Post by batman on Jan 27, 2024 20:30:52 GMT
edited to acknowledge the general election result.
STREATHAM AND CROYDON NORTH
The oversizing (mainly) of some London constituencies has resulted in major boundary changes in parts of the capital, though some corners are relatively or completely unaffected. Some of these constituencies have crossed borough boundaries which have not been crossed before in creating parliamentary seats. One of these numerous new cross-border seats is Streatham & Croydon North. This new constituency is all territory with a marginal or even Tory-inclined heritage a generation or so ago, but this heritage is no longer apparent in elections. This seat was expected to be very safe for the Labour Party when it was first contested at the general election, and these expectations were essentially realised.
Quite a lot of borough boundaries are fairly hard to discern on the ground, based as they mostly are on ancient parish boundaries. The boundary between Lambeth and Croydon was until the 1960s the boundary between the County of London and of Surrey, and thereafter Lambeth was designated as an Inner London borough, with representation on the Inner London Education Authority, and Croydon as an Outer London borough devoid of such representation. But nowadays as you go down the A23 by car, van, motorcycle, lorry or bus the boundary is a very low-key one. The scenery does not discernibly change much when you go from Streatham into Norbury. This constituency was originally mooted to be called Streatham & Norbury, but it includes a much larger slice of northern Croydon borough than just Norbury, and the more generic Streatham & Croydon North was chosen instead. It is a fairly good name although not all of the northern third-or-so of Croydon borough is included; the seat is divided almost half-and-half between the two boroughs, with 4 wards each. The Lambeth wards between them cover all of the Streatham community which lies within that borough (parts of it can also be found in both Merton and Wandsworth). The 4 Croydon wards included are Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood, Norbury Park, Norbury & Pollards Hill, and Thornton Heath. The latter ward is not at all near the Lambeth ward of Streatham Hill West & Thornton, which is pretty much at the opposite end of the constituency. All this territory was in Conservative-held seats until the 1992 general election; nowadays, all of these wards can be regarded as very weak for the Conservatives, with the only partial exception being Norbury Park, and it took the effective bankruptcy of Croydon Council under its previous Labour administration even to allow the Conservatives to get modestly close as they did in that ward in the 2022 local elections.
Streatham is a large community with a long and very busy high street, which constitutes part of the A23 London to Brighton trunk road. Although the great majority of it now finds itself in the London Borough of Lambeth, before the creation of the present London Boroughs in the mid-1960s it was in a rather oddly-shaped borough of Wandsworth (a small part of the community still remains inside the present-day borough of Wandsworth, in its Furzedown ward). The present-day Lambeth Council has generally tended to be dominated politically by the Labour Party throughout its history, though there have been a few hung councils and one outright Conservative majority in 1968, a veritable annus horribilis for Labour. Streatham was not, in the present-day borough's earlier history, politically typical of Lambeth. Compared with Brixton and Herne Hill to its north and north-east, Streatham was a leafy suburb full of often prosperous commuters. Its compact seat saw a succession of Conservative victories ranging from the comfortable enough (for example October 1974) to the pretty overwhelming (for example 1955 and 1959, though both defeated Labour candidates went on to become Labour MPs later on). It had only a small council estate minority and very little working-class terraced cottage housing. Even the council dwellings were, and in many cases still are, often of unusually high quality and had real architectural character, though there are of course some more modern and typical council estates too. The first sign that all was not completely lovely in the Conservative garden was the 1987 general election, in which Streatham saw quite a sharp swing to Labour more than halving its majority, in sharp contrast with the London-wide trend which generally saw further improvement for the Tories on top of their crushing victory in 1983, although the 1983 boundary changes, which saw the abolished safe Labour Lambeth Central donate a fair-sized chunk of its electorate to an enlarged Streatham seat, also played a considerable part. In 1992 a further sharp swing saw the end of the parliamentary career of its right-wing, Freedom Association-supporting Tory MP Sir Bill Shelton. Since then, the Conservatives have seen their vote plummet to the extent that in the 2022 elections they were no longer even in second place in any of the Streatham community wards (they managed a distant second place in a by-election in Streatham Common and Vale in 2024). Demographic change seems to have come a little earlier to Streatham than it did in some parts of London, but it has been a familiar story; a once strong and perenially victorious Conservative vote no longer able to compete, not only with Labour but in some wards also the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who nowadays form the main opposition to Labour around here. How has this demographic change manifested itself?
