Post by batman on Feb 5, 2024 11:43:47 GMT
edited to take into account the general election result etc.
BECKENHAM AND PENGE
Despite the addition of Penge to the constituency title, this is very much the return of the pre-2010 Beckenham constituency. No longer associated with Beckenham for parliamentary purposes are two Conservative wards, Bromley Common & Holwood as it is now called, and Hayes & Coney Hall. These wards were once supersafe for the Tories, though they have become distinctly less so. In their place have come 3 Labour-held wards, Crystal Palace & Anerley, Penge & Cator, and Clock House. Penge & Cator (or at least the Penge part of the ward) is a long-term Labour stronghold, the only ward in Bromley that has been consistently Labour since 1986, and usually was before that too, but while Labour used to have to withstand worthwhile & often successful challenges from both the Lib Dems & the Conservatives in Clock House, and from the Alliance/Lib Dems in Crystal Palace & Anerley, however named , they have now become extremely safe, as they have increasingly followed the political example of inner-city wards to their north-west. The partisan effect of this major boundary change could not have been starker. Basically, this seat, which as "Beckenham" was notionally the safest Tory seat in the whole of London in 2010 (although it did not quite end up being so when actual votes were cast), not only passed out of Conservative tenure at the 2024 election for the first time in the seat's history, which goes back to 1950, if we take this new seat as the linear successor to the former Beckenham constituency, but it did so by a very wide margin indeed; and the Tories may well need to hope and campaign for a rescinding of these boundary changes if they are to win in any of this territory in the future. Their outgoing MP, the prominent former soldier Bob Stewart, fell out with the Conservative Party, though he did regain the Conservative Whip before his departure from the House in 2024; some speculated that he was never totally happy as an MP, and expressed surprise that he served as long as he did. His successor on these new boundaries is Labour's Liam Conlon, who is the first Labour MP ever to represent any of the non-Labour wards in the constituency. It has become known that he is the son of Sue Gray, who was Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff before and after the general election, and as chance would have it the heavily defeated Conservative candidate in the general election is a Gray too. Not only did he win the seat, which was almost universally expected, he sailed a very long way indeed past the winning post, ending up getting twice as many votes as his Conservative opponent. Apparently from nowhere, Labour has a new safe seat here.
Britain's larger conurbations owe their existence to a variety of causes. Some were built primarily on manufacturing (in some cases including shipbuilding), others more on docks and other transport-related jobs. London, easily the largest conurbation in Britain, has always had its manufacturing, and of course had its docks and retains a formidable transport network which continues to provide many jobs, but has always had a large array of middle-class suburbs, as well as wealthy more central swathes in the boroughs of Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster and also (in the case of Hampstead and some other pockets) Camden. When the Greater London Council was set up in the early 1960s, it was regarded as in an even year a very slightly Conservative-leaning authority, though winnable by Labour in their good years. As recently as 1987, the Tories were able to rack up a large majority of the parliamentary seats in Greater London; but starting in the early 1990s (Labour enjoyed a fair number of gains in London in the 1992 general election) the capital has swung more and more in the other direction in real terms. This has accelerated further in recent years, the 2017 general election seeing particularly heavily above-average swings from Conservative to Labour in a wide variety of London constituencies (though not of course quite all of them). The reasons for this are manifold, but if we were to boil things down to their simplest core London has become more heavily multiethnic than any other conurbation of size, even including the West Midlands with its very large Asian communities in some parts thereof; and this has been accompanied by, for a variety of reasons of which Brexit is just a part, a very serious weakening in the Conservatives' standing in many sections of the urban and suburban White middle class, even while they have distinctly improved their situation amongst some BAME sections of the middle class, particularly Hindus. Even many executive workers in the financial sector have fallen out of love with the Conservative Party, which would have seemed particularly unthinkable only a few years ago. Thus well-to-do neighbourhoods in places like Battersea and Putney, even Hampstead have lost their Tory stronghold status in the last few years. Parts of the London Borough of Bromley have seen at least an element of this and while the borough still has some very safe Tory wards, and has still only once passed out of outright Conservative control, in 1998, demographic & political change have gnawed away at the Conservative base in the territory here under discussion, not unrelated to the fact that it contains the parts of the borough which are furthest from the countryside and closest to (though still a fair distance away from) central London. The Tories still hold a majority in terms of council seats even in this redrawn constituency and even after what were relatively difficult council elections for them locally in 2022, but their safety in all of their strongest areas is very clearly reduced from what it was even just over a decade ago, let alone in the more distant but still recallable past. There are plenty of comfortably-off managerial & professional workers in thoroughly respectable wards such as Beckenham Town & Copers Cope, Shortlands & Park Langley, Kelsey & Eden Park, and furthest out West Wickham, with their detached and large semi-detached mainly interwar houses. These are not for the most part multiethnic, designer-scruffy, arty or public sector-dominated areas of the type where Labour has so prospered in the last decade in particular, especially since the Lib Dems forfeited the votes of so many instinctively non-Tory middle-class voters after forming the Coalition with the Tories in 2010. Two of these wards, Shortlands & Park Langley and slightly more so West Wickham, remain essentially safe for the Tories, but in all these wards the Labour vote has gone over 1,000, and they are now competitive or at least semi-competitive in the other two; it is doubtful that, at least in general elections, the former of these can still be regarded as safe, though the latter probably still can.
