ilerda
Conservative
Posts: 146
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Post by ilerda on Nov 18, 2020 8:50:42 GMT
Does anyone know if there is a map of urban and rural districts in England as they stood at abolition in 1973? There’s a fantastic map on Wikipedia of them in 1931, but the equivalent ones for Wales and NI show the situation at abolition instead. There were continuing changes over the years to boundaries so it would be interesting to see what they looked like by the end. It's a beautiful map, but it's not 1931. The boundaries in my part of south-east Lancashire, for example, reflect the situation after the abolition of Bury Rural District which did not take place until 1933. I'd suggest that the map is more reflective of the situation in 1961 although I haven't looked into this thoroughly. The main local government changes in the 1960s (so not on the map) are summarised in this Wiki article.That’s really interesting, thanks. Odd to think that they essentially were proposing creating metropolitan counties of contiguous county boroughs a decade before the big 1974 shake-up. |
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J.G.Harston
Lib Dem
Leave-voting Brexit-supporting Liberal Democrat
Posts: 7,830 
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Post by J.G.Harston on Nov 18, 2020 9:32:39 GMT
Those, and the ones at various points through time on Britain Through Time, and fascinating. But the thing that jumps out to me is how tiny Urban District Councils were in Scotland compared to England. Where they functionally different? Coldstream is bearly half a mile across. Local government took an entirely different form in Scotland - it did not have Urban Districts and Rural Districts. Coldstream, which had a population of 1,267 in 1969, was a burgh. There were 201 of them in total, of which 176 were (like Coldstream) officially termed 'Small Burghs'. In addition there were 25 Cities and Large Burghs Some of them seem to have been deliniated by somebody with a ruler (probably the same chap in the Colonial Office). There's a couple in the south-west penisular that are nearly perfect squares, ignoring all geography and physical features. |
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Post by David Boothroyd on Nov 18, 2020 9:54:18 GMT
It's important to note that there was a general consensus, after the end of the war, that English local government was weak and needed reform - the problem being that there were too many small authorities and the boundaries of quite a few did not match the growth of communities. The Ministry of Health under Bevan set up a Local Government Boundary Commission in the late 1940s to go through and make recommendations area by area, but it quickly became overawed by the extent of the problem and eventually decided to exceed its brief by proposing a nationwide reform. Bevan was too busy with other things and scrapped them.
The mid-1960s changes had been instituted by the commission set up in 1958, who were strictly instructed to take it slowly and do one bit of the country at a time. By 1965 they had taken minutes and wasted hours, as the saying goes - coming up with a tiny number of recommendations in the Black Country and Teesside. The new Minister of Housing and Local Government, Crossman, decided he had had enough and when he was invited to speak at the annual meeting of the Association of Municipal Corporations, without getting any approval, he said that the whole country needed reform. It might have gone nowhere, but George Brown read it and approved, and urged Wilson to take it on. Wilson eventually agreed, and that was the reason for setting up the Redcliffe-Maud commission.
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ilerda
Conservative
Posts: 146
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Post by ilerda on Nov 18, 2020 10:08:38 GMT
I would be interesting to know what would have happened if we’d kept this idea of small rolling boundary changes and rationalisations going. Redcliffe-Maud was clearly far too radical to actually be adopted, and so we went for some sort of middle ground in the 1974 reforms that were, in a way, a sped up version of what started as a result of the 1958 Act.
If Labour hadn’t tried to go too far and too fast with R-M, we might have come to see local government reform as a continual and flexible process, rather that the current situation which sees it as an event to be carried out every 40 or 50 years. Instead of thinking the only possible solution is to merge existing districts into ever larger super councils, we might consider the merits of boundary changes and locally-led alterations that reflect communities on the ground.
It’s a real shame because the slow and bureaucratic nature of the Commission’s work in the 60’s, I actually think it came up with a far more organic and sustainable way of doing local government reform.
