Post by andrewteale on Jan 16, 2024 19:15:17 GMT
Between Bolton and Manchester, the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there.
Farnworth and its associated towns lie on the eastern edge of the Lancashire coalfield, which is home to many towns that greatly expanded with the Industrial Revolution and are still looking for a future now that the Revolution has been and gone. Today these are forgotten towns. Walkden claims to have the largest branch of Tesco in the country (4¼ acres of floorspace), but Royal Mail don't even recognise it as a town: every address in Walkden's M28 postcode is classified by Royal Mail as "Worsley, Manchester". Many people in Greater Manchester would have trouble placing Kearsley on a map. Little Hulton, according to one source, "aimed to create a suburb that would improve the standard of living and create private space, greenspace and a sense of community for the new residents"; the jury would appear to be still out on that one.
The coal mines are of course long gone, as is the power station at Kearsley which much of their coal fed. Many of the cotton mills have disappeared too, most recently the Beehive Mills, two large structures which for decades greeted rail travellers arriving into Bolton from the south. They were demolished in 2019 in favour of new housing. Many more mills have fallen victim over the years to the predations of national treasure and steeplejack Fred Dibnah, who lived in this area.
Farnworth was a parliamentary constituency name from 1885, as part of the Radcliffe-cum-Farnworth constituency, before gaining independence from Radcliffe at the 1918 redistribution. That created a Farnworth constituency based on the small towns between Bolton and Salford, including Kearsley, Little Lever, Little Hulton and Walkden, as well as the coal-mining village of Outwood and the rather more affluent village of Ainsworth. So, a little larger than the current seat. Farnworth and Walkden are and to a large extent remain Lancashire as Coronation Street or Spring and Port Wine would have you believe it is, with Victorian terraces and a fair number of cobbled backstreets dotted around.
The Radcliffe-cum-Farnworth constituency had a Liberal tradition: the Conservatives won it only once, in 1895. Its MP from 1900 was Theodore Taylor, a textile millowner from Batley in Yorkshire who was one of the longest-lived MPs of all time. Taylor died in 1950 at the age of 102, a modern-era record which wasn't overtaken until 2018.
Taylor retired from the Commons when his seat was broken up in 1918. The Farnworth constituency was narrowly won by the Conservatives' Edward Bagley, who is described in the relevant Times Guide as having been "one of the most prominent Tariff Reform speakers and workers" before the Great War broke out. He had served in the war, and by polling day had the rank of Captain.
Bagley had a majority of just 497 votes over Labour candidate Thomas Greenall, who had worked down the coalmines for twenty years before becoming a full-time union rep: he rose to become president of the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners' Federation, and in January 1910 had been the first Labour candidate to contest the Liberal-dominated Leigh constituency. Greenall got his revenge on Bagley in 1922, gaining Farnworth by a majority of 3,354, and he enjoyed similar majorities in the 1923 and '24 elections against Conservative candidate Alexander Worsthorne. The father of the journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, Alexander was a Belgian who had been born with the surname Koch de Gooreynd and had reached the rank of General in the Belgian army. Goodness knows why he was thought to be a good fit for Farnworth.
Greenall retired in 1929 and passed the seat on to Guy Rowson, who like Greenall had gone down the pits as a child before ending up in the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners Federation. Rowson had been a Tyldesley urban istrict councillor from 1919 to 1925, and it his first election in Farnworth he had a majority of over 11,000.
It wasn't enough. The 1929 Labour government was a short and turbulent one, and Farnworth was one of the seats which fell in the following Tory landslide of 1931. The new MP was James Stones, a former railway clerk who had been chairman of Farnworth urban district council from 1915 to 1919. He pulled off a 17% swing to defeat Rowson by 2,907 votes.
To date, James Stones was the last Conservative MP for Farnworth. He died just before the 1935 election was called, leaving an open seat; and Guy Rowson returned to the Commons with a 10-point swing and a majority of 5,201. In his second term he became PPS to the party leader Clement Attlee, and introduced a bill to regulate holiday pay; but this proved to be his final term. Rowson died in November 1937, aged just 54.