Beckenham Town and Copers Cope ward (surely Copers Cope is the only London district which forms an entire sentence complete with verb on its own?) is one of several which underwent both boundary and name changes in time for the 2022 council elections, which makes comparisons somewhat hazardous, but we can only do the best we can in that regard. Of the 4 traditionally Tory-inclined wards, this is rather the oldest with plenty of 19th-century housing remaining along with more recent houses and flats. There is a minority council estate element but most homes are owner-occupied or privately rented, the latter seeing a gentle increase in saliency in recent years perhaps. This writer visited the ward not long before the general election, mostly to take part in a cricket net at the Kent CCC indoor school, just over the borough boundary from Lewisham. This is Beckenham "proper" and (the eastern part of) New Beckenham to its north-west, Copers Cope Road being a fairly long avenue just to the east of New Beckenham railway station. (There is no railway station called simply Beckenham, but 3 with the word Beckenham in their names, one of which is in the neighbouring borough of Lewisham.) In the 2010 local elections, which took place on General Election day that year and thus saw much larger turnout than is customary for local elections, the Tories polled twice as many votes as the Lib Dems, with Labour some distance further behind, in what was at that time Copers Cope ward. Now, the present ward has two Lib Dem councillors and one Conservative, with Labour only a short distance behind; their top candidate polled 1492 votes, only 270 votes behind the bottom elected Liberal Democrat. 3-way marginal wards have at times been a thing in the history of the London Borough of Bromley, and this now looks like one of them. These communities have got a bit younger than they were, just a little bit more multiethnic, and just a little more like some of the inner-city areas to its north, though it would not do to exaggerate this factor. Mostly this is still a pretty prosperous area, but these sort of voters are just the type who have been turning away from the Tories in recent years, and it looks as if a lot of the Liberal Democrats' local voters ended up voting tactically for Labour in the general election, even though the result shows that they didn't really need to, arguably. The Tories cannot rely on a lead over Labour in the ward any more, although in days gone by not that long ago they certainly could.
To the south-east of this ward lies Shortlands and Park Langley ward, areas long associated with Beckenham for parliamentary purposes, but in the case of Shortlands not in the Beckenham postal town. Shortlands lies directly between Beckenham & Bromley and has had a deserved reputation as a thoroughly reliable Tory ward of high standing as a residential area. Park Langley (sometimes rendered as one word) to its west is not dissimilar, though it can be regarded as part of Beckenham, and if anything is rather more prosperous still. These are predominantly interwar areas with fine detached & semi-detached homes in tree-lined roads. Here the age profile is a little older and the population is even more heavily White. This was unshakeably Tory territory for ever and a day. Even in 1998, the Tories' worst-ever year in Bromley council elections, they had not the slightest difficulty in holding the then Shortlands ward. It is literally only at the last council election that Labour's ascent to a respectable and truly coherent vote has been seen here, their vote actually doubling from its figure in 2018, although again boundary changes, it must be stressed, do make comparisons a little awkward. It must be deeply worrying to the Bromley Tories that they now have only a modest lead over Labour in Shortlands of all places, but after all Shortlands is only a short walk from central Bromley, an area which has seen significant weakening of its Tory vote in the last decade, and this may be an extension of the gentle demographic and political changes which have been seen there. Labour’s improvement was sustained in a council by-election in 2024, and in the light of the Tories' heavy defeat in the constituency as a whole it has to be regarded as a little doubtful that the Tories maintained any plurality over Labour in the general election in the ward.
