Post by andrewp on Feb 7, 2024 14:59:47 GMT
Significant parts of this profile are from @europeanlefty original Bristol West with updates on boundary changes, census data and local elections from me,
Bristol Central will reappear on the British political map for the first time in half a century in 2024. This new seat is quite different to the Central constituency which was abolished in 1974 which did cover the city centre but mostly spread South and East from the centre, where as this new version contains the city centre and territory to the west and north of the centre.
This seat is truly the successor to the current Bristol West constituency, and after an aborted attempt to rename the constituency as Central in the 2000s, the boundary commission have chosen to follow through with the rename in this review of parliamentary boundaries just as the boundary changes to the constituency make it if anything less ‘Central’
As the name would suggest this seat will contain Bristol city centre and areas immediately to to the West, North West of the centre.
Probably the most frequent context in which Bristol West and now Bristol Central get mentioned in political analysis is as one the most likely, although its still a long shot, places where the Green Party might gain a second parliamentary representative if such an event occurred. The reasons for this are not hard to see. This is the lefty-liberal seat to end all lefty-liberal seats. The demographics here are matched by few places outside of London. Bristol Central is the new name for this seat, although many would suggest, perhaps unkindly but not incorrectly, that “Hipster Central” would be even more accurate. This seat sits nestled in between the other Bristol, or in the local dialect, “Brizzle” seats and on the north bank of the Avon, which marked the historic boundary between Somerset and Gloucestershire.
When outsiders from other areas say “Bristol”, this is the area they usually mean, covering the city centre, Cabot Circus shopping mall, the floating harbour, most of the university buildings and countless shops, museums and restaurants that draw people into the city from miles away. The seat also takes in some areas with a more suburban and more North Bristol feeling, including the communities of Montpellier and Redland to its north and Clifton to the west. Although the city’s position on the mouth of the river Avon allowed it to become a major port and industrial centre, this is probably the constituency that shows it least. Bristol was already a major shipbuilding and manufacturing hub by the 14th century, and by the Tudor era it was the country’s second most important port, trading with Ireland, Iceland and Gascony. In the 17th and 18th centuries overseas trade grew in importance and Bristol, along with Liverpool, became a major hub in the triangular Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the railway came to Bristol thanks to engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built the Great Western Railway linking the West Country to London. His Bristol-Built steamships, the SS Great Britain and Great Western, the former of which is now back in Bristol harbour and open to the public as a museum which is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, brought the New World much closer and helped increase Bristol’s importance as a port.
Bristol also has a long history of liberal and non-conformist thought. Not only did its status as a port open it to trade and immigration from all over Europe, but John Wesley opened the first Methodist chapel in the city in 1739. In 1831, the people of Bristol rioted in Queen's Square in protest at the House of Lords' rejection of the reform act at its second reading. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus company was refusing to hire black or Asian bus crews and discrimination in many areas, including employment and housing, was sadly commonplace in the UK at the time. Led by youth worker Paul Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council, residents boycotted Bristol buses for four months. The boycott drew national attention and was endorsed by several prominent politicians including the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. The boycott was successful not only in persuading the company to drop it discriminatory policies but was also likely instrumental in passing the Race Relations acts of 1965 and 68. Little wonder then, with its history of liberalism, protest and progressivism that this city is such a stronghold for the left in UK politics.
Bizarrely, this is not so much the case in this seat. It is, by quite some way, the least deprived of Bristol’s four constituencies and is one of the richest in the country, although there are large pockets of deprivation in and around St Paul’s. In Bristol’s industrial heyday, the grand and garden-rich townhouses of this seat were home to the managers and owners of the city’s industries and this seat was a safe Conservative one for most of its history.
The centre of Bristol has undergone huge redevelopment over the last 20 years, with lots of new flats attracting young professionals to rent at high prices. The electorate of Bristol West grew by about a quarter between 2005 and 2019, and thus at the 2019 general election, the electorate here was only just shy of 100,000, the largest in England apart from the special case of the Isle of Wight. The seat is pared back by nearly 30,000 electors in the 2024 boundary changes, moving this seat from having one of the highest electorates to one of the lowest. Two areas are removed, Bishopston at the northern end of the seat, and which is part of the middle class belt, moves to Bristol North West and the inner city Easton and Lawrence Hill wards to the east of the city centre are moved into Bristol East. The latter two are multi cultural inner city areas and are particularly strong areas for Labour. The transfer of these two wards means that Bristol East will have a larger notional Labour majority than Bristol Central and helps the Greens a bit here.
