British Elections 1918-1945

[stepney]

Just further to the maps up top about the causes of electorate decline in London in the inter-war period, here's a similar map indicating population change between 1914 and 1961. A bit of late inter-war clearance, but nothing compared to the post-1940 flight.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well there were no large scale slum clearance programmes in Britain until the Luftwaffe decided to embark on an unnecessarily and excessively brutal one, so this is very much the pattern you'd expect.

This is what a lot of people get wrong about council housing; the early estates and even the 1930s estates weren't actually built for the slummies, but for the respectable workers in by-law houses. The thinking - more accurately hope - was that market forces would somehow do most of the rest. You don't get big intentional slum clearance programmes until the 1950s and 1960s.

[Dr. Cynic]

Can anyone upload a map of results for Plymouth for the 1922 GE?

[stepney]

Can anyone upload a map of results for Plymouth for the 1922 GE?

This should cover it, but the outline map's a little rough I'm afraid.

[DistingFlyer]

Here's a shaded map for 1935 - the outline comes from an Alternate History forum but is obviously based on the Boothroyd drawing. I've removed most of the urban insets but have kept London, which has so many tiny seats that it can't be illustrated very well on the larger map.

[Serenity Now]

Here's a shaded map for 1935 - the map comes from an Alternate History forum but is obviously based on the Boothroyd drawing. I've removed most of the urban insets but have kept London, which has so many tiny seats that it can't be illustrated very well on the larger map.

Excellent work

[freefair]

Here's a shaded map for 1935 - the map comes from an Alternate History forum but is obviously based on the Boothroyd drawing. I've removed most of the urban insets but have kept London, which has so many tiny seats that it can't be illustrated very well on the larger map.

Apart from the SNP, Plaid,and the decline of Orangery in Liverpool and Glasgow, that 1935 map has not changed at all in 80 years. If the Tories won a landslide 420 seats tomorrow, that's what it'd look like. Compared with all the re-alignments in other nations, that's quite something.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Almost every detail has changed, but the basic pattern is much the same. 1935 is a much underrated election.

[DistingFlyer]

Almost every detail has changed, but the basic pattern is much the same. 1935 is a much underrated election.

I'd say that the biggest change from then to now is that the Labour Party's base was in the industrial (mining, shipbuilding, steel etc.) areas while it's now in the urban areas - a great deal of overlap, obviously, but just compare Birmingham (or Bristol, Manchester, suburban London etc.) in 1935 to now.

It seems to have happened in a few stages: first, 1945 brought a lot of inner-city seats firmly to the Labour fold, while 1964/6 brought in some more middle-class areas like Hampstead & Stretford. 1997 completed things, as well-off suburban areas like Enfield, Crosby & Harrow jumped to Labour and have stayed there - in fact, all three of those seats saw increased Labour majorities in 2001. This brought us the 2001 electoral map, which saw Tory wins in places like Newark & Romford (with a fat majority), slim Labour majorities in places like Hornchurch, and big Labour majorities in Harrow East/West & Brent North! Unthinkable even twenty years before.

Simultaneous to this last development, however, was the weakening of Labour support in those poor urban areas that had always done them so well; the party's drift to the middle, as well as Afghanistan/Iraq and tuition fees, saw some votes shaken loose but only in a few instances were seats actually lost - for the most part, it just meant majorities of 5-10,000 as opposed to 15-20,000, so it's not a major shift like the 1960s & 1990s. The decline in Liberal support over the last few years - very much based on policies like tuition which drove Labour voters to them in the first place - will probably reverse things altogether and bring Labour's standing in these areas back to where it was before.

[YL]

Yes.  Freefair mentioned Liverpool and Glasgow, with the "Orange" Tory vote, but other cities are striking too.  The Tories won every seat in Birmingham in 1935; that wouldn't happen in a comparable scale landslide today.  They won six out of ten in Manchester; they'd need a bigger landslide than that to come close in any today.  (Of course, today Manchester has only three seats of its own, plus two which are mostly in the city but which cross the borders and have names which don't include the city name.)  They won three out of seven in Sheffield, three out of four in Newcastle (and the other was a Liberal National), and so on.

[ObserverIE]

Almost every detail has changed, but the basic pattern is much the same. 1935 is a much underrated election.

Big Labour majorities in Harrow East/West & Brent North! Unthinkable even twenty years before.

Is a lot of that not due to demographic change in that part of north-west London and the Tories not being particularly attractive to South Asian voters?

[freefair]

The Tories won every seat in Birmingham in 1935; that wouldn't happen in a comparable scale landslide today. 

