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Post by matureleft on Jun 24, 2024 10:32:04 GMT
It would take a 22% swing for Labour to gain this which is more than even the dire opinion polls indicate - for it to not be close what sort of swing do you envisage? Of course the Conservatives stand to lose a bigger vote share in seats like this than the average (on the 'the bigger they are the harder they fall' principle) but then a large part of that lost Conservative vote is taken up by Reform, in which case this has the potential to be a three way marginal. Reform should really be included in the poll as if they do start to win siezable number of seats this is a prime contender (although its unfortunate that this is where David Kurten is standing as that will split the right-wing vote a bit) This is the sort of seat I can see being in the "We didn't see that one coming" type of reaction from the media and others, as I cansee it having a very large swing. This is obviously dependent on Labour actually working it hard, which not being local I don't know. Littlehampton is probably moving quickly into the Sussex coast Labour influence that is spreading from its east. I would expect the Conservative vote to hold reasonably well in the large private estates around Bognor, but the rest of the area could see Labour making big inroads. I agree that Reform will be a major factor here as well, though I don't think it is a realistic seat for them to win. So it could end up with a split something like Labour 35%, Conservative 25%, Reform 25% and the rest, inc Kurten, 15%. I agree it’s a big reach for Labour and it depends on a range of things: 1. The impact of Reform. The candidate is a local ex-nurse and former Tory party member. She would appear to be campaigning. The demographics of parts of the seat look like fertile territory. 2. The impact of Gibb’s retirement and late replacement. While he didn’t seem the guy to have a huge personal vote he was MP for 27 years and must have built some local relationships. His successor starts from scratch and doesn’t appear to have got full hearted local association support. 3. The effect of local government change in the area with a strong Labour shift and a Lib Dem decline. As I’ve remarked local government isn’t great round here, so maybe it makes no odds except in strengthening or diminishing the activist base? But it may strengthen tactical instincts among LDs. 4. Labour actively campaigning. I’d imagine that hasn’t happened in a General Election for many years. I know the candidate. She works very hard and is quite motivational. 5. The continued gentle demographic shift, in the eastern parts of the seat particularly, away from Conservatives. The south coast movement has been pretty noticeable from Brighton westwards. My instinct has been a comfortably above average swing to Labour. Enough? That’ll depend on how the national campaigns work until 4 July. |
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Post by John Chanin on Jun 24, 2024 12:21:43 GMT
I'd just have three unitaries for the whole of Sussex: East Sussex as per the county council area now but less Peacehaven/Telscombe/Saltdean A coastal unitary covering Brighton & Hove, Adur Worthing and including from Arun, Litthampton and the coastal strip between there and Worthing - possibly also to include Angmering and Findon. In the East it would expand only so far as Peachehaven (though I can see an argument for extending it to Newhaven or even to Seaford) West Sussex being the remainder of West Sussex There is a case for including Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill as well in an extended Brighton based unitary. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 24, 2024 12:24:29 GMT
I'd just have three unitaries for the whole of Sussex: East Sussex as per the county council area now but less Peacehaven/Telscombe/Saltdean A coastal unitary covering Brighton & Hove, Adur Worthing and including from Arun, Litthampton and the coastal strip between there and Worthing - possibly also to include Angmering and Findon. In the East it would expand only so far as Peachehaven (though I can see an argument for extending it to Newhaven or even to Seaford) West Sussex being the remainder of West Sussex I'd have one big Sussex and abolish the authorities of Hastings, Brighton & Hove and Adur. Or I'd merge Lewes with Brighton & Hove so that it's forever NOC. Worthing and Adur can be lumped in with Arun and Rother for balance. There is no need for compass points in the UK - our population ain't that big. Cf. Yorkshire. If you're going to have Adur, Arun etc, then bring back Hornsey, Hampstead, Holborn et al. |
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Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
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Post by Khunanup on Jun 24, 2024 13:09:48 GMT
I'd just have three unitaries for the whole of Sussex: East Sussex as per the county council area now but less Peacehaven/Telscombe/Saltdean A coastal unitary covering Brighton & Hove, Adur Worthing and including from Arun, Litthampton and the coastal strip between there and Worthing - possibly also to include Angmering and Findon. In the East it would expand only so far as Peachehaven (though I can see an argument for extending it to Newhaven or even to Seaford) West Sussex being the remainder of West Sussex There is a case for including Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill as well in an extended Brighton based unitary. Wrong thread. That's one for pitchfork bait... |
