Next UK General Election thread

[parochial boy]

yougov internals are worse than useless, don't bother looking at them - especially the regional ones since they are tiny and unrepresentative - one of the other post-election polls that had Labour ahead nationally had the Tories at over 40% in Scotland which, eh, isn't the case.

Yeah, the compulsory warning about unskewing polls is important here. One cross tab looking off doesn't mean the poll is wrong.

Although, having said that, I'm assuming that the pollsters are all still making stuff up on the fly when it comes to weighting the poll data.

[parochial boy]

Overreacting to a cross tab alert!

But, latest YouGov has toplines of:

Con - 41
Lab - 44
LD - 6

But the Scotland crosstab has Labour on 33; SNP on 29 and Tories on 28...

More big swings underway in Scotland? or Crosstabs being completely unreliable as they obviously are anyway.

Though I'd post it anyway seeing as only a few months ago, the assumption was that LiS were dead and buried.

[parochial boy]

There are people who are far more knowlegeable than me, but

Stroud is on an old coal field, which tends to lead to strong Labour support. It also has a large population of bohemian types, and countercultural and hippy type people - all of which come together to give Labour a chance. Stroud also voted remain in the Brexit referedum, and those types of areas swung heavily to Labour across the board.

High peak - most people in the constituency dont live on "t' moors" but in the western edge of the consituency in working class industrial towns like Glossop. Therefore good for Labour. This is also outer Manchester we are talking about - so there may be an element of metro areas swinging left (and the cultural influence of the North West, which is probably more staunchly Labour than amywhere else in the country).

Bournemouth and Poole - old retirees living on the coast, one of the Christchurches is the "oldest" constituency in the country, and the story at the GE was the absolutely huge age gap in terms of voting. It helps that the region is not particularly industrial; and that you have mega, mega rich suburbs like Sandbanks.

The London commuter belt is Tory because, fundamentally, Britain, like most of Europe, has a different political structure to the US. Middle class Brits are still a strong Tory demographic, and working class voters still vote heavily Labour. So Surrey and the like are Tory as a result of being hugely wealthy. The UK does not really have the American culture style influence behind voting patterns (plenty of pundits assured us that the culture war gap would emerge this time round, but it didnt, working class areas stayed solidly Labour). As in, Centrists and liberals are still perfectly comfortable in voting Tory in line with their class interests - there are plenty of liberal tories (Ken Clarke, Gidiot Osborne) and "conservative" Labourites (Frank Fields).

[parochial boy]

Well Liberal (and Labour) strength in parts of the SW is a matter of tradition more than just previous incumbency. In the SW, outside of the urban areas, the Labour tradition has really been restricted to the coal fields of Gloucestershire - that is, Stroud and the Forest of Dean; and to some tin mining areas in Cornwall. A history of coal mining genuinely is a great proxy for Labour strength these days (Labour areas in rural parts of the North fit pretty neatly to the coal mining areas).

So for Stroud, take coal and factor in the kind of liberal metropolitan elite rat race drop outs who helped it vote remain, and remember that remain voting areas swung massively towards Labour, and isnt surprising that Stroud sticks out.

As for the commuter belt; Watford, Thurrock and Slough are demographicallt nothing like what people generally mean by commuter belt. They are much poorer than Sevenoaks or Dorking, and I can guarantee you that white people in Slough vote very differently to those in Windsor.

Put simply, the Tories are still the party of the British elite - there is just no way those people are voting Labour, you cant compare it to the Democrats in the US or Liberals in Canada.

Likewise, the outlying areas of Manchester or Liverpool arent really comparable to the London commuter belt. A more direct equivalent would be places in Cheshire like Tatton, which are still very right wing.

[parochial boy]

Yeah the age gap was huge, best demonstrated in the huge swings that saw Portsmouth South and Canterbury vote Labour (university towns), and when we're talking about a 70-20 odd margin for the under 25s, it is probably safe to assume Labour won across class boundaries.

But as far as the class vote in the election - there was some back and forth about the crosstabs in the main election thread, and to a large degree, the ABCDE methodology isn't helpful as it reflects working patterns that no longer really apply.

If you look at the kinds of places that elected Tories or La, the traditional patterns hold up, and theee is a very strong correlation between a constituency's level of deprivation and its propensity to vote Labour. Anwcdotally, comparing Surrey with S Yorks very much bears that up.

Aa fae as the housing tenure crosstabs go - they probably baxk this up, middle class owner occupiers voting Conservative;working class social renters and young private renters voting Labour

[parochial boy]

From the 2017 election thread

Least deprived Labour constituencies in England, including all in the bottom four deciles:
1. Sheffield Hallam
2. Stroud
3. Warwick & Leamington
4. Sefton Central
5. Cambridge
6. Reading East
7. Harrow West
8. Wirral South
9. Leeds North West
10. Warrington South
11. Canterbury
12. Wirral West
13. Penistone & Stocksbridge
14. High Peak
15. Gedling
16. Enfield Southgate
17. York Central
18. Tynemouth
19. City of Durham

Basically think:
- universities
- multicultural London
- a handful of Northern constituencies (sefton central, penistone) in areas that have specific reasons to dislike the Conservatives.

On the flipside Walsall North does represent a particular type of Working Class/leave area that has been trending away from Labour for a long time now.

