welsh Rugby Union was established in the Castle Hotel in the town. Neath is of course famous for its rugby team (reputedly the oldest in Wales – I wonder who they played against then...), whose distinctive all-black kit with a Maltese cross on it is obviously better than its New Zealand knock-off. Famous people from Neath include former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, hymnodist Anna Letitia Waring, and opera star Katherine Jenkins.
Neath is joined now by about 22000 voters from Swansea East. This area has a narrow section of waterfront onto Swansea Bay where there are now vast marina developments of flats, business parks and leisure facilities, along with the docklands east of the mouth of the River Tawe. But far more typical are the very eastern suburbs of Swansea- in Bonymaen and Llansamlet- containing a lot of social housing. As in many British cities, the eastern half of the second city of Wales is the more working class and less affluent half. This is not the Swansea of the bohemian University area of Uplands or affluent Sketty, this is the Swansea of council estates and industry. As you would expect, therefore, this is also the half of Swansea which has shown greater favour to the Labour Party
Swansea East clocked up a century in Labour hands in 2022, having been gained from the Liberals in 1922. For most of the post war period the majorities racked up by the party here have looked impregnable, topping 20,000 on nine occasions.
The demographics of this new constituency are of a fairly average age profile, a mainly white constituency ( 95.6%) and a fairly average number of owner occupiers ( 66%) Qualifications and economic activity show a somewhat more telling picture. 21.9% of people have no formal qualifications and ‘only’ 27.3% of people have a degree or equivalent- placing the consituency in the ‘worst’ quartile for both of these measures. Only 8.2% of people are in higher professional roles and the constituency is in the top 100 in England and Wales for people in lower supervisory roles and for those in semi routine occupations. These economic indicators are not so extreme as some of the constieunices in the middle of the Welsh valleys but they are indicative of a relatively low skilled low wage economy.
In the 2022 local elections here, the Conservatives were unable to build on the step forward that they took in the 2019 general election and failed to get a single councillor elected in the new consituency. Labour didn’t have things all their own way however, particularly in Neath. They comfortably won all of the Swansea wards, apart from Waterfront, which the Liberal Democrats won. Neath was a rather different story with Independents defeating Labour in most of the wards in the upper Neath valley. Councillors elected in this new constituency were 14 Independents, 13 Labour, 4 Plaid Cymru, 3 Liberal Democrats and 1 Green.
The Neath constituency was created by the Representation of the People Act 1918 for the General Election that December, and then comprised Neath MB, most of Neath RD (excluding the parishes of Baglan Lower (i.e. Baglan), Baglan Higher (i.e. half of Tonmawr and some farms above Efail-fach, discontiguous from one another – the bit in the middle was in Llantwit Parish, the very strangely shaped parish in which Neath town wasn't), Michaelston Higher (an area between the Pelenna and Afan rivers), and Michaelston Lower (i.e. Cwmafan), and also excluding the parish of Ystradfellte, which was administered by Neath RD, but was in Brecknockshire), and Pontardawe RD.
For the 1950 General Election, Pontardawe RD was transferred to the Gower constituency and the former Briton Ferry UD (which had been abolished in 1922 and included in Neath MB) together with the remainder of Neath RD (boundary changes had transferred part of Michaelston Higher to Glyncorrwg UD, abolished Michaelston Lower and Baglan Lower and transferred most of them to Port Talbot MB in 1921) was at last added from the Aberavon constituency; and these extremely tidy boundaries of Neath MB and Neath RD would go unchanged by the First and Second Periodic Reviews.
The Third Review undid much of the tidiness, as the Welsh Commission followed the 1974 county boundaries, despite the district of Neath only differing from the former MB and RD by having lost the parish of Rhigos to the Cynon Valley district. Rhigos predictably went to the Cynon Valley constituency, but then Briton Ferry was lost again to Aberavon, which was undersized as a result of now following the West Glamorgan/Mid Glamorgan boundary, and Pontardawe was re-gained from Gower – i.e. pretty much back to the 1918-1950 boundaries again from 1983, but with the Pelenna Valley. The Fourth Review prior to the 1997 General Election saw Neath lose Coedffranc community, which it now regains.