Bristol last voted in council elections in 2021, not a good year for the Labour Party, and councillors elected in the wards in this new seat were 11 Greens, 2 Labour and 1 Liberal Democrat. The Greens racked up big majorities and beat Labour by at least two to one in the four residential area of Clifton, Clifton Down, Cotham and Redland. Central ward and neighbouring Ashley ward both elected a mix of Green and Labour councillors and Hotwells & Harbourside elected a Liberal Democrat, whose subsequent resignation resulted in a Green gain at a by election in February 2023.
From Bristol West’s creation in 1885 to 1997 it elected only Conservative MPs. The Liberals were starting to close in on the Tories in the 80s and 90s and in 1992 the Tory majority shrunk to just 11.5% - their only narrower wins coming in the Liberal landslide year of 1906 and the Labour landslide of 1945. In 1997, Labour came from third to take the seat by 2.4% or 1,493 votes over the Conservatives and 7.2% or 4,517 votes over the LibDems. Labour held in 2001 with the LibDems leapfrogging the Tories into second. In 2005, the LibDems gained the seat on an 8.4% swing and held it in 2010, with the Tory vote declining in both cases.
Boundary changes have helped the Labour Party, moving several Tory areas out of the seat and importing equally strongly Labour ones, but this seat has also undergone major political and demographic change. On the 1997-2010 boundaries when the seat included Stoke Bishop and Westbury on Trym, both still Conservative at city council level - Stoke Bishop particularly so, the Conservatives would still have come second in 2019, but would probably have been about 20,000 votes behind Labour. By the 1990s the University was the largest employer in the seat and this had had two major effects. One is that the former grand houses of the area’s managerial class were now mostly divided up and given over to student accommodation. Another is that the population in the city centre areas of the seat was now disproportionately working in sectors associated with academia and the university.
The constituency also has a strikingly young age profile. Fully 53.6% of people are under the age of 34, with the constituency ranking 4th nationally for the 16-24 age group and 13th for the 25-34 age group. 29.8% of people are students here, the 5th highest in England and Wales. It ranks 559th out of 575 for those aged over 65. The constituency is 78.1% white, with Asian and black minorities. Ashley ward in particular, which contains St Paul’s and Montpelier contains one of Bristol’s oldest West Indian communities and is 14% black
Other demographics are quite extreme here, and tell the tale of a seat of young professional private renters and students. The seat is only 40.8% owner occupied ( rank 541/575) and fully 47.1% of people are private renters, the second highest in England and Wales. 22.1% of people are in jobs classified as higher professional.and the constituency is in the bottom 5 in England and Wales for the proportion of people in routine and semi routine jobs. Only 4.8% of people have no formal qualifications, the lowest of the 575 new constituencies in England and Wales, and 56.3% of people have level 4 qualifications.
Most of Redland, Cotham, Clifton, Clifton Down and Hotwells and Harbourside wards are in the 10% least deprived areas on the Indices of Multiple deprivation, with only a corner of the City Centre ward and St Paul’s in Ashley ward being classified as significantly deprived.
The liberal nature of this seat has not changed but now transitioned into a more overtly left-wing liberal one, and at 79.3% Bristol West had the second (or third, depending on whose analysis you read) highest remain vote of any constituency in the country in 2016. In 2015, this political shift showed itself in a big way as the LibDems lost nearly 30% on 2010, Thangam Debonnaire regained the seat for Labour, and the Greens gained 23% to finish second, just 8.9% behind the Labour Party. In 2017, as left-wing and liberal voters lined up behind Labour nationwide, the party gained 30%, their largest gain at that year’s general election. In 2019, the LibDems stood aside allowing the Greens a free run at the seat. but Debbonaire comfortably won, winning 62.3% of the vote and a 37.4% majority. The Labour Party now carry every ward at general elections, although it is highly likely that the Greens do noticeably better in the old Tory strongholds like the Clifton and Redland wards where social and environmental issues are more important than economic ones.
The removal of Easton and Lawrence Hill in the boundary changes remove two of the least good areas for the Green Party, although they got councillors elected in both of these wards in 2021, and helps them slightly here. It reduces the current Labour majority from 28219 to a notional 16696 or from 37.4% to 32.5%
Overall, Bristol Central will be an extremely liberal and left-wing city seat and is currently safe for the Labour Party, although one does feel that once Labour are in government there is potential for the Greens to progress here, but even then, it might be a stiff task for them to win.