When the Conservatives were winning in Streatham, it had many voters who worked in executive, managerial and professional jobs, frequently in the private sector. Its array of rather oddly-connected railway stations and the trains serving them were full of people commuting into central London to work. These people were almost all White. Like so much of outer South London, this was not primarily the territory covered by the London Underground, but by what was British Rail. People working in these jobs, even in the public sector, overwhelmingly voted Conservative; it was a time when voting was governed primarily by social class. Nowadays it is not difficult to find doctors who are Labour-inclined, for example, but in those days a Labour-voting qualified & practising medical doctor was a rarity though admittedly not completely unknown. Streatham lies immediately south of Brixton, which has a much longer history of Labour domination. Brixton in the years after WWII gained a very large Black Caribbean community, which is still of course much in evidence there. Indeed, a surprisingly large amount of what we would term Streatham has the SW2 postcode which also covers much of the Brixton community (though not all, as the postcodes are a bit weird in these parts of London). As some members of the Black community in Brixton moved up in the world a bit & gained better-paid & more managerial and professional jobs, they were able to move into more middle-class suburban areas. It was natural that one of these would be Streatham not far down the A23. Other ethnic minority communities also gained a foothold in Streatham, and the increase in the numbers of the Black middle class was accompanied by other phenomena. Streatham became gradually less favoured as a residential area for private-sector executive voters who tended to move quite a bit further out of London, to its outer suburbs and beyond. The emphasis amongst the majority of voters, White, Black and other, who remained increasingly became public-sector professional, although of course many continued to be employed in the private sector too. As time has gone on, such middle-class voters have become increasingly estranged from the Conservatives. Wards which would once have been won either by the Conservatives (the old Streatham South ward, for example, was a major Tory stronghold for donkey's years) or, in some cases, the Liberal-SDP Alliance in the early 1980s gradually became more and more Labour-friendly. There remain some excellent residential streets in Streatham, especially south of Streatham Hill station, with some particularly expensive properties in roads close to Tooting Bec and Streatham commons. But there is now much multi-occupancy, a strong BAME population and a younger age profile than used to be the case. The streets north of Streatham Hill station were always distinctly less prosperous, and always had a Labour vote, but now Labour is at worst competitive throughout Streatham, and very dominant in two wards, Streatham Hill East, and Streatham Common & Vale. The other two, Streatham Hill West & Thornton, and Streatham St Leonards are politically more mixed and perhaps what one might loosely term the "trendy vote" is even more in evidence here than in the other two. Streatham St Leonards was seen as almost, but not quite, a bit of a Green Party stronghold, and the Greens were widely expected to make further gains at Labour's expense in Streatham, bearing in mind the apparently increasingly Green-friendly demographic. Instead, they went backwards and Labour rather unexpectedly gained a seat in the ward. The Lib Dems, who had been off the council for a couple of cycles, did quite well in a small number of wards, one of them being Streatham Hill West and Thornton, which they won outright. This is a rather bifurcated ward, as the former Thornton ward had a relatively large council-estate presence, and tended to be a Labour stronghold, whereas the areas closest to Streatham Hill (also part of the A23 and the northern continuation of the High Road) are mostly privately-built, with some quite desirable and expensive executive homes mixed in with somewhat humbler, though certainly not downmarket, terraces. Labour's dominance in Streatham Common & Vale in particular is quite a recent phenomenon, as much of this territory was strongly Tory for a long time. Streatham Hill East ward, as it now is, had quite a strong Alliance vote and Labour victories there too were rare until fairly recent years. Taken as a whole, Streatham still has good residential areas, but is not much favoured, except for a few small pockets, by well-to-do City workers, and in a matter of only a few years it has been transformed from its status as a reliable Tory neck of the woods into (at least at parliamentary level, if not invariably in local elections) a Labour stronghold. The Greens and Lib Dems fight over the minor placings, but Labour generally wins, and often wins big.