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Post by wickofthesouth on Jun 24, 2024 20:52:27 GMT
Bognor definitely looks towards Portsmouth. I think once you're in the far East of the seat, Rustington etc. you're very much in the ambit of Worthing/Brighton. I get the sense that Littlehampton isnt really anchored to either (despite being technically part of the Brighton metropolitan area) and that is part of the reason why Littlehampton remains so down-at-heel. One of the big challenges if you were ever to turn West Sussex into 2 or 3 unitaries (which I admit I spend more time thinking about than I really should) is what to do with Arun DC. Bognor really needs to be with Chi and Littlehampton with Worthing, but separating Bognor and Littlehampton doesn't feel right. But a unitary stretching from the edge of Portslade all the way to the Hampshire border (which would be the only way to accommodate the above) wouldn't be right either. You've fallen into successive governments' trap of a failure of imagination: there's no reason unitarisation should have to mean simple mergers of existing districts just for Whitehall cartographers' administrative convenience. And in the specific case of Sussex, West going unitary while East remains two-tier would be a peculiar arrangement indeed – might as well review the whole area while you're at it and if one new authority is best served by containing bits of Mid Sussex and either Lewes or Wealden, then so be it. Oh, I have an imagination, I have just been allowing it be constrained by an acceptance of reality. Unitaries are an a great idea, two tiers just brings extra paperwork. But if it was down to me we would be making them much smaller, not larger... |
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Post by wickofthesouth on Jun 24, 2024 21:01:33 GMT
Bognor definitely looks towards Portsmouth. I think once you're in the far East of the seat, Rustington etc. you're very much in the ambit of Worthing/Brighton. I get the sense that Littlehampton isnt really anchored to either (despite being technically part of the Brighton metropolitan area) and that is part of the reason why Littlehampton remains so down-at-heel. One of the big challenges if you were ever to turn West Sussex into 2 or 3 unitaries (which I admit I spend more time thinking about than I really should) is what to do with Arun DC. Bognor really needs to be with Chi and Littlehampton with Worthing, but separating Bognor and Littlehampton doesn't feel right. But a unitary stretching from the edge of Portslade all the way to the Hampshire border (which would be the only way to accommodate the above) wouldn't be right either. Sorry, didn't mean to stray so far off topic! I too once spent far more time than was justifiable thinking about West Sussex unitaries. If you're looking at a coastal urban unitary, then everything between the Arun and the Adur is core. On the west side Littlehampton is included, but Bognor isn't. They don't really like each other much, partly because both being in Arun sets them against each other for funding, but also because Littlehampton looks to Worthing and Bognor to Chi. On the east side, Lancing and Sompting are definitely Worthing-facing. Southwick and Shoreham much less so, and I think given the choice they might well choose to be in B&H instead; certainly that would have been the case a few years back and I find it hard to imagine they've moved away from that view since. So that gives a thorny issue of crossing county boundaries. There's also an issue of how far north you go - although the Downs would seem a natural barrier, there are villages along the north side of the Downs who look towards Worthing and/or Shoreham as their nearest centre, and there's certainly an anti-Horsham feeling there. But current ward boundaries aren't helpfull, because they are so rural and extended, wihout ward or parish splitting you'd either exclude places that would want to be in the unitary, or include places that didn't want to. I do have a map somewhere of this... The final problem is that then you end up with either everything else in a West Sussex unitary with a strong imbalance between the urban parts in the north and the rural elsewhere, or you split off Crawley and Horsham into another urban unitary. And that would go down so well... I'm not going to pretend I know how to handle the north of the county, but I entirely agree that Adur is a ludicrous thing. Everything east of the river should be part of Brighton and Hove, whether the residents of either like it or not. Lancing etc. needs to be included in whatever ends up involving Worthing. The reason I started thinking about this at all was because, once Worthing went Labour, it seemed likely that they would want to unitarise in order to escape being ruled by the Tories in Chi. But any authority based on Worthing couldn't extend much more than Lancing and Littlehampton (even Arundel would be pushing it) and therefore very small by contemporary standards. Any wider West Sussex coastal unitary would have to include Chi (because it ain't going to be based in Bognor) and the civic infrastructure (council offices etc.) are already there. Which would defeat the point of Worthing trying to escape Chi control. |
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Ports
Non-Aligned
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Post by Ports on Jun 24, 2024 21:08:42 GMT
Or we could just leave things as they are.