Bristol Central will reappear on the British political map for the first time in half a century in 2024. This new seat is quite different to the Central constituency which was abolished in 1974 which did cover the city centre but mostly spread South and East from the centre, where as this new version contains the city centre and territory to the west and north of the centre.
This seat is truly the successor to the current Bristol West constituency, and after an aborted attempt to rename the constituency as Central in the 2000s, the boundary commission have chosen to follow through with the rename in this review of parliamentary boundaries just as the boundary changes to the constituency make it if anything less ‘Central’
As the name would suggest this seat will contain Bristol city centre and areas immediately to to the West, North West of the centre.
Probably the most frequent context in which Bristol West and now Bristol Central get mentioned in political analysis is as one the most likely, although its still a long shot, places where the Green Party might gain a second parliamentary representative if such an event occurred. The reasons for this are not hard to see. This is the lefty-liberal seat to end all lefty-liberal seats. The demographics here are matched by few places outside of London. Bristol Central is the new name for this seat, although many would suggest, perhaps unkindly but not incorrectly, that “Hipster Central” would be even more accurate. This seat sits nestled in between the other Bristol, or in the local dialect, “Brizzle” seats and on the north bank of the Avon, which marked the historic boundary between Somerset and Gloucestershire.
When outsiders from other areas say “Bristol”, this is the area they usually mean, covering the city centre, Cabot Circus shopping mall, the floating harbour, most of the university buildings and countless shops, museums and restaurants that draw people into the city from miles away. The seat also takes in some areas with a more suburban and more North Bristol feeling, including the communities of Montpellier and Redland to its north and Clifton to the west. Although the city’s position on the mouth of the river Avon allowed it to become a major port and industrial centre, this is probably the constituency that shows it least. Bristol was already a major shipbuilding and manufacturing hub by the 14th century, and by the Tudor era it was the country’s second most important port, trading with Ireland, Iceland and Gascony. In the 17th and 18th centuries overseas trade grew in importance and Bristol, along with Liverpool, became a major hub in the triangular Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the railway came to Bristol thanks to engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built the Great Western Railway linking the West Country to London. His Bristol-Built steamships, the SS Great Britain and Great Western, the former of which is now back in Bristol harbour and open to the public as a museum which is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, brought the New World much closer and helped increase Bristol’s importance as a port.
Bristol also has a long history of liberal and non-conformist thought. Not only did its status as a port open it to trade and immigration from all over Europe, but John Wesley opened the first Methodist chapel in the city in 1739. In 1831, the people of Bristol rioted in Queen's Square in protest at the House of Lords' rejection of the reform act at its second reading. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus company was refusing to hire black or Asian bus crews and discrimination in many areas, including employment and housing, was sadly commonplace in the UK at the time. Led by youth worker Paul Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council, residents boycotted Bristol buses for four months. The boycott drew national attention and was endorsed by several prominent politicians including the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. The boycott was successful not only in persuading the company to drop it discriminatory policies but was also likely instrumental in passing the Race Relations acts of 1965 and 68. Little wonder then, with its history of liberalism, protest and progressivism that this city is such a stronghold for the left in UK politics.
Bizarrely, this is not so much the case in this seat. It is, by quite some way, the least deprived of Bristol’s four constituencies and is one of the richest in the country, although there are large pockets of deprivation in and around St Paul’s. In Bristol’s industrial heyday, the grand and garden-rich townhouses of this seat were home to the managers and owners of the city’s industries and this seat was a safe Conservative one for most of its history.
The centre of Bristol has undergone huge redevelopment over the last 20 years, with lots of new flats attracting young professionals to rent at high prices. The electorate of Bristol West grew by about a quarter between 2005 and 2019, and thus at the 2019 general election, the electorate here was only just shy of 100,000, the largest in England apart from the special case of the Isle of Wight. The seat is pared back by nearly 30,000 electors in the 2024 boundary changes, moving this seat from having one of the highest electorates to one of the lowest. Two areas are removed, Bishopston at the northern end of the seat, and which is part of the middle class belt, moves to Bristol North West and the inner city Easton and Lawrence Hill wards to the east of the city centre are moved into Bristol East. The latter two are multi cultural inner city areas and are particularly strong areas for Labour. The transfer of these two wards means that Bristol East will have a larger notional Labour majority than Bristol Central and helps the Greens a bit here.