Good grief, I hadn't even noticed, that, even though I knew the Midlands urban area as a whole was very historically Conservative. Wow. Surely that had something to do with Neville, Joseph & Austin Chamberlain, or Stanley Baldwin being relatively local?
Another striking feature for me is that the then very industrialsed, mining based constituency corresponding to modern day uber-bourgoise South Staffordshire is slightly Labour during this Tory landslide, when since 1970 it has been, no word of a lie, one of the Conservatives 10 safest seats (they got 51% in 1997 and 57% in 2010)

[DistingFlyer]

Big Labour majorities in Harrow East/West & Brent North! Unthinkable even twenty years before.

Is a lot of that not due to demographic change in that part of north-west London and the Tories not being particularly attractive to South Asian voters?
[/quote]

I'd say that the rise of immigrant populations in the cities is one of the biggest reasons for Labour's success in those areas over the last fifty years. However, unlike Birmingham/Bradford/Leicester, which saw steady improvement for Labour over many years, these northwest London seats stayed heavily Tory until 1997, when they swung massively to Labour (and swung strongly again four years later). Harrow West was the safest seat gained by Labour in 1997 (a 33% majority overturned), Southgate the second safest (32%) and Brent North ranked pretty high too (27%) before polling day.

[ObserverIE]

The Tories won every seat in Birmingham in 1935; that wouldn't happen in a comparable scale landslide today. 

Good grief, I hadn't even noticed, that, even though I knew the Midlands urban area as a whole was very historically Conservative. Wow. Surely that had something to do with Neville, Joseph & Austin Chamberlain, or Stanley Baldwin being relatively local?
Another striking feature for me is that the then very industrialsed, mining based constituency corresponding to modern day uber-bourgoise South Staffordshire is slightly Labour during this Tory landslide, when since 1970 it has been, no word of a lie, one of the Conservatives 10 safest seats (they got 51% in 1997 and 57% in 2010)

That's Cannock, and presumably the Labour vote came from there rather than from what is now South Staffordshire.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'd say that the biggest change from then to now is that the Labour Party's base was in the industrial (mining, shipbuilding, steel etc.) areas while it's now in the urban areas - a great deal of overlap, obviously, but just compare Birmingham (or Bristol, Manchester, suburban London etc.) in 1935 to now.

Except that many of those urban areas mentioned were actually very industrial in 1935. Birmingham was dominated by metal bashing of one sort or another (historically guns and cheap consumer crap, but increasingly also cars and related industries), while Manchester was still a major centre of heavy industry and of lighter industries relating to textiles.

Or to point out the really obvious: Labour underperformed in most larger urban areas (compared to how they'd polled in the 20s) quite badly in 1935. In 1929 (for instance) Labour dominated the representation of Manchester/Salford and Newcastle/Gateshead, while there was a large clutch of Labour MPs from Birmingham. On the other hand, Labour recovered very strongly in the various coalfields and in some more rural textile districts as these places had been particularly devastated by the later stages of the depression. That, and the power of the MFGB. The reason why 1935 is (to me at least) important isn't because it was some kind of perfect baseline election or whatever, but because it basically set patterns that had been emerging since 1918 as permanent.

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Newark was redrawn in 1983 as a basically safe Conservative seat (though the old Newark would have drifted Torywards anyway as the pit villages in the Dukeries depopulated and as more Nottingham commuters moved into the prosperously rural end of the constituency), and Romford is a middle class suburban constituency of the sort that Labour has only ever been able to win in extremely good years.* The issue in the Harrows and Brent North is their transformation from middle class suburbia to ethnic banlieues (for lack of a good English word for this).

And with regards to many long term changes, that's the issue in general: people move, industries die, and lifestyles change. The functional metropolitan areas of most British cities in 1935 were much smaller (geographically) than is the case now. My mum grew up in a carpet weaving town on the distant outskirts of Wolverhampton that is now, effectively, a middle class commuter town.

_{*In the interests of clarity however... it should be noted that the Romford constituency that existed in the 1930s included both Barking and Dagenham, while the Romford constituency that existed prior to 1974 combined the middle class 'burbs of Romford proper with the Harold Hill estate.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's Cannock, and presumably the Labour vote came from there rather than from what is now South Staffordshire.

Quite so. At the time the area that is now South Staffs was still very rural and had a low population. Almost all of the settlements in the area are almost entirely post-war (and frequently post-1960 at that).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Good grief, I hadn't even noticed, that, even though I knew the Midlands urban area as a whole was very historically Conservative. Wow. Surely that had something to do with Neville, Joseph & Austin Chamberlain, or Stanley Baldwin being relatively local?