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Post by doktorb🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ on Jun 24, 2024 21:21:27 GMT
Or we could just leave things as they are. The history of England from c1974 onwards has been an urgent, incessant need to never leave the local government structure alone. Had we done it properly, we'd have sorted it all out by about 1990 and left things thereafter. |
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john07
Labour & Co-operative
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Post by john07 on Jun 24, 2024 21:35:15 GMT
Or we could just leave things as they are. The history of England from c1974 onwards has been an urgent, incessant need to never leave the local government structure alone. Had we done it properly, we'd have sorted it all out by about 1990 and left things thereafter. Precisely. Because Peter Walker made such an arse of things, the mistakes are still being unravelled fifty years on. |
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Post by jamesdoyle on Jun 24, 2024 21:46:37 GMT
I too once spent far more time than was justifiable thinking about West Sussex unitaries. If you're looking at a coastal urban unitary, then everything between the Arun and the Adur is core. On the west side Littlehampton is included, but Bognor isn't. They don't really like each other much, partly because both being in Arun sets them against each other for funding, but also because Littlehampton looks to Worthing and Bognor to Chi. On the east side, Lancing and Sompting are definitely Worthing-facing. Southwick and Shoreham much less so, and I think given the choice they might well choose to be in B&H instead; certainly that would have been the case a few years back and I find it hard to imagine they've moved away from that view since. So that gives a thorny issue of crossing county boundaries. There's also an issue of how far north you go - although the Downs would seem a natural barrier, there are villages along the north side of the Downs who look towards Worthing and/or Shoreham as their nearest centre, and there's certainly an anti-Horsham feeling there. But current ward boundaries aren't helpfull, because they are so rural and extended, wihout ward or parish splitting you'd either exclude places that would want to be in the unitary, or include places that didn't want to. I do have a map somewhere of this... The final problem is that then you end up with either everything else in a West Sussex unitary with a strong imbalance between the urban parts in the north and the rural elsewhere, or you split off Crawley and Horsham into another urban unitary. And that would go down so well... I'm not going to pretend I know how to handle the north of the county, but I entirely agree that Adur is a ludicrous thing. Everything east of the river should be part of Brighton and Hove, whether the residents of either like it or not. Lancing etc. needs to be included in whatever ends up involving Worthing. The reason I started thinking about this at all was because, once Worthing went Labour, it seemed likely that they would want to unitarise in order to escape being ruled by the Tories in Chi. But any authority based on Worthing couldn't extend much more than Lancing and Littlehampton (even Arundel would be pushing it) and therefore very small by contemporary standards. Any wider West Sussex coastal unitary would have to include Chi (because it ain't going to be based in Bognor) and the civic infrastructure (council offices etc.) are already there. Which would defeat the point of Worthing trying to escape Chi control. I don't really agree on the size of a potential Sussex Coast unitary. I know there are quite a few county-wide unitaries now that skew the overall picture larger, but a coastal UA wouldn't be small compare to many others. I've dug out my map and figures, which are based on the 2011 census, so a little outdated, but there's no reason that they shouldn't give reasonable relative figures. And note also these are the wards from 2011, Arun has had a few changes since then. The core area (which I called Area A) is all of Worthing and all of Adur. That would be bigger than any of the six Berkshire UAs (I only looked at UAs in the South East region). My next step would be adding Ferring and Findon (area B). That doesn't step above any other UAs, only adding about 7k population. Area C is all of the coastal wards as far as Littlehampton. That makes it bigger than Portsmouth or Milton Keynes. The final step - that's reasonable in my eyes - is to add Angmering and Poling in the west, and Steyning, Bramber and Upper Beeding in the east - all these look to Worthing and/orShoreham. That's Area D, and that makes Sussex Coastal bigger than Southampton. This is not a small unitary, in my opinion, and would be perfect viable without Bognor, Chi or anywhere else. Whether it leaves a viable rump West Sussex is another matter of course!  |
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Post by wickofthesouth on Jun 25, 2024 9:16:26 GMT
That looks very sensible to me. Except I would still slice off Shoreham and Southwick and add them to Brighton, which would take maybe 30k off the total population of a Worthing-based unitary.