[parochial boy]

Well the swings in London had a lot to do with young people and remain voters, and Hillingdon has substantially less of those than the rest of the city. Also, the minority population there tend to be middle class Hindus, who tend to be friendly to the Tories. So it isn't the most obvious Labour target.

I would also be very hesitant to predict how London as a whole will swing before Brexit gets settled -especially as swings in London quite often contrast quite markedly to the rest of the country

[parochial boy]

Yeah, the commuter belt is very Bourgeois in attitude, I mean - the "outraged of Tunbridge Wells" trope exists for a reason, so the kind of person living in the Commuter belt is not always comparable to those living in the North American equivalents (although that is changing as increasing numbers of people are more or less forced to move to commuter towns in order to have any hope of ever owning a home).

As far as ethnicity goes as a factor, I think it is harder to know for sure. As mentioned earlier, towns in the London periphery, like Slough or Luton, that do give Labour better scores, as they are much more diverse, but also much poorer than their neighbours - which is probably a greater factor in the way that those places vote. Of course, Stevenage and Crawley are also poorer than the surrounding areas and are friendlier to the Tories - but I don't know whether that is down to them being relatively "whiter" or more down to the fact that they are smaller and that the constituencies include more traditional Tory "shire" country/suburban areas.

In the UK, you down get polling data on ethnicity like you do in the US, (aside from very infrequent polls of "how Jewish people vote" or whatever, which have huge inherent inbuilt problems stemming from the question of self-identification).

So looking at the "ethnic" vote relies on looking at vote breakdowns for specific areas with minority populations - this is made all the harder based on the fact that at General Elections, you only get constituency-wide data - so a large degree you have to extrapolate from the ward-by-ward data you get at local elections.

Anyway, point being, it's harder to say for sure to what extent how white a place is factors into its voting habits, as it's harder to get a good picture of the way that ethnic minorities vote. Certainly, among Hindus, there seems to be a big class divide (compare Brent with Harrow, for instance), which may be reflected among other minority groups; and if I remember correctly, Muslim voters being hugely Labour is not a cast-iron guarantee either.

[parochial boy]

Luton is to London what Brampton is to Toronto?

Depends what Brampton is like (I don't know a lot about specific areas of Canada). Luton is an extremely grotty town with high rates of crime, unemployment and poverty, though there are a few more middle class bits in the east. The kind of place where you wouldn't feel safe walking alone down the street at night time. It is probably the worst town in the south of England, the worst bits being on par with some of London's most run down suburbs.

To address Pariochial Boy's point Luton and Slough vote Labour because they are nothing like most of the rest of the home counties and instead have much more in common with rundown London suburbs.

Towns like Stevenage and Crawley are swing constituencies primarily because they are much less deprived and have larger middle class elements and in Stevenage's case it contains very Tory areas outside the borough boundary like Knebworth.

The culture of the home counties isn't really changing though save for becoming a bit more ethnically diverse. People buying homes who have been priced out of London aren't changing the makeup of the home counties as these people are a primarily bourgeois, Tory demographic anyway. Plus the phenomenon of middle class Londoners upping sticks for the home counties has been going on for decades. In fact these people being priced out of London is why the Tories are having such trouble in many London suburbs where they used to be strong a generation ago because the only people left are the ethnically diverse poor living in social housing or rented properties (a monolithically Labour demographic) and the super rich (many are foreign nationals so can't vote).


I would note that the home counties are and never have been uniformly affluent or middle class. Many of the medium sized towns e.g. St Albans, Aylesbury, Guildford, Wycombe etc. have fairly grotty parts to them.

Yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at re the difference between Slough/Luton and Stevenage/Crawley (although both of those towns are mega grotty in the centre )

As for the trends in London, another thing is that people living in private rented properties (especially younger, and often highly educated voters) have swung heavily towards Labour in recent elections (thank you housing crisis...). IIRC, this was a demographic that was evenly split, even voted Tory in the not too distant past, but went Labour in 2015 and heavily Labour this year. The swing in Battersea is probably a good indicator of this, as Clapham is more or less the heartland of post-uni professionals in private rented housing; Tooting as well, which has gentrified in recent years but stayed in the Labour camp.

[parochial boy]

An important thing to bear in mind - and to anchor this discussion perhaps a little more - when discussing London is the not exactly small issue of housing...



In particular you should never forget that great ring of council estates in the inner city; one of the largest concentrations of public housing in Europe and something that immediately makes it very hard to draw hasty parallels with Canadian cities with their total lack of any serious tradition of municipal socialism. Battersea has been mentioned in this discussion and is a good example, as whatever the ups and downs of local swings there, Labour would not be competitive without the council estates in the north of the former borough. The increasingly low status of private renting - a return to what had historically been the norm after a few decades - is also now very important.

I'm actually surprised at how much social housing there still is in Fulham (as compared to Putney excluding Roehampton). I'd always assumed it had completely and utterly gentrified - are they less solidly Tory than I would have assumed?

Also, it's interesting how outright owned and owned with mortgage don't really match up in Central London. Owned with mortgage us more evenly spread, but outright is concentrated on very rich arenas

[parochial boy]

On Mortgaged v Owned Outright - how much of the latter is inherited?

Depends where in London; in the suburban areas - and areas developed as suburban to an extent still - a lot of the time they're houses on which the mortgage has been paid off, but as you get further in... "guess".

I'm assuming that many of those outright owners don't actually have the right to vote?