I alluded to the relatively (by 1987 standards) strong swing to Labour in Streatham in Shelton's final winning election. The swing was, as it happens, almost identical in the neighbouring then constituency of Croydon North-West, which like Streatham saw an inaugural Labour win in the following election, in 1992. Croydon North-West constituency is no more, but quite a bit of its former territory now finds itself in this new seat; however, it also contains a substantial swathe of the also abolished Croydon North-East constituency, which was never won by Labour, although it was fairly closely run at times. (Labour did manage to win that seat by 11 votes in the 1973 GLC election, but this result was annulled in the courts, and the Conservatives won the resulting by-election.) These two seats were mostly (though not entirely) merged into Croydon North for the 1997 general election. By this time, Labour had started winning local elections in all the northern Croydon wards, taking control of Croydon council for the first time ever in the 1994 local elections. Some of these areas were, and in certain cases remain, distinctly leafy with the Beulah Hill area having a particularly excellent array of owner-occupied houses (as well as a rather counter-intuitive housing co-op in the middle of what was once a heavily Tory-voting locality). Norbury was very similar in appearance, and in terms of the kinds of people who lived there, to Streatham South ward over the borough boundary, although its owner-occupied streets were distinctly less classy than those in & around Beulah Hill and other parts of Upper Norwood; in the old Croydon North-West constituency, it and the former Beulah Hill wards were the most reliable for the Tories, with wards further south being more marginal and, after 1986, normally Labour-inclined. The social changes which have been seen in Streatham are very similar to those that have occurred in much of northern Croydon borough, including the wards which will now be part of this new constituency. Once a heavily White middle-class commuting area, it has become far more multiethnic and public-sector in emphasis. Croydon North was, according to psephologists at the time, a seat with a very small notional Conservative majority over Labour on 1992 figures, and one of John Major's first campaign appearances in 1997 was there. He might as well have gone elsewhere as Labour swept to a huge victory and the constituency became a permanently super-safe Labour seat. It has been a transformation in political fortunes if anything even more rapid than that seen in Streatham. Areas which were once largely owner-occupied are much more privately-rented than once they were, a phenomenon which is particularly visible in the Pollards Hill section of Norbury and Pollards Hill ward, won very easily by Labour in the last local elections. The neighbouring Pollards Hill ward of Merton Council has seen a huge transformation from Tory-inclined marginal to utterly safe Labour, and has one of the largest Ghanaian communities in Britain; this community is certainly much in evidence over the borough boundary, too. There is in addition a noticeable but not huge council estate element in this ward. The other wards to be included are Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, Norbury Park, and Thornton Heath, as stated further above. The first two continue to have a strong owner-occupied element, though the privately-rented element here too has clearly risen. The Tories were hoping to win Norbury Park in the unusually locally favourable circumstances of the 2022 elections, but fell some way short. In Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood, however, Labour were actually beaten in one seat (by over 100 votes, in fact) by the Liberal Democrats. This remains the best residential area in north Croydon in most people's eyes, and perhaps if Labour were to lose in any ward in the north of the borough, this was the one where it was likeliest to happen. Thornton Heath is a bit different. Traditionally, it had a more working-class vote than the other wards in this new constituency, both in terraced privately-built streets and in council estates, and was often though not invariably won by Labour in the days before that party could reasonably aspire to control of Croydon council. It then swung rather less heavily to Labour than the rest of the north of the borough, retaining at least a semi-competitive Conservative vote longer than some expected, perhaps reflecting a bit of a Thatcherite White working-class vote which was rather thin on the ground in wards to its north. But despite Labour's travails in the most recent borough elections, they won very comfortably indeed here, and it seems fair to say that the Tories have now faded out of contention in this older suburb. Labour lost a great deal of ground in the borough in the 2022 elections, largely because voters knew that the Council had become effectively bankrupt during their period of control. But their losses were modest indeed in these four wards, reaching the dizzy heights of a single council seat; 2 of the wards in this part of the new constituency are very safe Labour indeed even now, another, Norbury Park, is safe though not spectacularly so (it does still have some very pleasant owner-occupied areas, especially near the park itself), and only in one do they face a worthwhile challenge. Even in that ward, Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, Labour must have outpolled all comers in the context of the general election.
In summary, this is yet another example of a London seat, in this case a halfway-out suburban area for the most part, which was once fairly firmly Tory but has swung heavily in the other direction. Until the Conservatives find ways of improving their situation amongst public-sector professionals, and amongst the Black middle class more generally, they will continue to be heavily beaten here, and with a further drop in their already low vote they had to concede even second place to the Greens, who generally polled fairly well throughout most of inner South London. Steve Reed, who had represented Croydon North for over a decade until the creation of this seat and risen to Shadow Cabinet status with Labour in opposition, saw his Labour share of the vote drop rather less than in some inner London seats, and enjoyed a very easy victory over the Greens, the Tories, the Lib Dems much further behind still, and disparate other opposition. He has now risen to the Cabinet as Environment Secretary, and seems unlikely to see his career interrupted by serious threats to his position in his own constituency.