On the size issue, the recent trend has been towards absolutely massive authorities - BCP, North Yorks, Bucks etc. I don't think that's the right approach, smaller councils can respond much better to local needs. But it is what it is...
What was the last unitary to be created with only c200k population?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2024 9:17:58 GMT
Maybe Labour can build out the Tories here and it can be Bighampton instead of Littlehampton. Seriously, the train is derisory and should be twice as fast. The London to Brighton train has been a shitshow forever. My parents almost bought in Preston Park in 1999, but the commute pissed them off too much. I guess the quadruple lock may help the Tories here since it's still got a lot of OAPs.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 25, 2024 9:18:43 GMT
Yeah it would be madness for Shoreham and Southwick not to be in with Brighton in that scenario
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Jun 25, 2024 9:40:27 GMT
Or we could just leave things as they are. The history of England from c1974 onwards has been an urgent, incessant need to never leave the local government structure alone. Had we done it properly, we'd have sorted it all out by about 1990 and left things thereafter. Agree, but it's a bit like education. You can never do it properly because everybody has a totally different opinion, which they all think is the common sense option. |
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Post by jamesdoyle on Jun 25, 2024 9:42:31 GMT
Yeah it would be madness for Shoreham and Southwick not to be in with Brighton in that scenario Yes, as I said above, I think that's the direction they look, generally speaking. I think in a referendum Southwick would be a slam dunk to join B&H; Shoreham might be a bit more interesting, as although they look that way a lot, they might feel swamped by it: so maybe 52:48? |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2024 9:43:58 GMT
Yeah it would be madness for Shoreham and Southwick not to be in with Brighton in that scenario Yes, as I said above, I think that's the direction they look, generally speaking. I think in a referendum Southwick would be a slam dunk to join B&H; Shoreham might be a bit more interesting, as although they look that way a lot, they might feel swamped by it: so maybe 52:48?A cursed result, I was thinking Worthing West would be as close as Quebec independence referendum 1995 or Norway EU referendum 1994 on joining B&H! |
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Post by jamesdoyle on Jun 25, 2024 9:48:18 GMT
Yes, as I said above, I think that's the direction they look, generally speaking. I think in a referendum Southwick would be a slam dunk to join B&H; Shoreham might be a bit more interesting, as although they look that way a lot, they might feel swamped by it: so maybe 52:48?A cursed result, I was thinking Worthing West would be as close as Quebec independence referendum 1995 or Norway EU referendum 1994 on joining B&H! At no time in my life, and I suspect for a long time to come, would Worthing vote to join B&H. The council joining the Greater Brighton economic board caused enough ructions. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2024 9:50:38 GMT
A cursed result, I was thinking Worthing West would be as close as Quebec independence referendum 1995 or Norway EU referendum 1994 on joining B&H! At no time in my life, and I suspect for a long time to come, would Worthing vote to join B&H. The council joining the Greater Brighton economic board caused enough ructions. Worthing is the Southport to Brighton & Hove's Liverpool! |
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nyx
Non-Aligned
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Post by nyx on Jun 25, 2024 16:18:01 GMT
Considering the trend towards ever larger unitary authorities, and the fact the coast pretty much dominated Sussex– surely the obvious solution is just to make West Sussex unitary and invite Brighton and Hove and Lewes to join.
That would then have the same boundaries as the Greater Brighton City Region plus Horsham/Chichester districts.
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Post by froome on Jun 26, 2024 4:31:48 GMT
Yeah it would be madness for Shoreham and Southwick not to be in with Brighton in that scenario Yes, as I said above, I think that's the direction they look, generally speaking. I think in a referendum Southwick would be a slam dunk to join B&H; Shoreham might be a bit more interesting, as although they look that way a lot, they might feel swamped by it: so maybe 52:48? My brother lived in Shoreham until he died a couple of years ago, so I have been there many times. My impression is that it looks much more to Worthing than Brighton, but that there are really two or even three Shorehams. The port end of the town is more akin to Brighton, but that the old town of Shoreham and Shoreham Beach are much more closely aligned with Worthing. |
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