Furthest out, and not very far from the edge of the built-up area of London, is West Wickham. (There is indeed an East Wickham, but that is some distance away in the neighbouring borough of Bexley.) Here if anything the houses are even just that bit bigger, the roads even just that bit more prosperous still, and it is an area which is far enough away from the gently changing Beckenham and Bromley to be less affected by demographic change. This is very comfortably-off suburbia indeed. Yet even here there has been a major shift away from the Conservatives. They still win here easily enough, but their lead has slipped from one of fully 3-to-1 over Labour in 2018 to one of only approximately 2200 to 1200, so less than twice as many votes as Labour. There is very little sign of a change in the nature of the population here, so the small but clear increase in the Labour vote and the rather stronger decline in the Conservative vote is more likely to be indicative of a further loosening of the traditional Tory vote in parts of London's more comfortable outer suburbs. The rather less wealthy Bexley, by contrast, has seen much less of an increase in its Labour vote between 2018 and 2022 other than in a very small minority of its wards. The Tories almost certainly continued to outpoll Labour in this ward in the general election, but there is now a coherent Labour vote, even if it may decline again in the future if the Conservatives can recapture the hearts of these mostly pretty well-to-do outer suburban voters.
The last of the 4 traditionally Conservative wards to be included is Kelsey & Eden Park, lying north-west of West Wickham. Labour here too has gained a great deal of ground in a short time; in 2014 the Tories still enjoyed an advantage of over 2-to-1 over Labour in the ward, now that has declined to a sufficient extent that Labour's vote is now more than half as much again compared with then, and the Tory vote has reduced by several hundred, making this a marginal for the first time since it became Kelsey & Eden Park ward (the old Eden Park did see the Lib Dems at least briefly compete semi-effectively with the Tories), Labour in 2022 coming fewer than 130 votes away from winning a council seat in the ward. Although the Kelsey Park area of the ward is closer to central Beckenham, it is at least as well-to-do as Eden Park slightly to its south, if not even very slightly more, though the distinction is not great. These are, again, owner-occupied, mostly interwar homes of very good quality, still fairly heavily White and replete with the sort of voters who have traditionally backed the Tories. Labour has probably gained the most ground, however, in the north of the ward as it gets closer to central Beckenham and its slightly older and slightly more multi-occupied housing, and it may well be that the Kelsey Park ward on its old boundaries would actually have voted Labour in the 2022 council elections, which a generation or even less ago would have been completely unthinkable. Excellent residential areas need no longer automatically be safe Conservative ones. Labour will undoubtedly target this ward at the next council elections and it seems very likely that the Tories failed to outpoll Labour here in the general election, even though they may perhaps have still been a little ahead in the Eden Park section of it.
Taking these four wards as a whole, the expectation was that the Tories would retain at least some lead over Labour, even if they might well struggle to achieve that in two, or possibly even three, of them. However, such residual Tory lead as there remained was overwhelmingly exceeded in the remaining three wards, as Labour has now forged very large leads in all of them. Of these wards, the one with the strongest Conservative heritage, by some distance especially in the last 20 years or so, has been Clock House. This was not that many years ago a 3-way marginal, but as with myriads of London wards saw the Lib Dem vote plummet in the 2014 local elections, at which time the Tories were still strong enough to share the seats with Labour. And yet in 8 short years Labour has gone from a position of parity with the Conservatives to a lead of fully 3-to-1, in fact rather more, over them. This is a very radical political transformation. Clock House is, in common with the other Labour-inclined wards, rather older suburbia than that found further out, much of it of 19th-century vintage. There has been a strong increase in the amount of multi-occupation and private renting taking the place of owner-occupation, and its population has become rapidly younger and more multiethnic. Even so, it is remarkable that from being competitive less than a decade ago it is now actually even safer than many traditionally more working-class and more inner-city wards a couple of miles further in towards London. Labour has a new stronghold here to add to its existing ones to its north and west and this tells part of the story of why Beckenham's transformation from safe Conservative seat to safe Labour seat has now taken place.