STREATHAM AND CROYDON NORTH
The oversizing (mainly) of some London constituencies has resulted in major boundary changes in parts of the capital, though some corners are relatively or completely unaffected. Some of these constituencies have crossed borough boundaries which have not been crossed before in creating parliamentary seats. One of these numerous new cross-border seats is Streatham & Croydon North. This new constituency is all territory with a marginal or even Tory-inclined heritage a generation or so ago, but this heritage is no longer apparent in elections. This seat was expected to be very safe for the Labour Party when it was first contested at the general election, and these expectations were essentially realised.
Quite a lot of borough boundaries are fairly hard to discern on the ground, based as they mostly are on ancient parish boundaries. The boundary between Lambeth and Croydon was until the 1960s the boundary between the County of London and of Surrey, and thereafter Lambeth was designated as an Inner London borough, with representation on the Inner London Education Authority, and Croydon as an Outer London borough devoid of such representation. But nowadays as you go down the A23 by car, van, motorcycle, lorry or bus the boundary is a very low-key one. The scenery does not discernibly change much when you go from Streatham into Norbury. This constituency was originally mooted to be called Streatham & Norbury, but it includes a much larger slice of northern Croydon borough than just Norbury, and the more generic Streatham & Croydon North was chosen instead. It is a fairly good name although not all of the northern third-or-so of Croydon borough is included; the seat is divided almost half-and-half between the two boroughs, with 4 wards each. The Lambeth wards between them cover all of the Streatham community which lies within that borough (parts of it can also be found in both Merton and Wandsworth). The 4 Croydon wards included are Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood, Norbury Park, Norbury & Pollards Hill, and Thornton Heath. The latter ward is not at all near the Lambeth ward of Streatham Hill West & Thornton, which is pretty much at the opposite end of the constituency. All this territory was in Conservative-held seats until the 1992 general election; nowadays, all of these wards can be regarded as very weak for the Conservatives, with the only partial exception being Norbury Park, and it took the effective bankruptcy of Croydon Council under its previous Labour administration even to allow the Conservatives to get modestly close as they did in that ward in the 2022 local elections.
Streatham is a large community with a long and very busy high street, which constitutes part of the A23 London to Brighton trunk road. Although the great majority of it now finds itself in the London Borough of Lambeth, before the creation of the present London Boroughs in the mid-1960s it was in a rather oddly-shaped borough of Wandsworth (a small part of the community still remains inside the present-day borough of Wandsworth, in its Furzedown ward). The present-day Lambeth Council has generally tended to be dominated politically by the Labour Party throughout its history, though there have been a few hung councils and one outright Conservative majority in 1968, a veritable annus horribilis for Labour. Streatham was not, in the present-day borough's earlier history, politically typical of Lambeth. Compared with Brixton and Herne Hill to its north and north-east, Streatham was a leafy suburb full of often prosperous commuters. Its compact seat saw a succession of Conservative victories ranging from the comfortable enough (for example October 1974) to the pretty overwhelming (for example 1955 and 1959, though both defeated Labour candidates went on to become Labour MPs later on). It had only a small council estate minority and very little working-class terraced cottage housing. Even the council dwellings were, and in many cases still are, often of unusually high quality and had real architectural character, though there are of course some more modern and typical council estates too. The first sign that all was not completely lovely in the Conservative garden was the 1987 general election, in which Streatham saw quite a sharp swing to Labour more than halving its majority, in sharp contrast with the London-wide trend which generally saw further improvement for the Tories on top of their crushing victory in 1983, although the 1983 boundary changes, which saw the abolished safe Labour Lambeth Central donate a fair-sized chunk of its electorate to an enlarged Streatham seat, also played a considerable part. In 1992 a further sharp swing saw the end of the parliamentary career of its right-wing, Freedom Association-supporting Tory MP Sir Bill Shelton. Since then, the Conservatives have seen their vote plummet to the extent that in the 2022 elections they were no longer even in second place in any of the Streatham community wards (they managed a distant second place in a by-election in Streatham Common and Vale in 2024). Demographic change seems to have come a little earlier to Streatham than it did in some parts of London, but it has been a familiar story; a once strong and perenially victorious Conservative vote no longer able to compete, not only with Labour but in some wards also the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who nowadays form the main opposition to Labour around here. How has this demographic change manifested itself?