Bristol last voted in council elections in 2021, not a good year for the Labour Party, and councillors elected in the wards in this new seat were 11 Greens, 2 Labour and 1 Liberal Democrat. The Greens racked up big majorities and beat Labour by at least two to one in the four residential area of Clifton, Clifton Down, Cotham and Redland. Central ward and neighbouring Ashley ward both elected a mix of Green and Labour councillors and Hotwells & Harbourside elected a Liberal Democrat, whose subsequent resignation resulted in a Green gain at a by election in February 2023.
From Bristol West’s creation in 1885 to 1997 it elected only Conservative MPs. The Liberals were starting to close in on the Tories in the 80s and 90s and in 1992 the Tory majority shrunk to just 11.5% - their only narrower wins coming in the Liberal landslide year of 1906 and the Labour landslide of 1945. In 1997, Labour came from third to take the seat by 2.4% or 1,493 votes over the Conservatives and 7.2% or 4,517 votes over the LibDems. Labour held in 2001 with the LibDems leapfrogging the Tories into second. In 2005, the LibDems gained the seat on an 8.4% swing and held it in 2010, with the Tory vote declining in both cases.
Boundary changes have helped the Labour Party, moving several Tory areas out of the seat and importing equally strongly Labour ones, but this seat has also undergone major political and demographic change. On the 1997-2010 boundaries when the seat included Stoke Bishop and Westbury on Trym, both still Conservative at city council level - Stoke Bishop particularly so, the Conservatives would still have come second in 2019, but would probably have been about 20,000 votes behind Labour. By the 1990s the University was the largest employer in the seat and this had had two major effects. One is that the former grand houses of the area’s managerial class were now mostly divided up and given over to student accommodation. Another is that the population in the city centre areas of the seat was now disproportionately working in sectors associated with academia and the university.
The constituency also has a strikingly young age profile. Fully 53.6% of people are under the age of 34, with the constituency ranking 4th nationally for the 16-24 age group and 13th for the 25-34 age group. 29.8% of people are students here, the 5th highest in England and Wales. It ranks 559th out of 575 for those aged over 65. The constituency is 78.1% white, with Asian and black minorities. Ashley ward in particular, which contains St Paul’s and Montpelier contains one of Bristol’s oldest West Indian communities and is 14% black
Other demographics are quite extreme here, and tell the tale of a seat of young professional private renters and students. The seat is only 40.8% owner occupied ( rank 541/575) and fully 47.1% of people are private renters, the second highest in England and Wales. 22.1% of people are in jobs classified as higher professional.and the constituency is in the bottom 5 in England and Wales for the proportion of people in routine and semi routine jobs. Only 4.8% of people have no formal qualifications, the lowest of the 575 new constituencies in England and Wales, and 56.3% of people have level 4 qualifications.
Most of Redland, Cotham, Clifton, Clifton Down and Hotwells and Harbourside wards are in the 10% least deprived areas on the Indices of Multiple deprivation, with only a corner of the City Centre ward and St Paul’s in Ashley ward being classified as significantly deprived.
The liberal nature of this seat has not changed but now transitioned into a more overtly left-wing liberal one, and at 79.3% Bristol West had the second (or third, depending on whose analysis you read) highest remain vote of any constituency in the country in 2016. In 2015, this political shift showed itself in a big way as the LibDems lost nearly 30% on 2010, Thangam Debonnaire regained the seat for Labour, and the Greens gained 23% to finish second, just 8.9% behind the Labour Party. In 2017, as left-wing and liberal voters lined up behind Labour nationwide, the party gained 30%, their largest gain at that year’s general election. In 2019, the LibDems stood aside allowing the Greens a free run at the seat. but Debbonaire comfortably won, winning 62.3% of the vote and a 37.4% majority. The Labour Party now carry every ward at general elections, although it is highly likely that the Greens do noticeably better in the old Tory strongholds like the Clifton and Redland wards where social and environmental issues are more important than economic ones.
The removal of Easton and Lawrence Hill in the boundary changes remove two of the least good areas for the Green Party, although they got councillors elected in both of these wards in 2021, and helps them slightly here. It reduces the current Labour majority from 28219 to a notional 16696 or from 37.4% to 32.5%
Overall, Bristol Central will be an extremely liberal and left-wing city seat and is currently safe for the Labour Party, although one does feel that once Labour are in government there is potential for the Greens to progress here, but even then, it might be a stiff task for them to win.