Crystal Palace and Anerley ward replaces the former Crystal Palace ward, which in its turn replaced the former Anerley ward. This territory lies hard by the borders of no fewer than 4 other boroughs, Croydon, Lewisham, Southwark and Lambeth. Although officially part of outer London like the rest of the borough of Bromley, this area has had a recognisably inner-city character for a long time now, and Labour has been competitive for much longer than in the other wards, except for Penge & Cator. However, for a long time this was its constituency's sole Alliance, then Liberal Democrat, stronghold. With its generally above-averagely youthful population, its multi-occupancy and its ever so slightly scruffier housing, this was not generally a winnable ward for the Tories even, for the most part, in strong years. As long ago as 1974, a decent but not vintage year for Labour, the Labour lead over the Tories in what was then Anerley ward was close to 3-to-1; the Liberal success came not long afterwards. Since Labour gained what was by then Crystal Palace from the Lib Dems in 2014, the latter have collapsed completely into last place, Labour now holding a crushing lead over a disparate opposition. This ward, unlike so much of the constituency, looks the part of an inner-city Labour stronghold, and election results show conclusively that it is just that. The Lib Dems have returned to the council chamber, but emphatically not representing this ward. It is a small ward electing only two councillors, with Labour's two members enjoying a 3-to-1 lead in 2022 over the solitary Green candidate, the Greens enjoying a similar standing to that which they enjoy in several wards in neighbouring inner London boroughs, but not one which at present remotely threatens Labour.
Penge and Cator has been Labour-held unbrokenly for some decades, unlike Crystal Palace and Anerley, or rather the Penge part of it has: and there have been times when Penge was Labour's only fully-held ward anywhere in the borough. The present ward is actually slightly less totally inner-city in character than Crystal Palace & Anerley, but Penge itself has densely-packed terraces, some council housing and plenty of multi-occupied 19th-century privately-built homes. It is hard to believe that it was not even officially part of London until the mid-1960s. Penge is very heavily Labour indeed, and has become even more heavily so in the last decade. The Cator (Park) part of the ward is much more spacious and does still have some very good middle-class houses, the south-east corner of the ward still just about having a recognisable, though these days much diminished, Tory vote. This makes Penge & Cator quite a large and varied ward, but it is mostly united, albeit to slightly varying degrees, in strong voting allegiance to the Labour Party, whose top candidate in the 2022 local elections secured no fewer than 3655 votes, one of the very highest in London, and surely the highest Labour vote in any Conservative-controlled borough. It is a ward which these days constitutes a very major bank of Labour votes especially in general elections, and its reintroduction to a Beckenham-based constituency has been utterly ruinous for the Conservative Party even before one takes into account the reintroduction also of Clock House, and Crystal Palace & Anerley, wards. Labour has an absolutely formidable lead in these 3 more inner-city and 19th-century-built wards, and the Tories do not have anything like enough of a lead in the more suburban remainder to prevent the former from winning now. And yet, even in the 1997 general election, this mixture was able to elect a Conservative MP with a fairly comfy majority of several thousand, comfy enough for the Tories to survive a very awkward and rather embarrassing by-election only a few months later.
Although this was seen by many analysts (but not all - Rallings & Thrasher disagreed, for example, seeing this as a Labour marginal on 2019 figures) as a notionally Conservative seat on 2019 figures, the direction of travel has been Crystal Palace-clear in the Beckenham & Penge constituency, and that direction has been resolutely leftwards. Many observers expect Bob Stewart to be the last Tory MP to be elected here, and it may require a future boundary change to give them a chance to prove that assessment wrong; even that, however, may not end up doing the trick, as the decline in the Tories' support even in their best areas has been pretty precipitous, and it remains to be seen whether there is any way back for them in these parts.