The resulting Farnworth by-election of January 1938 is possibly the most extensively-studied by-election of the pre-war era. This is thanks to the efforts of Mass Observation, which was active up the road in Bolton at the time and embedded some of its observers in the two parties' campaigns. The photographic record of the campaign (now held by Bolton Council) is fantastic and I recommend a browse at boltonworktown.co.uk/themes/politics. I've previously put some highlights on this thread, and Bolton Council very kindly gave me permission to reproduce the above photo in Andrew's Previews 2018 in exchange for a free copy of the book.
The result of the election was probably less interesting than the study. New Tory candidate Herbert Ryan was defeated by Farnworth councillor and Lancashire county councillor George Tomlinson, who increased the Labour majority to 7,463. That set Tomlinson up for a long career on the Labour benches, which culminated in 1947 with his appointment to the Cabinet as Minister of Education, replacing Ellen Wilkinson after she died in office.
Tomlinson's government career ended with the defeat of the Attlee government in 1951, and within a year Tomlinson was dead at the age of 62. The resulting Farnworth by-election of November 1952 elected Labour's Ernest Thornton without fuss, and he served for 18 years in what was by now a safe Labour constituency. Thornton retired in 1970 and passed the seat on to John Roper, who was on the pro-European wing of the party. Roper was one of the Labour MPS who rallied to the SDP banner in 1981, becoming the SDP chief whip - a role he later carried out for the Liberal Democrats when he was elevated to the House of Lords in 2001.
The local government reorganisation of 1974 had left the Farnworth constituency evenly divided between Farnworth, Kearsley and Little Lever, which were part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton; and Walkden and Little Hulton, which had been annexed by the City of Salford. The 1983 redistribution divided the seat into two halves along this line, with the southern half forming the major part of the new Worsley constituency and the northern half forming the major part of the new seat of Bolton South East. Both new seats were notionally safe for Labour. John Roper decided to contest Worsley, finishing third in a close three-way result; that left Bolton South East as an open seat, and the Labour nomination went to David Young who had been the MP for Bolton East since February 1974. This was a much more Labour-inclined seat than the the marginal Bolton East, and Young won the new seat with a majority of 8,753 or 17.6% - still the lowest percentage majority in Bolton South East.
Young was deselected for the 1997 general election in favour of Brian Iddon, the only case in that Parliament when a Labour MP lost their nomination without boundary changes being involved. A long-serving Bolton councillor, Iddon came to Parliament from a career in academia as a chemistry lecturer.
Iddon retired in 2010 and passed Bolton South East on to Yasmin Qureshi, who along with her fellow Labour MPs Rushanara Ali and Shabana Mahmood became one of the first female Muslim MPs. Originally from Pakistan, Qureshi's career before Parliament was in the law, including as head of the criminal legal section of the UN Mission in Kosovo.
Yasmin Qureshi's seat is centred on the Royal Bolton Hospital, which despite the name is in Farnworth; this is the busiest hospital in Greater Manchester and a major local employer. Much of the hospital site was previously railway land, occupied by Plodder Lane engine shed on a line which has long gone. The hospital is in Harper Green ward, which covers the western end of Farnworth and the Lever Edge area on the southern edge of Bolton proper.
To the vest of this is the starkly-divided Hulton ward, which combines the strongly Conservative area of Over Hulton with more downmarket parts of Bolton proper. From here we travel down Deane Road and St Helens Road into Rumworth ward, which is majority-Asian and majority-Muslim and has very high rates of people "looking after home or family". These lead to the sleek new buildings of the University of Bolton and to Bolton town centre, most of which is contained within the Great Lever ward that includes Burnden to the south. Also part of Bolton East until 1983 was the village of Darcy Lever, which is now part of a ward with Little Lever.
Qureshi's four elections have all been marked by large votes for the radical right. UKIP were second here in the 2015 general election with 24% of the vote, and saved their deposit in 2017; there were also saved deposits for the BNP in 2010 and for the Brexit Party in December 2019. This was not a flash in the pan: UKIP had won seats on Bolton council in 2014 and 2016, including Kearsley ward.