Birmingham was still dominated by the political machine that had run it (more or less) since the middle of the 19th century (note that Conservative candidates in the city were still officially described as Unionists), and which was in practice the political wing of local business and professional interests (a hell of a lot of Edgbaston lawyers were senior Aldermen). It was strongly associated with the Chamberlain family, though by the interwar period they didn't have much to do with the actual operation of things. It had been given a few scares in the 20s, but was very much in full control by '35. Then the city had what amounted to a democratic revolution in 1945, and that was the end of that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The composition (and boundaries) of Cannock were really quite impressively bizarre:

[DistingFlyer]

Newark was redrawn in 1983 as a basically safe Conservative seat (though the old Newark would have drifted Torywards anyway as the pit villages in the Dukeries depopulated and as more Nottingham commuters moved into the prosperously rural end of the constituency), and Romford is a middle class suburban constituency of the sort that Labour has only ever been able to win in extremely good years.* The issue in the Harrows and Brent North is their transformation from middle class suburbia to ethnic banlieues (for lack of a good English word for this).

And with regards to many long term changes, that's the issue in general: people move, industries die, and lifestyles change. The functional metropolitan areas of most British cities in 1935 were much smaller (geographically) than is the case now. My mum grew up in a carpet weaving town on the distant outskirts of Wolverhampton that is now, effectively, a middle class commuter town.

_{*In the interests of clarity however... it should be noted that the Romford constituency that existed in the 1930s included both Barking and Dagenham, while the Romford constituency that existed prior to 1974 combined the middle class 'burbs of Romford proper with the Harold Hill estate.}

I wasn't so much referring to the Tories winning those seats as doing much better in them than in the more posh north London areas that had always been strongholds.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I wasn't so much referring to the Tories winning those seats as doing much better in them than in the more posh north London areas that had always been strongholds.

But the people who had made those formerly posh - though really we're talking more humdrum suburban boring middle class actually* - parts of North London Tory strongholds no longer (at least for the most part) lived there by then.

_{*And not always that safe: in 1966, Labour won Harrow East, came close in Harrow Central, and only very narrowly failed to gain Hendon North. Even in '74, Labour managed to vaguely menace in Harrow Central and came close in Hendon North. At the same time, Battersea North was a Labour stronghold and Fulham was a reliable Labour seat.}

[DistingFlyer]

I wasn't so much referring to the Tories winning those seats as doing much better in them than in the more posh north London areas that had always been strongholds.

But the people who had made those formerly posh - though really we're talking more humdrum suburban boring middle class actually* - parts of North London Tory strongholds no longer (at least for the most part) lived there by then.

_{*And not always that safe: in 1966, Labour won Harrow East, came close in Harrow Central, and only very narrowly failed to gain Hendon North. Even in '74, Labour managed to vaguely menace in Harrow Central and came close in Hendon North. At the same time, Battersea North was a Labour stronghold and Fulham was a reliable Labour seat.}

Precisely - I wasn't simply referring to Labour doing better among middle-class voters (although that was true) but also the changes in population. Even Keith Hill, the first Labour MP for Streatham, admitted that it was demographic changes that were responsible for his victory rather than any great damning rejection of the Tory member.
The slow expansion of what might crudely be called 'inner-city' areas outward, as well as a greater willingness of middle-class voters to go Labour, combined to produce some results that would have been unimaginable decades earlier. Going in the reverse direction, seats like Battersea, Fulham & Hornchurch - that had been blue-collar Labour country - saw the reverse happening (though this seems to have been much rarer, and has faded a bit from the glory days of the 1980s when even seats like Dagenham or Barking looked like potential Tory gains).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, so mostly a - productive! - misunderstanding then.

[YL]

The composition (and boundaries) of Cannock were really quite impressively bizarre:

Any idea why it was drawn like that?

[YL]

And with regards to many long term changes, that's the issue in general: people move, industries die, and lifestyles change. The functional metropolitan areas of most British cities in 1935 were much smaller (geographically) than is the case now. My mum grew up in a carpet weaving town on the distant outskirts of Wolverhampton that is now, effectively, a middle class commuter town.

A good point.  In my area, Penistone & Stocksbridge, Rother Valley and North East Derbyshire (the northern arm anyway) are much more suburban in nature than the equivalent seats were in 1935; their relatively small Labour majorities shouldn't really be surprising.  (Of course you have to take account of boundary changes)  In fact I think there are seats in other parts of the country which look demographically similar which are Tory-held.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Any idea why it was drawn like that?

Alcohol?

It was actually slightly less insane when it was first drawn (the bits in Wolves weren't then and so on: these were areas of major growth), but still bats. I suspect it may have come about from the rules used to draw up the boundaries: you have that bizarre dip into the Black Country because points west of that were in one set of designated borough constituencies, and points east were in another. Though its possible that they were consciously trying to draw a barrier between the Black Country and designated agricultural constituencies further north in Staffs.