Post by batman on Jan 31, 2024 17:07:48 GMT
edited to take the 2024 general election result into account
CROYDON WEST
As with neighbouring Croydon East, this is a recreation of a short-lived constituency of the 1950s. This seat was previously contested only in 1950 and 1951, both times being won narrowly by Richard Thompson (later to succeed to a baronetcy) of the Conservative Party. He defeated David Rees-Williams, who had been Labour MP for Croydon South (a very different seat from its namesake of today) from 1945 to 1950, and after increasing his majority noticeably with the national swing in 1951 went on to enjoy a lengthy tenure in the area, latterly in the reconstituted Croydon South, interrupted by a solitary defeat to Labour's David Winnick in 1966. This and its linear predecessor and successor, Croydon South, were clearly marginals. This reconstituted seat, however, is not and will not be so, unlike Croydon East (well, at least to some extent). Even in the very trying local elections of 2022, when Labour's vote was (perhaps hardly surprisingly) badly hit by the effective bankruptcy of Croydon Council under their control, Labour won seats in every single ward which makes up this constituency, and only in the two southernmost ones, Fairfield and Waddon, was there much of a contest at all. The Tories have one solitary councillor here even now, Simon Fox in Waddon ward, and he had no real chance of achieving the unenviable task of trying to unseat Labour's Sarah Jones, who chose to stand here rather than in the much more marginal East and had represented Croydon Central since her gain of the seat from the Conservatives in 2017.
This constituency contains somewhat more than half of the outgoing Croydon North seat, and that has been ultra-safe for Labour ever since it was first reconstituted for the 1997 election. All of the wards coming here from that seat, Bensham Manor, Selhurst, West Thornton, Broad Green and South Norwood, nowadays have totally safe Labour characteristics, mostly since roughly 1986, but in the case of South Norwood more recently. This seat also acquires a small minority sliver of the also ultra-safe Woodside ward (most of which however finds itself instead in Croydon East) which along with Fairfield ward has come in from the abolished (or more accurately mostly redrawn as Croydon East) seat of Croydon Central. One further ward, Waddon, which had up to 2024 been an aberrant Labour-inclined ward in the otherwise fairly strongly Tory seat of Croydon South, has also been added. Most of Croydon's town centre logically enough is in Fairfield ward, which includes a fairly prestigious concert hall, the Fairfield Halls. I will consider the territory from the former Croydon North first.
Bensham Manor, Selhurst (in those days as Whitehorse Manor) and West Thornton were the wards which formed the core Labour-inclined areas of Croydon North-West which existed from 1955 until its abolition in 1997. This was usually a Conservative seat, but was won in a 1981 by-election by the Liberal Alliance's Bill Pitt (later to join the Labour Party, the opposite of the political journey a generation earlier of Rees-Williams when he became Lord Ogmore), and after his defeat in 1983 and Labour's rapid ascent into a challenging position by Labour's Malcolm Wicks in 1992. This seat, as mentioned in the profile of Streatham & Croydon North, saw quite strong pro-Labour demographic change in its latter days, culminating in the Tories' huge defeat in its partial successor of Croydon North in 1997. Whitehorse Manor, in the shadow of the Crystal Palace football ground, was the most Labour-inclined of these, being for example won in the 1978 elections when Labour lost the other two, although Bensham Manor only extremely narrowly. This ward never had much obviously middle-class housing and had a fair-sized element of terraced housing intended primarily for railway workers, sitting as it did and as Selhurst now does just north of a major railway junction and sidings. Bensham Manor and West Thornton (i.e., west of central Thornton Heath, which was never in the Croydon NW constituency but in NE) were a little more socially mixed with some more middle-class streets, and could be won in bad Labour years in times gone by. However, since both were gained along with Whitehorse Manor in the 1986 elections, Labour has marched into the distance in these wards, which can perhaps most easily be characterised as somewhat fading mostly 19th-century suburbs, and now routinely wins very easily indeed. Bensham Manor and West Thornton wards remain to this day politically very similar to each other, with Labour even in the pretty poor year of 2022 outpolling the Tories by a good two-and-a-half to one, but Selhurst, whose electorate is smaller, is safer still as it always tended to be as Whitehorse Manor, with Labour enjoying more like a 3-to-1 advantage. There are some streets with interwar owner-occupied semis in the two slightly less safe wards, but most of the housing is 19th-century, with the larger houses tending to be increasingly split up into flats as time has gone on. These are not particularly sought-after residential areas generally speaking although it is certainly possible to find plenty of graduates and people in non-routine jobs in these parts. As with the great majority of the borough of Croydon, these wards have been fairly multiethnic for a fair while now and this feature has increased further. South Norwood is rather more interwar and less multi-occupied. The Conservatives were still able to win here (albeit very narrowly) in the face of a further swing to Labour in 1990, but then the ward fell decisively to the latter in their triumphant 1994 elections. It did remain fairly competitive for another generation, and the Tories managed