The only politician honoured with a statue in the town is the Conservative Howel Gwyn, who was oddly enough MP for Penryn and Falmouth from 1847 to 1857. He was born on Orchard Street in the town centre and later lived at Dyffryn across the river. Gwyn's birthplace (together with the former offices of Neath RDC) has since been demolished for an extension to what was then Woolworth's, but the location is marked with a blue plaque. The opposite side of Orchard Street features the Gwyn Hall, a magnificent concert hall outside which Gwyn's statue once stood before the needs of traffic (Orchard Street was at that time part of the A48) saw it relocated to Victoria Gardens. Next to this stand the rather modest offices of Neath Town Council, with the Union Jack and Red Dragon flying high outside. Back across the street is the former Constitutional Club (closed and converted into a pub in 2016), which was opened by the Earl of Iddesleigh (who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Disraeli's second ministry) in 1886, and then as St David's Street sweeps off along one side of Victoria Gardens the large Victorian St David's Church (the largest of Neath's slightly excessive total of six Church in Wales parish churches), with its tower aligned with Gnoll Avenue, which leads up from Victoria Gardens through the War Memorial Gates into the Gnoll Estate, which is now a large country park, now containing just the locked-off cellars of the once magnificent stately home Gnoll Castle (demolished by the municipal philistines in 1957), once the seat of the Mackworth baronets, a title created in 1780 for Sir Herbert Mackworth, Tory MP for the Cardiff District of Boroughs from 1766 to 1790.
With such an excellent Conservative heritage and with that typical pattern of reasonably prosperous market town plus rural hinterland that can mean only one thing in any part of England; but with Wales being Wales and coal being nearby, it should come as no surprise that the Conservative Party has never won the Neath constituency. The initial election in 1918 was won by J. Hugh Edwards for the Liberal Party, but every election after that has been won by Labour.
J. Hugh Edwards was first elected for the Mid Glamorgan division at the December 1910 election, before the 1918 boundary changes saw him elected for Neath. Edwards was a curious figure – a minister of the Annibynwyr (Congregationalists/Independents) and a Welsh nationalist who went on to write no fewer than three biographies of David Lloyd George, but later (after his 1922 defeat in Neath) Constitutionalist MP for Accrington from 1923-29 – the very label Winston Churchill used mid-rerat at the same time. He did not face Conservative opponents either in Neath or in Accrington.
Edwards was defeated at the 1922 election by William Jenkins (who would be knighted in 1931). Sir William was a coal miner from Glyncorrwg in the neighbouring Aberavon constituency who had risen to Chairman of Glamorgan County Council in 1906 and then again from 1919 to 1921. He never lived in the Neath constituency, and died at Cymmer in the Afan Valley in December 1944.
Jenkins' death prompted a by-election on 15 May 1945. Due to the War, the Conservative and Liberal Parties had agreed not to oppose the Labour candidate, D.J. Williams. But Plaid Cymru and a Trotskyist group calling themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party (as Wikipedia says, not to be confused with the one you've actually heard of) fielded candidates. Williams unsurprisingly won very handily indeed. After the splitters saw to that version of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Williams helped their candidate, Jock Haston, get a job with the National Council of Labour Colleges.
Williams was again a coal miner from outside the constituency (this time from the Amman Valley in Carmarthenshire), but he at least had the good sense to move to Cilfrew. He had studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, in the 1920s, and wrote a book entitled Capitalist Combination in the Coal Industry (which you can still apparently buy a copy of). Williams is probably best defined by the things he opposed: National Service, the Warsaw Pact, British membership of the EEC, and any idea of devolving anything to Wales. He stepped down in advance of the 1964 election.
Donald Coleman, who succeeded WIlliams, was only the son of a coal miner – he was a metallurgist in the research department of the Abbey works in Margam – but once more from outside the constituency, this time originally from Barry and a councillor in Swansea. He served as a whip both in opposition and in government between 1970 and 1978. He reputedly had some falling out or other with Neil Kinnock, but did a sort of sulking tribute act to Ted Heath until his death on 14 January 1991.