When the Conservatives were winning in Streatham, it had many voters who worked in executive, managerial and professional jobs, frequently in the private sector. Its array of rather oddly-connected railway stations and the trains serving them were full of people commuting into central London to work. These people were almost all White. Like so much of outer South London, this was not primarily the territory covered by the London Underground, but by what was British Rail. People working in these jobs, even in the public sector, overwhelmingly voted Conservative; it was a time when voting was governed primarily by social class. Nowadays it is not difficult to find doctors who are Labour-inclined, for example, but in those days a Labour-voting qualified & practising medical doctor was a rarity though admittedly not completely unknown. Streatham lies immediately south of Brixton, which has a much longer history of Labour domination. Brixton in the years after WWII gained a very large Black Caribbean community, which is still of course much in evidence there. Indeed, a surprisingly large amount of what we would term Streatham has the SW2 postcode which also covers much of the Brixton community (though not all, as the postcodes are a bit weird in these parts of London). As some members of the Black community in Brixton moved up in the world a bit & gained better-paid & more managerial and professional jobs, they were able to move into more middle-class suburban areas. It was natural that one of these would be Streatham not far down the A23. Other ethnic minority communities also gained a foothold in Streatham, and the increase in the numbers of the Black middle class was accompanied by other phenomena. Streatham became gradually less favoured as a residential area for private-sector executive voters who tended to move quite a bit further out of London, to its outer suburbs and beyond. The emphasis amongst the majority of voters, White, Black and other, who remained increasingly became public-sector professional, although of course many continued to be employed in the private sector too. As time has gone on, such middle-class voters have become increasingly estranged from the Conservatives. Wards which would once have been won either by the Conservatives (the old Streatham South ward, for example, was a major Tory stronghold for donkey's years) or, in some cases, the Liberal-SDP Alliance in the early 1980s gradually became more and more Labour-friendly. There remain some excellent residential streets in Streatham, especially south of Streatham Hill station, with some particularly expensive properties in roads close to Tooting Bec and Streatham commons. But there is now much multi-occupancy, a strong BAME population and a younger age profile than used to be the case. The streets north of Streatham Hill station were always distinctly less prosperous, and always had a Labour vote, but now Labour is at worst competitive throughout Streatham, and very dominant in two wards, Streatham Hill East, and Streatham Common & Vale. The other two, Streatham Hill West & Thornton, and Streatham St Leonards are politically more mixed and perhaps what one might loosely term the "trendy vote" is even more in evidence here than in the other two. Streatham St Leonards was seen as almost, but not quite, a bit of a Green Party stronghold, and the Greens were widely expected to make further gains at Labour's expense in Streatham, bearing in mind the apparently increasingly Green-friendly demographic. Instead, they went backwards and Labour rather unexpectedly gained a seat in the ward. The Lib Dems, who had been off the council for a couple of cycles, did quite well in a small number of wards, one of them being Streatham Hill West and Thornton, which they won outright. This is a rather bifurcated ward, as the former Thornton ward had a relatively large council-estate presence, and tended to be a Labour stronghold, whereas the areas closest to Streatham Hill (also part of the A23 and the northern continuation of the High Road) are mostly privately-built, with some quite desirable and expensive executive homes mixed in with somewhat humbler, though certainly not downmarket, terraces. Labour's dominance in Streatham Common & Vale in particular is quite a recent phenomenon, as much of this territory was strongly Tory for a long time. Streatham Hill East ward, as it now is, had quite a strong Alliance vote and Labour victories there too were rare until fairly recent years. Taken as a whole, Streatham still has good residential areas, but is not much favoured, except for a few small pockets, by well-to-do City workers, and in a matter of only a few years it has been transformed from its status as a reliable Tory neck of the woods into (at least at parliamentary level, if not invariably in local elections) a Labour stronghold. The Greens and Lib Dems fight over the minor placings, but Labour generally wins, and often wins big.