BECKENHAM AND PENGE
Despite the addition of Penge to the constituency title, this is very much the return of the pre-2010 Beckenham constituency. No longer associated with Beckenham for parliamentary purposes are two Conservative wards, Bromley Common & Holwood as it is now called, and Hayes & Coney Hall. These wards were once supersafe for the Tories, though they have become distinctly less so. In their place have come 3 Labour-held wards, Crystal Palace & Anerley, Penge & Cator, and Clock House. Penge & Cator (or at least the Penge part of the ward) is a long-term Labour stronghold, the only ward in Bromley that has been consistently Labour since 1986, and usually was before that too, but while Labour used to have to withstand worthwhile & often successful challenges from both the Lib Dems & the Conservatives in Clock House, and from the Alliance/Lib Dems in Crystal Palace & Anerley, however named , they have now become extremely safe, as they have increasingly followed the political example of inner-city wards to their north-west. The partisan effect of this major boundary change could not have been starker. Basically, this seat, which as "Beckenham" was notionally the safest Tory seat in the whole of London in 2010 (although it did not quite end up being so when actual votes were cast), not only passed out of Conservative tenure at the 2024 election for the first time in the seat's history, which goes back to 1950, if we take this new seat as the linear successor to the former Beckenham constituency, but it did so by a very wide margin indeed; and the Tories may well need to hope and campaign for a rescinding of these boundary changes if they are to win in any of this territory in the future. Their outgoing MP, the prominent former soldier Bob Stewart, fell out with the Conservative Party, though he did regain the Conservative Whip before his departure from the House in 2024; some speculated that he was never totally happy as an MP, and expressed surprise that he served as long as he did. His successor on these new boundaries is Labour's Liam Conlon, who is the first Labour MP ever to represent any of the non-Labour wards in the constituency. It has become known that he is the son of Sue Gray, who was Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff before and after the general election, and as chance would have it the heavily defeated Conservative candidate in the general election is a Gray too. Not only did he win the seat, which was almost universally expected, he sailed a very long way indeed past the winning post, ending up getting twice as many votes as his Conservative opponent. Apparently from nowhere, Labour has a new safe seat here.
Britain's larger conurbations owe their existence to a variety of causes. Some were built primarily on manufacturing (in some cases including shipbuilding), others more on docks and other transport-related jobs. London, easily the largest conurbation in Britain, has always had its manufacturing, and of course had its docks and retains a formidable transport network which continues to provide many jobs, but has always had a large array of middle-class suburbs, as well as wealthy more central swathes in the boroughs of Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster and also (in the case of Hampstead and some other pockets) Camden. When the Greater London Council was set up in the early 1960s, it was regarded as in an even year a very slightly Conservative-leaning authority, though winnable by Labour in their good years. As recently as 1987, the Tories were able to rack up a large majority of the parliamentary seats in Greater London; but starting in the early 1990s (Labour enjoyed a fair number of gains in London in the 1992 general election) the capital has swung more and more in the other direction in real terms. This has accelerated further in recent years, the 2017 general election seeing particularly heavily above-average swings from Conservative to Labour in a wide variety of London constituencies (though not of course quite all of them). The reasons for this are manifold, but if we were to boil things down to their simplest core London has become more heavily multiethnic than any other conurbation of size, even including the West Midlands with its very large Asian communities in some parts thereof; and this has been accompanied by, for a variety of reasons of which Brexit is just a part, a very serious weakening in the Conservatives' standing in many sections of the urban and suburban White middle class, even while they have distinctly improved their situation amongst some BAME sections of the middle class, particularly Hindus. Even many executive workers in the financial sector have fallen out of love with the Conservative Party, which would have seemed particularly unthinkable only a few years ago. Thus well-to-do neighbourhoods in places like Battersea and Putney, even Hampstead have lost their Tory stronghold status in the last few years. Parts of the London Borough of Bromley have seen at least an element of this and while the borough still has some very safe Tory wards, and has still only once passed out of outright Conservative control, in 1998, demographic & political change have gnawed away at the Conservative base in the territory here under discussion, not unrelated to the fact that it contains the parts of the borough which are furthest from the countryside and closest to (though still a fair distance away from) central London. The Tories still hold a majority in terms of council seats even in this redrawn constituency and even after what were relatively difficult council elections for them locally in 2022, but their safety in all of their strongest areas is very clearly reduced from what it was even just over a decade ago, let alone in the more distant but still recallable past. There are plenty of comfortably-off managerial & professional workers in thoroughly respectable wards such as Beckenham Town & Copers Cope, Shortlands & Park Langley, Kelsey & Eden Park, and furthest out West Wickham, with their detached and large semi-detached mainly interwar houses. These are not for the most part multiethnic, designer-scruffy, arty or public sector-dominated areas of the type where Labour has so prospered in the last decade in particular, especially since the Lib Dems forfeited the votes of so many instinctively non-Tory middle-class voters after forming the Coalition with the Tories in 2010. Two of these wards, Shortlands & Park Langley and slightly more so West Wickham, remain essentially safe for the Tories, but in all these wards the Labour vote has gone over 1,000, and they are now competitive or at least semi-competitive in the other two; it is doubtful that, at least in general elections, the former of these can still be regarded as safe, though the latter probably still can.