The Neath by-election was held on 4 April 1991. It featured as well as the familiar four main parties, a continuity SDP candidate (who saved his deposit), someone called Rhys Jeffreys describing himself as Local Independent Labour, Screaming Lord Sutch, and Captain Beany. Despite Rhys Jeffreys' understandable but deposit-losing point, Labour's latest candidate from outside the constituency won, this time Peter Hain, born in Nairobi and brought up in South Africa, who had never done a real job in his life – he had puzzlingly joined the Liberal Party first and then Labour, and had worked in the research department of a trades union straight from university at Queen Mary and then Sussex. But he took the point on board and moved to Resolven. Hain's journey from anti-Apartheid campaigner to a competent ministerial career in the Blair and Brown administrations, to the ignominious plausible deniability of the expenses mess of his deputy leadership campaign, to his inner Liberal popping up at the AV Referndum, to a seat in the Lords is well-known. And I do have to admit I felt a bit of sympathy for that incident where the incredibly thin-skinned Northern Irish judiciary invoked the Streisand Effect in their attempt to prosecute him over a passage in his memoirs that was mildly critical of Sir Paul Girvan.
After Peter Hain stepped down at the 2015 election, he was succeeded by Christina Rees. The theme should be obvious: she was born in Kenfig Hill in Bridgend, and had previously lost in Arfon in the 2011 Assembly election. Her career is only ever described as "barrister", before launching onto a digression about squash and other sports she has played – quite shadowy – but she seems to have been well-connected, formerly having been married to former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies (divorced in 1999). She was Shadow Welsh Secretary for much of Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader, but has since left the Shadow Cabinet. She is a vegan. She likes to show up at civic services etc in a car with personalized number plates to give the impression of living in Neath, but the Register of Members interests discloses that she actually lives in Bridgend County Borough. Rees was suspended by the Labour Party in 2022 following allegations against her.
In 2019, the Conservative party achieved their best ever results in both Swansea East and in Neath, clocking up 28% of the vote in each and reducing the Labour majorities to 7900 in Swansea East and to 5600 in Neath. Initial notional results have indicated a Labour majority of about 8000 or 20% in this new seat- safe enough but not as safe as this area would usually be.
It is perhaps fair to conclude that whilst this area may not be as monolithically Labour as it was, it may be that this is one of those places that 2019 was the outlier, and this is still a very safe constituency for that party.
The effects of this boundary review are essentially to merge the 4 Labour held constituencies of Gower, Neath, Swansea East and Swansea West into 3 new constituencies. This could have been a problem for the 4 sitting Labour MPs but the suspension of Christina Rees solved the problem and Carolyn Harris, current MP for Swansea East, will be the first MP for this new seat.
Wales loses 8 seats, or 20% of its parliamentary representation, in the parliamentary boundary review which reported in 2023, and on which boundaries the 2024 General election will be fought. The results of this review are a number of constituency names which appear to be the merger of two longstanding constituencies. There have been parliamentary constituencies called both Neath, and Swansea East, since 1918. This however is not an equal merger. The new seat contains about two thirds (68% or 39000 voters) of the current Neath constituency- essentially all of that seat except the Upper Swansea valley area which is moved into the vast Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe constituency. These electors are joined by ‘ Swansea East’ - three and a half divisions from the current Swansea East constituency, Llansamlet, Brynmaen, St Thomas and half of Waterfront ward. These divisions include about 22,000 voters ( just over a third of the current Swansea East). Most of the current Swansea East moves into the new Swansea West. This new seat then is topped up by about 8000 voters in Coedffranc community to the immediate West of Neath town which despite being more or less one built up area with Neath have previously been in the Aberavon constituency. This area contains the villages of Skewen and Jersey Marine between Neath town and Swansea, west of the Neath estuary) Finally about 6000 voters in Clydach, to the North of Swansea, arrive from the Gower constituency. Clydach developed on the route from the coal mines of the Upper Swansea Valley to the port at Swansea, first on the Swansea canal and then on the railway.
Neath (Welsh: Castell-nedd) is an ancient market town on the edge of the South Wales coalfield. The Romans built the fort of Nidum on the Blaenhonddan bank of the river where the Via Julia from Gloucester/Caerleon/Cardiff/Cowbridge/Ewenny to Carmarthen crossed the River Neath and was joined by another Roman Road (problematically called, as with most Roman Roads, Sarn Helen, after the mother of Constantine and finder of the True Cross) along the top of the Hirfynydd and over the Beacons to Brecon. The ancient church of St Illtyd in a hollow on the north-eastern edge of the town was reputedly founded by the saint himself in the sixth century (the current masonry only dates back to the 13th). Richard de Grenville, the Norman Lord of Neath under his feudal master Robert Earl of Gloucester, built a castle at Neath in the early 12th century, at the point where the Gnoll Brook (now forming the town's water supply at the Gnoll Interceptor) then entered the river – at that time it flowed along Water Street and Old Market Street, presumably washing all the nasties of butchery into the castle moat to discourage the Welsh. And the Welsh needed some discouragement: multiple attacks on the town occurred over the centuries that followed, ranging from mugging the Normans on the way to church (St Thomas's Church in the town centre was supposedly built so that the Normans did not have to brave the walk to Llantwit), burning the town, and Morgan Gam ("the Crooked")'s brief capture of the castle in 1231 in the name of Llywelyn Fawr ("the Great") of Gwynedd. At about the same time as the Normans built their castle, the Cistercian order built a large abbey (reputedly the largest in Wales) across the river conveniently (for quarrying) near the Roman fort.