I alluded to the relatively (by 1987 standards) strong swing to Labour in Streatham in Shelton's final winning election. The swing was, as it happens, almost identical in the neighbouring then constituency of Croydon North-West, which like Streatham saw an inaugural Labour win in the following election, in 1992. Croydon North-West constituency is no more, but quite a bit of its former territory now finds itself in this new seat; however, it also contains a substantial swathe of the also abolished Croydon North-East constituency, which was never won by Labour, although it was fairly closely run at times. (Labour did manage to win that seat by 11 votes in the 1973 GLC election, but this result was annulled in the courts, and the Conservatives won the resulting by-election.) These two seats were mostly (though not entirely) merged into Croydon North for the 1997 general election. By this time, Labour had started winning local elections in all the northern Croydon wards, taking control of Croydon council for the first time ever in the 1994 local elections. Some of these areas were, and in certain cases remain, distinctly leafy with the Beulah Hill area having a particularly excellent array of owner-occupied houses (as well as a rather counter-intuitive housing co-op in the middle of what was once a heavily Tory-voting locality). Norbury was very similar in appearance, and in terms of the kinds of people who lived there, to Streatham South ward over the borough boundary, although its owner-occupied streets were distinctly less classy than those in & around Beulah Hill and other parts of Upper Norwood; in the old Croydon North-West constituency, it and the former Beulah Hill wards were the most reliable for the Tories, with wards further south being more marginal and, after 1986, normally Labour-inclined. The social changes which have been seen in Streatham are very similar to those that have occurred in much of northern Croydon borough, including the wards which will now be part of this new constituency. Once a heavily White middle-class commuting area, it has become far more multiethnic and public-sector in emphasis. Croydon North was, according to psephologists at the time, a seat with a very small notional Conservative majority over Labour on 1992 figures, and one of John Major's first campaign appearances in 1997 was there. He might as well have gone elsewhere as Labour swept to a huge victory and the constituency became a permanently super-safe Labour seat. It has been a transformation in political fortunes if anything even more rapid than that seen in Streatham. Areas which were once largely owner-occupied are much more privately-rented than once they were, a phenomenon which is particularly visible in the Pollards Hill section of Norbury and Pollards Hill ward, won very easily by Labour in the last local elections. The neighbouring Pollards Hill ward of Merton Council has seen a huge transformation from Tory-inclined marginal to utterly safe Labour, and has one of the largest Ghanaian communities in Britain; this community is certainly much in evidence over the borough boundary, too. There is in addition a noticeable but not huge council estate element in this ward. The other wards to be included are Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, Norbury Park, and Thornton Heath, as stated further above. The first two continue to have a strong owner-occupied element, though the privately-rented element here too has clearly risen. The Tories were hoping to win Norbury Park in the unusually locally favourable circumstances of the 2022 elections, but fell some way short. In Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood, however, Labour were actually beaten in one seat (by over 100 votes, in fact) by the Liberal Democrats. This remains the best residential area in north Croydon in most people's eyes, and perhaps if Labour were to lose in any ward in the north of the borough, this was the one where it was likeliest to happen. Thornton Heath is a bit different. Traditionally, it had a more working-class vote than the other wards in this new constituency, both in terraced privately-built streets and in council estates, and was often though not invariably won by Labour in the days before that party could reasonably aspire to control of Croydon council. It then swung rather less heavily to Labour than the rest of the north of the borough, retaining at least a semi-competitive Conservative vote longer than some expected, perhaps reflecting a bit of a Thatcherite White working-class vote which was rather thin on the ground in wards to its north. But despite Labour's travails in the most recent borough elections, they won very comfortably indeed here, and it seems fair to say that the Tories have now faded out of contention in this older suburb. Labour lost a great deal of ground in the borough in the 2022 elections, largely because voters knew that the Council had become effectively bankrupt during their period of control. But their losses were modest indeed in these four wards, reaching the dizzy heights of a single council seat; 2 of the wards in this part of the new constituency are very safe Labour indeed even now, another, Norbury Park, is safe though not spectacularly so (it does still have some very pleasant owner-occupied areas, especially near the park itself), and only in one do they face a worthwhile challenge. Even in that ward, Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, Labour must have outpolled all comers in the context of the general election.
In summary, this is yet another example of a London seat, in this case a halfway-out suburban area for the most part, which was once fairly firmly Tory but has swung heavily in the other direction. Until the Conservatives find ways of improving their situation amongst public-sector professionals, and amongst the Black middle class more generally, they will continue to be heavily beaten here, and with a further drop in their already low vote they had to concede even second place to the Greens, who generally polled fairly well throughout most of inner South London. Steve Reed, who had represented Croydon North for over a decade until the creation of this seat and risen to Shadow Cabinet status with Labour in opposition, saw his Labour share of the vote drop rather less than in some inner London seats, and enjoyed a very easy victory over the Greens, the Tories, the Lib Dems much further behind still, and disparate other opposition. He has now risen to the Cabinet as Environment Secretary, and seems unlikely to see his career interrupted by serious threats to his position in his own constituency.