a partial regain in 2006, but since the 2010 local elections which took place on General Election day Labour has now pulled away to the extent that the ward can no longer be regarded as anything but safe Labour. In fact Labour's advantage here was comparable to Bensham Manor and West Thornton in the last local elections. Here, as with so much of the outgoing Croydon North, the area has seen a major increase in its BAME (especially Black) population and it is no longer an area that prosperous City workers tend to look to, although it would be incorrect to describe its houses and flats as cheap. Broad Green has had a longer history as a mostly safe Labour ward than most of the above, but is now politically more or less in line with them and actually slightly less safe than Selhurst. It has featured in both Croydon Central and Croydon North-West in the past, and the transfer from the former to the latter in 1983 was a major factor in enabling Labour to win which they managed to do nine years later. It is on the fringes of Croydon town centre and much of it would be locally described as West Croydon. The prevailing housing type tends to be fairly basic terraces, with a council estate element too. It too is distinctly multiethnic but there are still some elements of a White working-class Conservative-inclined vote, albeit rather residual now. With the addition of the sliver of Woodside which is included, this mostly Croydon-North-derived part of the constituency, by far its majority, provides a very solid and numerous bank of Labour votes. It is hard to see now how any of these wards could become truly competitive again, despite their mostly marginal history a generation or more ago. Halfway-out London, as opposed to its very outermost suburbs, has in so many cases seen a major strengthening of Labour's position in the last decade and a half in particular, and these wards are no exception.
Waddon ward is distinctly mixed. Parts of it are of unprepossessing appearance with a strong light-industrial element. The northern end of the ward has traditional Labour strength, but its southern end while not an area exactly of great beauty does become progressively more middle-class and is still predominantly White. The Tories have remained competitive in this mixture for much longer than anywhere else in this new constituency, and after Labour racked up a rather larger-than-usual majority in 2018 they managed to strike back in 2022 to gain a seat here, a result not many believed would have happened had it not been for the Council's financial woes. Labour would have hoped that in the context of a general election they might have been able to establish a bit of a lead here, despite Simon Fox's candidacy (it's not completely clear whether they did), but whatever its voting figures for 2024 this ward does remain, unusually for this constituency, truly competitive at least for the time being.
Finally Fairfield ward. This ward was, perhaps to the surprise of someone making a cursory acquaintance with it, a remarkably strongly Tory area for a very long time. It has what are generally considered the very unlovely tall office blocks which tell the approaching traveller he or she has made it to Croydon town centre, not all of which are private-sector, but these are not residential tower blocks, and its housing is for much of its extent of very good quality, sizeable and generally built between the wars. The area's close proximity to East Croydon station, from which one can easily take fast trains both to central London, Gatwick Airport and to the seaside, as well as its good housing stock has long made it attractive to commuters. A mixture of a noticeable but not swingeing boundary change and various demographic factors, one important one of which has been a gradual but definite increase in multi-occupancy, have finally broken the Conservative stranglehold. This was a ward which for some time Labour felt it should win but couldn't, but they went into a surprisingly strong lead in a short time, only to see two of their seats in 2022 fall, not to the Tories who now appear finally to have fallen out of contention here, but to the Green Party, a very rare election success in previously fallow territory. It is rather odd, bearing in mind the ward's situation east of Croydon town centre, that the ward finds itself in Croydon West, but that is partly because the borough could be described as somewhat lopsided east to west, with the borough boundary with Sutton only being less than a mile from the town centre. Labour could well have done with it being in Croydon East, but they managed perfectly well without it; in a general election there is no longer any doubt that Labour will have outpolled the Tories comfortably there despite its former status as a Tory stronghold ward, unlike its neighbours to the north in particular.
This constituency perhaps corrals more Labour support into one seat than the party would ideally have wished, but in the short term they were comfortably able to make light of it sufficiently to win Croydon East nonetheless; however, the inclusion of Waddon here may well insulate the Tories from Labour's challenge further south not only in 2024 but in future elections (it's almost certain that the Tories would have held Croydon South in 2024 even if Waddon ward had still been included). In 2024 Labour's share of the vote dropped by over 12%, and that of the Tories by a much more modest 4%, perhaps partly because of Fox's candidacy, so this seat swung quite a few per cent against the national swing; but this was not nearly enough to make the seat remotely competitive. This is a very clearly safe Labour seat, even though in the past it would undoubtedly have seen some hair-raisingly close contests had it existed on these boundaries.