Farming, especially of livestock, has historically formed a significant part of the local economy, and there was still a cattle market in the town centre into the 1950s. The Industrial Revolution's effects were somewhat muted by the inadequacies of the Corporation Quay in the face of competition from Swansea and Port Talbot docks, and the Corporation's long losing battle against the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway's bridge across the estuary. Coal mining was relatively small-scale for South Wales and bedevilled by the faults that delimit the broad Vale of Neath. The collieries, generally drift mines, near the town had short, if tragic histories. That drift mining was physically possible actually kept mining going long past when it had become uneconomical elsewhere, as we tragically saw when four miners lost their lives in an accident in 2011 at the Gleision drift mine in Cilybebyll in the Pontardawe part of the constituency. Metal work was an important sector, including iron works at Neath Abbey (where 19th century scholar Samuel Prideaux Tregelles incongruously worked at one point), tin works at Aberdulais (now under the care of the National Trust), and the large Metal Box works in the Melincryddan (universally abbreviated to "the Melin") section of the town, these last works closing in the 1960s before being partially revived by Crown Packaging, closing again in 2015.
Despite the decline of industry, Neath itself has continued to be a prosperous town – average earnings in Neath Port Talbot County Borough stand at £409 per week, the second-highest figure in Wales. This is probably helped by the hourly Intercity rail service to Swansea in one direction and Cardiff and London Paddington in the other, which combined with much lower house prices than in the cities makes the town an attractive place to live for well-paid commuters.
The usual piece of trivia cited about Neath are that the Welsh Rugby Union was established in the Castle Hotel in the town. Neath is of course famous for its rugby team (reputedly the oldest in Wales – I wonder who they played against then...), whose distinctive all-black kit with a Maltese cross on it is obviously better than its New Zealand knock-off. Famous people from Neath include former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, hymnodist Anna Letitia Waring, and opera star Katherine Jenkins.
Neath is joined now by about 22000 voters from Swansea East. This area has a narrow section of waterfront onto Swansea Bay where there are now vast marina developments of flats, business parks and leisure facilities, along with the docklands east of the mouth of the River Tawe. But far more typical are the very eastern suburbs of Swansea- in Bonymaen and Llansamlet- containing a lot of social housing. As in many British cities, the eastern half of the second city of Wales is the more working class and less affluent half. This is not the Swansea of the bohemian University area of Uplands or affluent Sketty, this is the Swansea of council estates and industry. As you would expect, therefore, this is also the half of Swansea which has shown greater favour to the Labour Party
Swansea East clocked up a century in Labour hands in 2022, having been gained from the Liberals in 1922. For most of the post war period the majorities racked up by the party here have looked impregnable, topping 20,000 on nine occasions.
The demographics of this new constituency are of a fairly average age profile, a mainly white constituency ( 95.6%) and a fairly average number of owner occupiers ( 66%) Qualifications and economic activity show a somewhat more telling picture. 21.9% of people have no formal qualifications and ‘only’ 27.3% of people have a degree or equivalent- placing the consituency in the ‘worst’ quartile for both of these measures. Only 8.2% of people are in higher professional roles and the constituency is in the top 100 in England and Wales for people in lower supervisory roles and for those in semi routine occupations. These economic indicators are not so extreme as some of the constieunices in the middle of the Welsh valleys but they are indicative of a relatively low skilled low wage economy.
In the 2022 local elections here, the Conservatives were unable to build on the step forward that they took in the 2019 general election and failed to get a single councillor elected in the new consituency. Labour didn’t have things all their own way however, particularly in Neath. They comfortably won all of the Swansea wards, apart from Waterfront, which the Liberal Democrats won. Neath was a rather different story with Independents defeating Labour in most of the wards in the upper Neath valley. Councillors elected in this new constituency were 14 Independents, 13 Labour, 4 Plaid Cymru, 3 Liberal Democrats and 1 Green.