Beckenham Town and Copers Cope ward (surely Copers Cope is the only London district which forms an entire sentence complete with verb on its own?) is one of several which underwent both boundary and name changes in time for the 2022 council elections, which makes comparisons somewhat hazardous, but we can only do the best we can in that regard. Of the 4 traditionally Tory-inclined wards, this is rather the oldest with plenty of 19th-century housing remaining along with more recent houses and flats. There is a minority council estate element but most homes are owner-occupied or privately rented, the latter seeing a gentle increase in saliency in recent years perhaps. This writer visited the ward not long before the general election, mostly to take part in a cricket net at the Kent CCC indoor school, just over the borough boundary from Lewisham. This is Beckenham "proper" and (the eastern part of) New Beckenham to its north-west, Copers Cope Road being a fairly long avenue just to the east of New Beckenham railway station. (There is no railway station called simply Beckenham, but 3 with the word Beckenham in their names, one of which is in the neighbouring borough of Lewisham.) In the 2010 local elections, which took place on General Election day that year and thus saw much larger turnout than is customary for local elections, the Tories polled twice as many votes as the Lib Dems, with Labour some distance further behind, in what was at that time Copers Cope ward. Now, the present ward has two Lib Dem councillors and one Conservative, with Labour only a short distance behind; their top candidate polled 1492 votes, only 270 votes behind the bottom elected Liberal Democrat. 3-way marginal wards have at times been a thing in the history of the London Borough of Bromley, and this now looks like one of them. These communities have got a bit younger than they were, just a little bit more multiethnic, and just a little more like some of the inner-city areas to its north, though it would not do to exaggerate this factor. Mostly this is still a pretty prosperous area, but these sort of voters are just the type who have been turning away from the Tories in recent years, and it looks as if a lot of the Liberal Democrats' local voters ended up voting tactically for Labour in the general election, even though the result shows that they didn't really need to, arguably. The Tories cannot rely on a lead over Labour in the ward any more, although in days gone by not that long ago they certainly could.
To the south-east of this ward lies Shortlands and Park Langley ward, areas long associated with Beckenham for parliamentary purposes, but in the case of Shortlands not in the Beckenham postal town. Shortlands lies directly between Beckenham & Bromley and has had a deserved reputation as a thoroughly reliable Tory ward of high standing as a residential area. Park Langley (sometimes rendered as one word) to its west is not dissimilar, though it can be regarded as part of Beckenham, and if anything is rather more prosperous still. These are predominantly interwar areas with fine detached & semi-detached homes in tree-lined roads. Here the age profile is a little older and the population is even more heavily White. This was unshakeably Tory territory for ever and a day. Even in 1998, the Tories' worst-ever year in Bromley council elections, they had not the slightest difficulty in holding the then Shortlands ward. It is literally only at the last council election that Labour's ascent to a respectable and truly coherent vote has been seen here, their vote actually doubling from its figure in 2018, although again boundary changes, it must be stressed, do make comparisons a little awkward. It must be deeply worrying to the Bromley Tories that they now have only a modest lead over Labour in Shortlands of all places, but after all Shortlands is only a short walk from central Bromley, an area which has seen significant weakening of its Tory vote in the last decade, and this may be an extension of the gentle demographic and political changes which have been seen there. Labour’s improvement was sustained in a council by-election in 2024, and in the light of the Tories' heavy defeat in the constituency as a whole it has to be regarded as a little doubtful that the Tories maintained any plurality over Labour in the general election in the ward.