CROYDON WEST
As with neighbouring Croydon East, this is a recreation of a short-lived constituency of the 1950s. This seat was previously contested only in 1950 and 1951, both times being won narrowly by Richard Thompson (later to succeed to a baronetcy) of the Conservative Party. He defeated David Rees-Williams, who had been Labour MP for Croydon South (a very different seat from its namesake of today) from 1945 to 1950, and after increasing his majority noticeably with the national swing in 1951 went on to enjoy a lengthy tenure in the area, latterly in the reconstituted Croydon South, interrupted by a solitary defeat to Labour's David Winnick in 1966. This and its linear predecessor and successor, Croydon South, were clearly marginals. This reconstituted seat, however, is not and will not be so, unlike Croydon East (well, at least to some extent). Even in the very trying local elections of 2022, when Labour's vote was (perhaps hardly surprisingly) badly hit by the effective bankruptcy of Croydon Council under their control, Labour won seats in every single ward which makes up this constituency, and only in the two southernmost ones, Fairfield and Waddon, was there much of a contest at all. The Tories have one solitary councillor here even now, Simon Fox in Waddon ward, and he had no real chance of achieving the unenviable task of trying to unseat Labour's Sarah Jones, who chose to stand here rather than in the much more marginal East and had represented Croydon Central since her gain of the seat from the Conservatives in 2017.
This constituency contains somewhat more than half of the outgoing Croydon North seat, and that has been ultra-safe for Labour ever since it was first reconstituted for the 1997 election. All of the wards coming here from that seat, Bensham Manor, Selhurst, West Thornton, Broad Green and South Norwood, nowadays have totally safe Labour characteristics, mostly since roughly 1986, but in the case of South Norwood more recently. This seat also acquires a small minority sliver of the also ultra-safe Woodside ward (most of which however finds itself instead in Croydon East) which along with Fairfield ward has come in from the abolished (or more accurately mostly redrawn as Croydon East) seat of Croydon Central. One further ward, Waddon, which had up to 2024 been an aberrant Labour-inclined ward in the otherwise fairly strongly Tory seat of Croydon South, has also been added. Most of Croydon's town centre logically enough is in Fairfield ward, which includes a fairly prestigious concert hall, the Fairfield Halls. I will consider the territory from the former Croydon North first.
Bensham Manor, Selhurst (in those days as Whitehorse Manor) and West Thornton were the wards which formed the core Labour-inclined areas of Croydon North-West which existed from 1955 until its abolition in 1997. This was usually a Conservative seat, but was won in a 1981 by-election by the Liberal Alliance's Bill Pitt (later to join the Labour Party, the opposite of the political journey a generation earlier of Rees-Williams when he became Lord Ogmore), and after his defeat in 1983 and Labour's rapid ascent into a challenging position by Labour's Malcolm Wicks in 1992. This seat, as mentioned in the profile of Streatham & Croydon North, saw quite strong pro-Labour demographic change in its latter days, culminating in the Tories' huge defeat in its partial successor of Croydon North in 1997. Whitehorse Manor, in the shadow of the Crystal Palace football ground, was the most Labour-inclined of these, being for example won in the 1978 elections when Labour lost the other two, although Bensham Manor only extremely narrowly. This ward never had much obviously middle-class housing and had a fair-sized element of terraced housing intended primarily for railway workers, sitting as it did and as Selhurst now does just north of a major railway junction and sidings. Bensham Manor and West Thornton (i.e., west of central Thornton Heath, which was never in the Croydon NW constituency but in NE) were a little more socially mixed with some more middle-class streets, and could be won in bad Labour years in times gone by. However, since both were gained along with Whitehorse Manor in the 1986 elections, Labour has marched into the distance in these wards, which can perhaps most easily be characterised as somewhat fading mostly 19th-century suburbs, and now routinely wins very easily indeed. Bensham Manor and West Thornton wards remain to this day politically very similar to each other, with Labour even in the pretty poor year of 2022 outpolling the Tories by a good two-and-a-half to one, but Selhurst, whose electorate is smaller, is safer still as it always tended to be as Whitehorse Manor, with Labour enjoying more like a 3-to-1 advantage. There are some streets with interwar owner-occupied semis in the two slightly less safe wards, but most of the housing is 19th-century, with the larger houses tending to be increasingly split up into flats as time has gone on. These are not particularly sought-after residential areas generally speaking although it is certainly possible to find plenty of graduates and people in non-routine jobs in these parts. As with the great majority of the borough of Croydon, these wards have been fairly multiethnic for a fair while now and this feature has increased further. South Norwood is rather more interwar and less multi-occupied. The Conservatives were still able to win here (albeit very narrowly) in the face of a further swing to Labour in 1990, but then the ward fell decisively to the latter in their triumphant 1994 elections. It did remain fairly competitive for another generation, and the Tories managed a partial regain in 2006, but since the 2010 local