The Neath constituency was created by the Representation of the People Act 1918 for the General Election that December, and then comprised Neath MB, most of Neath RD (excluding the parishes of Baglan Lower (i.e. Baglan), Baglan Higher (i.e. half of Tonmawr and some farms above Efail-fach, discontiguous from one another – the bit in the middle was in Llantwit Parish, the very strangely shaped parish in which Neath town wasn't), Michaelston Higher (an area between the Pelenna and Afan rivers), and Michaelston Lower (i.e. Cwmafan), and also excluding the parish of Ystradfellte, which was administered by Neath RD, but was in Brecknockshire), and Pontardawe RD.
For the 1950 General Election, Pontardawe RD was transferred to the Gower constituency and the former Briton Ferry UD (which had been abolished in 1922 and included in Neath MB) together with the remainder of Neath RD (boundary changes had transferred part of Michaelston Higher to Glyncorrwg UD, abolished Michaelston Lower and Baglan Lower and transferred most of them to Port Talbot MB in 1921) was at last added from the Aberavon constituency; and these extremely tidy boundaries of Neath MB and Neath RD would go unchanged by the First and Second Periodic Reviews.
The Third Review undid much of the tidiness, as the Welsh Commission followed the 1974 county boundaries, despite the district of Neath only differing from the former MB and RD by having lost the parish of Rhigos to the Cynon Valley district. Rhigos predictably went to the Cynon Valley constituency, but then Briton Ferry was lost again to Aberavon, which was undersized as a result of now following the West Glamorgan/Mid Glamorgan boundary, and Pontardawe was re-gained from Gower – i.e. pretty much back to the 1918-1950 boundaries again from 1983, but with the Pelenna Valley. The Fourth Review prior to the 1997 General Election saw Neath lose Coedffranc community, which it now regains.
The only politician honoured with a statue in the town is the Conservative Howel Gwyn, who was oddly enough MP for Penryn and Falmouth from 1847 to 1857. He was born on Orchard Street in the town centre and later lived at Dyffryn across the river. Gwyn's birthplace (together with the former offices of Neath RDC) has since been demolished for an extension to what was then Woolworth's, but the location is marked with a blue plaque. The opposite side of Orchard Street features the Gwyn Hall, a magnificent concert hall outside which Gwyn's statue once stood before the needs of traffic (Orchard Street was at that time part of the A48) saw it relocated to Victoria Gardens. Next to this stand the rather modest offices of Neath Town Council, with the Union Jack and Red Dragon flying high outside. Back across the street is the former Constitutional Club (closed and converted into a pub in 2016), which was opened by the Earl of Iddesleigh (who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Disraeli's second ministry) in 1886, and then as St David's Street sweeps off along one side of Victoria Gardens the large Victorian St David's Church (the largest of Neath's slightly excessive total of six Church in Wales parish churches), with its tower aligned with Gnoll Avenue, which leads up from Victoria Gardens through the War Memorial Gates into the Gnoll Estate, which is now a large country park, now containing just the locked-off cellars of the once magnificent stately home Gnoll Castle (demolished by the municipal philistines in 1957), once the seat of the Mackworth baronets, a title created in 1780 for Sir Herbert Mackworth, Tory MP for the Cardiff District of Boroughs from 1766 to 1790.
With such an excellent Conservative heritage and with that typical pattern of reasonably prosperous market town plus rural hinterland that can mean only one thing in any part of England; but with Wales being Wales and coal being nearby, it should come as no surprise that the Conservative Party has never won the Neath constituency. The initial election in 1918 was won by J. Hugh Edwards for the Liberal Party, but every election after that has been won by Labour.
J. Hugh Edwards was first elected for the Mid Glamorgan division at the December 1910 election, before the 1918 boundary changes saw him elected for Neath. Edwards was a curious figure – a minister of the Annibynwyr (Congregationalists/Independents) and a Welsh nationalist who went on to write no fewer than three biographies of David Lloyd George, but later (after his 1922 defeat in Neath) Constitutionalist MP for Accrington from 1923-29 – the very label Winston Churchill used mid-rerat at the same time. He did not face Conservative opponents either in Neath or in Accrington.