Furthest out, and not very far from the edge of the built-up area of London, is West Wickham. (There is indeed an East Wickham, but that is some distance away in the neighbouring borough of Bexley.) Here if anything the houses are even just that bit bigger, the roads even just that bit more prosperous still, and it is an area which is far enough away from the gently changing Beckenham and Bromley to be less affected by demographic change. This is very comfortably-off suburbia indeed. Yet even here there has been a major shift away from the Conservatives. They still win here easily enough, but their lead has slipped from one of fully 3-to-1 over Labour in 2018 to one of only approximately 2200 to 1200, so less than twice as many votes as Labour. There is very little sign of a change in the nature of the population here, so the small but clear increase in the Labour vote and the rather stronger decline in the Conservative vote is more likely to be indicative of a further loosening of the traditional Tory vote in parts of London's more comfortable outer suburbs. The rather less wealthy Bexley, by contrast, has seen much less of an increase in its Labour vote between 2018 and 2022 other than in a very small minority of its wards. The Tories almost certainly continued to outpoll Labour in this ward in the general election, but there is now a coherent Labour vote, even if it may decline again in the future if the Conservatives can recapture the hearts of these mostly pretty well-to-do outer suburban voters.
The last of the 4 traditionally Conservative wards to be included is Kelsey & Eden Park, lying north-west of West Wickham. Labour here too has gained a great deal of ground in a short time; in 2014 the Tories still enjoyed an advantage of over 2-to-1 over Labour in the ward, now that has declined to a sufficient extent that Labour's vote is now more than half as much again compared with then, and the Tory vote has reduced by several hundred, making this a marginal for the first time since it became Kelsey & Eden Park ward (the old Eden Park did see the Lib Dems at least briefly compete semi-effectively with the Tories), Labour in 2022 coming fewer than 130 votes away from winning a council seat in the ward. Although the Kelsey Park area of the ward is closer to central Beckenham, it is at least as well-to-do as Eden Park slightly to its south, if not even very slightly more, though the distinction is not great. These are, again, owner-occupied, mostly interwar homes of very good quality, still fairly heavily White and replete with the sort of voters who have traditionally backed the Tories. Labour has probably gained the most ground, however, in the north of the ward as it gets closer to central Beckenham and its slightly older and slightly more multi-occupied housing, and it may well be that the Kelsey Park ward on its old boundaries would actually have voted Labour in the 2022 council elections, which a generation or even less ago would have been completely unthinkable. Excellent residential areas need no longer automatically be safe Conservative ones. Labour will undoubtedly target this ward at the next council elections and it seems very likely that the Tories failed to outpoll Labour here in the general election, even though they may perhaps have still been a little ahead in the Eden Park section of it.
Taking these four wards as a whole, the expectation was that the Tories would retain at least some lead over Labour, even if they might well struggle to achieve that in two, or possibly even three, of them. However, such residual Tory lead as there remained was overwhelmingly exceeded in the remaining three wards, as Labour has now forged very large leads in all of them. Of these wards, the one with the strongest Conservative heritage, by some distance especially in the last 20 years or so, has been Clock House. This was not that many years ago a 3-way marginal, but as with myriads of London wards saw the Lib Dem vote plummet in the 2014 local elections, at which time the Tories were still strong enough to share the seats with Labour. And yet in 8 short years Labour has gone from a position of parity with the Conservatives to a lead of fully 3-to-1, in fact rather more, over them. This is a very radical political transformation. Clock House is, in common with the other Labour-inclined wards, rather older suburbia than that found further out, much of it of 19th-century vintage. There has been a strong increase in the amount of multi-occupation and private renting taking the place of owner-occupation, and its population has become rapidly younger and more multiethnic. Even so, it is remarkable that from being competitive less than a decade ago it is now actually even safer than many traditionally more working-class and more inner-city wards a couple of miles further in towards London. Labour has a new stronghold here to add to its existing ones to its north and west and this tells part of the story of why Beckenham's transformation from safe Conservative seat to safe Labour seat has now taken place.