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Post by David Boothroyd on Nov 18, 2020 10:28:52 GMT
What killed Redcliffe-Maud was that it was published at a time when the government was very unpopular, so anything it did was likely to get a critical reception; the opposition could use it as a campaigning point, and then there was a change of government. But it meant that Heath had to propose another reform instead, so it did force a nationwide change.
Several times since then governments have tried to edge towards R-M style reform but piecemeal, for example the Banham Commission of the 1990s which instead ended up recreating County Boroughs.
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Post by afleitch on Nov 18, 2020 18:45:27 GMT
Yes, Scotland was a bit of a mess. If you look at Lanarkshire, there were no small burghs other than Lanark, leaving huge urban areas; Cambuslang, Bellshill, Blantyre, Viewpark, Larkhall etc represented by 'rural' districts, yet other counties were peppered with them.
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Post by manchesterman on Nov 20, 2020 23:47:10 GMT
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Georg Ebner
Non-Aligned
Roman-romantic-reactionary Catholic
Posts: 6,041
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Post by Georg Ebner on Nov 21, 2020 2:42:28 GMT
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Post by David Ashforth on Nov 26, 2020 17:47:22 GMT
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Post by conservativeestimate on Dec 3, 2020 9:58:20 GMT
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ilerda
Conservative
Posts: 146
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Post by ilerda on Dec 3, 2020 11:07:25 GMT
A map of the constituencies that have only been won by one party since 2010. Includes Speaker but excludes by-elections. It gives an interesting visualisation of the Red Wall, SNP takeover of Scotland, and the Lib Dem losses in 2015. www.yapms.com/app/?m=5efv |
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Post by conservativeestimate on Dec 3, 2020 11:10:33 GMT
A map of the constituencies that have only been won by one party since 2010. Includes Speaker but excludes by-elections. It gives an interesting visualisation of the Red Wall, SNP takeover of Scotland, and the Lib Dem losses in 2015. www.yapms.com/app/?m=5efvIf you want to see a party that's lost its heartland, look no further than the collapse of the Lib Dems in the South West. |
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The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
Posts: 26,752
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Post by The Bishop on Dec 3, 2020 12:44:09 GMT
Just 2 seats for the LibDems on that metric is a fairly well known stat, but a mere 3 for the SNP is striking.
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Post by David Boothroyd on Dec 3, 2020 13:23:30 GMT
Might be interesting to add party control in the 2005 notional election. That would take the Conservatives down a lot.
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ilerda
Conservative
Posts: 146
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Post by ilerda on Dec 3, 2020 13:38:53 GMT
Just 2 seats for the LibDems on that metric is a fairly well known stat, but a mere 3 for the SNP is striking. Yes I was surprised by that. And of course Perth and North Perthshire was held by just 21 votes in 2017. I suppose that's a reflection on just how much the SNP's base has changed in the past few years. |
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Post by conservativeestimate on Dec 3, 2020 14:26:37 GMT
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Post by bjornhattan on Dec 3, 2020 15:17:14 GMT
I know it got fairly close in 2005, but I'm pretty sure Oxford East has been consistently Labour since 1987. |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Dec 3, 2020 15:22:15 GMT
I know it got fairly close in 2005, but I'm pretty sure Oxford East has been consistently Labour since 1987. I wonder if that is based on the seat as currently drawn being notionally Lib Dem in 2005. I wouldn't personally do it that way because, as you say, it has actually ahd Labour MPs consistently since that time. There are some more glaring (and less ambiguous) errors there - Chipping Barnet, South and North West Cambridgshire, Rutland & Melton |
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Post by conservativeestimate on Dec 3, 2020 15:22:37 GMT
I know it got fairly close in 2005, but I'm pretty sure Oxford East has been consistently Labour since 1987. Hard to say. I remember hearing it was notional Lib Dem in 2005 on current boundaries because the city centre wards of Carfax and Holywell weren't in the 97-2010 seat. |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Dec 3, 2020 15:25:13 GMT
Also Newbury, Weston Super Mare..
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