British Elections 1918-1945

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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.

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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.

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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?
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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.

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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.}

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.

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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).

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Here's a map for 1945, minus the new & changed seats. The orange in Chelmsford is Common Wealth and, like in the 1935, the purple in Glasgow are ILP and the brown (in Fife & London) are Communist.

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A phenomenon that also saw the highly questionable retention of the Caernarvon Boroughs constituency, of course.

One of the most remarkable results of the election, given that the Tories hadn't won it in nearly sixty years, but a close three-way contest (only 807 votes separating first from third) allowed them to squeak in.
The same thing happened in Caithness & Sutherland - another Tory gain - where only 59 votes separated first from third.

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Maps showing the number of times a given party won each constituency in the period with notes. Enjoy.

I'd say they're all three - useful, interesting and pretty.