Crystal Palace and Anerley ward replaces the former Crystal Palace ward, which in its turn replaced the former Anerley ward. This territory lies hard by the borders of no fewer than 4 other boroughs, Croydon, Lewisham, Southwark and Lambeth. Although officially part of outer London like the rest of the borough of Bromley, this area has had a recognisably inner-city character for a long time now, and Labour has been competitive for much longer than in the other wards, except for Penge & Cator. However, for a long time this was its constituency's sole Alliance, then Liberal Democrat, stronghold. With its generally above-averagely youthful population, its multi-occupancy and its ever so slightly scruffier housing, this was not generally a winnable ward for the Tories even, for the most part, in strong years. As long ago as 1974, a decent but not vintage year for Labour, the Labour lead over the Tories in what was then Anerley ward was close to 3-to-1; the Liberal success came not long afterwards. Since Labour gained what was by then Crystal Palace from the Lib Dems in 2014, the latter have collapsed completely into last place, Labour now holding a crushing lead over a disparate opposition. This ward, unlike so much of the constituency, looks the part of an inner-city Labour stronghold, and election results show conclusively that it is just that. The Lib Dems have returned to the council chamber, but emphatically not representing this ward. It is a small ward electing only two councillors, with Labour's two members enjoying a 3-to-1 lead in 2022 over the solitary Green candidate, the Greens enjoying a similar standing to that which they enjoy in several wards in neighbouring inner London boroughs, but not one which at present remotely threatens Labour.
Penge and Cator has been Labour-held unbrokenly for some decades, unlike Crystal Palace and Anerley, or rather the Penge part of it has: and there have been times when Penge was Labour's only fully-held ward anywhere in the borough. The present ward is actually slightly less totally inner-city in character than Crystal Palace & Anerley, but Penge itself has densely-packed terraces, some council housing and plenty of multi-occupied 19th-century privately-built homes. It is hard to believe that it was not even officially part of London until the mid-1960s. Penge is very heavily Labour indeed, and has become even more heavily so in the last decade. The Cator (Park) part of the ward is much more spacious and does still have some very good middle-class houses, the south-east corner of the ward still just about having a recognisable, though these days much diminished, Tory vote. This makes Penge & Cator quite a large and varied ward, but it is mostly united, albeit to slightly varying degrees, in strong voting allegiance to the Labour Party, whose top candidate in the 2022 local elections secured no fewer than 3655 votes, one of the very highest in London, and surely the highest Labour vote in any Conservative-controlled borough. It is a ward which these days constitutes a very major bank of Labour votes especially in general elections, and its reintroduction to a Beckenham-based constituency has been utterly ruinous for the Conservative Party even before one takes into account the reintroduction also of Clock House, and Crystal Palace & Anerley, wards. Labour has an absolutely formidable lead in these 3 more inner-city and 19th-century-built wards, and the Tories do not have anything like enough of a lead in the more suburban remainder to prevent the former from winning now. And yet, even in the 1997 general election, this mixture was able to elect a Conservative MP with a fairly comfy majority of several thousand, comfy enough for the Tories to survive a very awkward and rather embarrassing by-election only a few months later.
Although this was seen by many analysts (but not all - Rallings & Thrasher disagreed, for example, seeing this as a Labour marginal on 2019 figures) as a notionally Conservative seat on 2019 figures, the direction of travel has been Crystal Palace-clear in the Beckenham & Penge constituency, and that direction has been resolutely leftwards. Many observers expect Bob Stewart to be the last Tory MP to be elected here, and it may require a future boundary change to give them a chance to prove that assessment wrong; even that, however, may not end up doing the trick, as the decline in the Tories' support even in their best areas has been pretty precipitous, and it remains to be seen whether there is any way back for them in these parts.