Edwards was defeated at the 1922 election by William Jenkins (who would be knighted in 1931). Sir William was a coal miner from Glyncorrwg in the neighbouring Aberavon constituency who had risen to Chairman of Glamorgan County Council in 1906 and then again from 1919 to 1921. He never lived in the Neath constituency, and died at Cymmer in the Afan Valley in December 1944.
Jenkins' death prompted a by-election on 15 May 1945. Due to the War, the Conservative and Liberal Parties had agreed not to oppose the Labour candidate, D.J. Williams. But Plaid Cymru and a Trotskyist group calling themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party (as Wikipedia says, not to be confused with the one you've actually heard of) fielded candidates. Williams unsurprisingly won very handily indeed. After the splitters saw to that version of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Williams helped their candidate, Jock Haston, get a job with the National Council of Labour Colleges.
Williams was again a coal miner from outside the constituency (this time from the Amman Valley in Carmarthenshire), but he at least had the good sense to move to Cilfrew. He had studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, in the 1920s, and wrote a book entitled Capitalist Combination in the Coal Industry (which you can still apparently buy a copy of). Williams is probably best defined by the things he opposed: National Service, the Warsaw Pact, British membership of the EEC, and any idea of devolving anything to Wales. He stepped down in advance of the 1964 election.
Donald Coleman, who succeeded WIlliams, was only the son of a coal miner – he was a metallurgist in the research department of the Abbey works in Margam – but once more from outside the constituency, this time originally from Barry and a councillor in Swansea. He served as a whip both in opposition and in government between 1970 and 1978. He reputedly had some falling out or other with Neil Kinnock, but did a sort of sulking tribute act to Ted Heath until his death on 14 January 1991.
The Neath by-election was held on 4 April 1991. It featured as well as the familiar four main parties, a continuity SDP candidate (who saved his deposit), someone called Rhys Jeffreys describing himself as Local Independent Labour, Screaming Lord Sutch, and Captain Beany. Despite Rhys Jeffreys' understandable but deposit-losing point, Labour's latest candidate from outside the constituency won, this time Peter Hain, born in Nairobi and brought up in South Africa, who had never done a real job in his life – he had puzzlingly joined the Liberal Party first and then Labour, and had worked in the research department of a trades union straight from university at Queen Mary and then Sussex. But he took the point on board and moved to Resolven. Hain's journey from anti-Apartheid campaigner to a competent ministerial career in the Blair and Brown administrations, to the ignominious plausible deniability of the expenses mess of his deputy leadership campaign, to his inner Liberal popping up at the AV Referndum, to a seat in the Lords is well-known. And I do have to admit I felt a bit of sympathy for that incident where the incredibly thin-skinned Northern Irish judiciary invoked the Streisand Effect in their attempt to prosecute him over a passage in his memoirs that was mildly critical of Sir Paul Girvan.
After Peter Hain stepped down at the 2015 election, he was succeeded by Christina Rees. The theme should be obvious: she was born in Kenfig Hill in Bridgend, and had previously lost in Arfon in the 2011 Assembly election. Her career is only ever described as "barrister", before launching onto a digression about squash and other sports she has played – quite shadowy – but she seems to have been well-connected, formerly having been married to former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies (divorced in 1999). She was Shadow Welsh Secretary for much of Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader, but has since left the Shadow Cabinet. She is a vegan. She likes to show up at civic services etc in a car with personalized number plates to give the impression of living in Neath, but the Register of Members interests discloses that she actually lives in Bridgend County Borough. Rees was suspended by the Labour Party in 2022 following allegations against her.
In 2019, the Conservative party achieved their best ever results in both Swansea East and in Neath, clocking up 28% of the vote in each and reducing the Labour majorities to 7900 in Swansea East and to 5600 in Neath. Initial notional results have indicated a Labour majority of about 8000 or 20% in this new seat- safe enough but not as safe as this area would usually be.
It is perhaps fair to conclude that whilst this area may not be as monolithically Labour as it was, it may be that this is one of those places that 2019 was the outlier, and this is still a very safe constituency for that party.
The effects of this boundary review are essentially to merge the 4 Labour held constituencies of Gower, Neath, Swansea East and Swansea West into 3 new constituencies. This could have been a problem for the 4 sitting Labour MPs but the suspension of Christina Rees solved the problem and Carolyn Harris, current MP for Swansea East, will be the first MP for this new seat.