elections which took place on General Election day Labour has now pulled away to the extent that the ward can no longer be regarded as anything but safe Labour. In fact Labour's advantage here was comparable to Bensham Manor and West Thornton in the last local elections. Here, as with so much of the outgoing Croydon North, the area has seen a major increase in its BAME (especially Black) population and it is no longer an area that prosperous City workers tend to look to, although it would be incorrect to describe its houses and flats as cheap. Broad Green has had a longer history as a mostly safe Labour ward than most of the above, but is now politically more or less in line with them and actually slightly less safe than Selhurst. It has featured in both Croydon Central and Croydon North-West in the past, and the transfer from the former to the latter in 1983 was a major factor in enabling Labour to win which they managed to do nine years later. It is on the fringes of Croydon town centre and much of it would be locally described as West Croydon. The prevailing housing type tends to be fairly basic terraces, with a council estate element too. It too is distinctly multiethnic but there are still some elements of a White working-class Conservative-inclined vote, albeit rather residual now. With the addition of the sliver of Woodside which is included, this mostly Croydon-North-derived part of the constituency, by far its majority, provides a very solid and numerous bank of Labour votes. It is hard to see now how any of these wards could become truly competitive again, despite their mostly marginal history a generation or more ago. Halfway-out London, as opposed to its very outermost suburbs, has in so many cases seen a major strengthening of Labour's position in the last decade and a half in particular, and these wards are no exception.
Waddon ward is distinctly mixed. Parts of it are of unprepossessing appearance with a strong light-industrial element. The northern end of the ward has traditional Labour strength, but its southern end while not an area exactly of great beauty does become progressively more middle-class and is still predominantly White. The Tories have remained competitive in this mixture for much longer than anywhere else in this new constituency, and after Labour racked up a rather larger-than-usual majority in 2018 they managed to strike back in 2022 to gain a seat here, a result not many believed would have happened had it not been for the Council's financial woes. Labour would have hoped that in the context of a general election they might have been able to establish a bit of a lead here, despite Simon Fox's candidacy (it's not completely clear whether they did), but whatever its voting figures for 2024 this ward does remain, unusually for this constituency, truly competitive at least for the time being.
Finally Fairfield ward. This ward was, perhaps to the surprise of someone making a cursory acquaintance with it, a remarkably strongly Tory area for a very long time. It has what are generally considered the very unlovely tall office blocks which tell the approaching traveller he or she has made it to Croydon town centre, not all of which are private-sector, but these are not residential tower blocks, and its housing is for much of its extent of very good quality, sizeable and generally built between the wars. The area's close proximity to East Croydon station, from which one can easily take fast trains both to central London, Gatwick Airport and to the seaside, as well as its good housing stock has long made it attractive to commuters. A mixture of a noticeable but not swingeing boundary change and various demographic factors, one important one of which has been a gradual but definite increase in multi-occupancy, have finally broken the Conservative stranglehold. This was a ward which for some time Labour felt it should win but couldn't, but they went into a surprisingly strong lead in a short time, only to see two of their seats in 2022 fall, not to the Tories who now appear finally to have fallen out of contention here, but to the Green Party, a very rare election success in previously fallow territory. It is rather odd, bearing in mind the ward's situation east of Croydon town centre, that the ward finds itself in Croydon West, but that is partly because the borough could be described as somewhat lopsided east to west, with the borough boundary with Sutton only being less than a mile from the town centre. Labour could well have done with it being in Croydon East, but they managed perfectly well without it; in a general election there is no longer any doubt that Labour will have outpolled the Tories comfortably there despite its former status as a Tory stronghold ward, unlike its neighbours to the north in particular.
This constituency perhaps corrals more Labour support into one seat than the party would ideally have wished, but in the short term they were comfortably able to make light of it sufficiently to win Croydon East nonetheless; however, the inclusion of Waddon here may well insulate the Tories from Labour's challenge further south not only in 2024 but in future elections (it's almost certain that the Tories would have held Croydon South in 2024 even if Waddon ward had still been included). In 2024 Labour's share of the vote dropped by over 12%, and that of the Tories by a much more modest 4%, perhaps partly because of Fox's candidacy, so this seat swung quite a few per cent against the national swing; but this was not nearly enough to make the seat remotely competitive. This is a very clearly safe Labour seat, even though in the past it would undoubtedly have seen some hair-raisingly close contests had it existed on these boundaries.