Turning to the history of the Worsley constituency from 1983, this started with a close three-way result. Outgoing Labour turned SDP MP John Roper finished third with 27%, against 33% for the Conservatives and 40% for the winning Labour candidate Terry Lewis. A personnel officer, Lewis had been in local government since 1971 (originally on Kearsley urban district council, then Bolton council) and at the time of the 1983 election he was chairman of Bolton council's education committee.
Roper didn't seek election to the Commons again, although he did eventually return to Parliament: he was appointed as a Lib Dem peer in 2000 and subsequently became chief whip for the party's group in the Lords. The SDP and their successors didn't have the local government base or organisation to challenge for the Worsley parliamentary seat again. With the third-party vote here generally going to Labour from that point on Terry Lewis was well set for a long career on the Labour backbenches. His final election was in 2001 when he saw off future Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood.
Lewis retired in 2005 and the Worsley Labour party selected as his replacement Barbara Keeley, a Trafford councillor and consultant on community regeneration issues. Keeley fairly quickly made it onto the ministerial ladder, serving as Deputy Leader of the Commons from 2009 to 2010. Throughout the Corbyn leadership she was a shadow minister with the social care brief, attending Shadow Cabinet in that capacity from 2016 to 2020; she is now a shadow junior minister with the music and tourism portfolio. In her first election she saw off Conservative candidate Graham Evans (who would later serve as MP for the Cheshire constituency of Weaver Vale from 2010 to 2017) comfortably.
Possibly Keeley's sternest electoral test came in advance of the 2010 election, when boundary changes meant she had to defeat the outgoing Eccles MP Ian Stewart for the Labour nomination in the redrawn seat of Worsley and Eccles South. After Stewart also lost the Labour nomination in Salford and Eccles to outgoing Salford MP Hazel Blears, he had little choice but to announce his retirement from the Commons. There was one coda to his political career however: Stewart served from 2012 to 2016 as the first elected Mayor of Salford.
At the ballot box, Keeley fought the 2010, 2015 and 2017 elections against Conservative candidate Iain Lindley, a Salford councillor for Walkden South ward and founder of this very forum. For that we owe all sorts of moral debts to Lindley which can never be adequately repaid. Keeley's majority was just over 10 points in 2010, rising to 18 points by 2017. For the 2019 election the Conservatives changed candidate to another Salford councillor: Arnie Saunders, a rabbi from Broughton Park, who sharply cut the Labour majority. Keeley won by 46% to 39%, a majority of 3,219 votes, as the seat became marginal for the first time since 1983.
The 2024 boundary changes essentially reverse the changes made in 1983 and recreate what is effectively the old Farnworth seat, but this time with the name of Bolton South and Walkden. (Readers of a sensitive disposition are advised not to find out what the local pronunciation of Walkden is.) And the boundaries aren't quite the same: Little Lever is not included in this version of the Farnworth seat, which instead extends into southern Bolton proper.
In local elections there's an interesting divide between the Bolton and Salford towns here. Farnworth and Kearsley have gone for localism in a big way when elections to Bolton council come round, although Labour remain competitive in Farnworth itself. Walkden and Little Hulton, by contrast, remain Labour strongholds; and Labour appear for now to have seen off the Conservatives in Walkden South, which is one of the few Salford wards where the Tories are competitive. The wards of Bolton proper included in the seat (Great Lever, Rumworth, and the southern end of Queens Park and Central) are dominated by the University of Bolton and have a large Muslim community; these are normally safe for Labour unless things have been going on in the local mosques.
The new seat takes in 72% of the old Bolton South East and 35% of the old Worsley and Eccles South. It should be a safe berth going forward for the outgoing South East MP Yasmin Qureshi. Qureshi is on the backbenches at the moment, having resigned her shadow women and equalities portfolio in November 2023 to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza, but we might well see her on the frontbench of a future Labour government should Labour win the next general election.
