U.K election maps

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As a sort of Christmas present to you all...



I've decided to make some maps of past U.K election results (I boundaries at that nice scale from 1955 onwards; the rewards of politely emailing people I think).
I intend to make a map of % majorities at every General Election from 1955 onwards (eventually) and that's probably the only time I'll use the full maps; I'd prefer to do % vote maps and % vote by party maps for smaller areas (ie; Wales, London, etc.). Would show up a lot better anyway as there'd be no threat of resizing. If larger maps end up being resized, just copy them and paste onto a paint thing or something to look at.
1974Feb was the first election I decided to do as (IMO anyway) it's probably the most important post-45 election in determining the political landscape. You literally can't compare national PV figures before 1974 and after 1974; before then it was common (even in times of three big parties like the '20's) to have just two candidates in each constituency; a couple of M.P's were even unopposed. After then all three major parties have tried to run candidates in every seat, every election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Thanks! That's great, but it's being shown as smaller on my computer... Still I can make it out.

That's the forum's doing I think... it auto-resizes now. To see the map in it's proper size, copy it and paste it onto a paint file or something similer.

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Demographic changes are only part of the story there; IIRC the current seat has some dodgy areas that used to be in Kemptown until '97.

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In fact it was called Horsham & Crawley
The SE New Towns were still, well, new, back then, so they were still almost entirely made up of ex-pat Londoners from working class families, and voted like it (look at Harlow. The Tories actually came *third* there in 1974F...). They all took a hard swing to the right in the '80's and a slightly less hard one back to the left in the late '90's.

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The big pink seat is the old Gravesend constituency if that helps. IIRC Rochester & Chatham (I think that was the name) fell to Labour in October though. Gillingham was a fairly safe Tory seat at the time.

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A lot of people assume that, but Labour becoming little more than a fringe party in many of them didn't really start to happen until the '80's. Some of them (notably Herts) were actually better bets for Labour then than they are now... and this is the case with just about all of them in the '60's.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

interesting so this is 1974 what were the results seat totals.

Labour 301, Tory 297, Liberal 14, SNP 7, PC 2, Ind Lab 1 [Blyth], "Dem Lab" 1 [Lincoln].
Tories won the popular vote by about 200,000 votes. Labour formed a minority government and called a new election in October.
The election was a failed gamble on the part of Heath; he carefully picked a fight with the NUM in the hope that the resulting miners strike would cause a big rise in anti-union sentiment and result in a nice big win for him. Didn't work out that way...  

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Yeah, at the moment they only have one and only won it because it was a new seat and anti-Tory tactical voters weren't sure to to vote for. They lost their other seat (held by the then Shadow Sec of State for Scotland) to Labour following major boundary changes.
The Tory collapse in Scotland came in two waves; 1987 (which was partially turned back in 1992) and 1997... when they lost every single seat they had in Scotland. Both 1974 elections were seen (at the time) as bad 'uns for the Tories north of the border. Tells you have much times have changed really.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Very interesting. I wonder how the 2005 result would have looked on these boundaries ?

A much larger Labour majority; there were still a load of Labour seats with tiny electorates back then (inner city seats being the obvious but not only ones; Abertillery falls into that catagory as well. And if it had been a seperate seat this year the bizarre civil war in the BG CLP wouldn't have happend as Law would *already* be M.P for Abertillery...) and then you have all the seats that were much better for Labour on those boundaries; Brecon & Radnor included a lot of territory that's now in some of the Valleys seats for example.

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Well spotted. It's especially stark if you control for demographic changes...

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And Northern Lancs

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Thanks Al I'm working backwards on my Scottish stuff for uni and I was about to do the two 74 elections! My boundary maps were a little offset when I did 79 and this should correct them

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Any suggestions for the next one to do?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

according to the map of 2005 on the BBC website (where you can click on a seat and it shows the results) I was looking around  there were some other seats that were kind of close with the conservative party in second, any chance the conservatives pick up seats in Scottland next election.

Oh yes, there's still quite a few seats were the Tories are fairly strong in Scotland. Dumfries & Galloway (the Galloway part was the Tories only M.P from Scotland's seat in the 2001-2005 Parliament) is probably a very unlikely gain now, but they are breathing very hard down the SNP's necks in Angus and Perth & North Perthshire. In the longrun they should really think about rebuilding themselves in Edinburgh... and then there's always that Borders seat held by Mike Moore (LibDem).
One hope of their's that was dashed with the boundary changes was Ayr; it were cut into pieces and largely combined with an ultra-Labour old mining area (the core of the old Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley seat)...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You can find the Feb 1974 results here if you are interested. I'm not sure how reliable these results are.

Interesting; seems to be using similer sources to me. Well if someone else is using them they can't be *that* far out (or can they? *shudders at some of the cock-up's made in newspaper reports of the 2005 election...*).

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IIRC the Tory majority in Horsham in '66 was something like 8,000 (in an extremely oversized seat so that's nowhere near as impressive as it looks)... and seeing as how the areas lost to Chichester are (IIRC) extremely Tory... Horsham & Crawley would probably have gone Labour in '66...

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There was an excellent cartoon done at the time (no, I'm not that old. It was reprinted in a magazine a few years ago) showing Heath and his cabinet walking through a devastated urban landscape and Heath saying something along the lines of "I'm just wondering if it was the wrong question to ask".

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And now for 1983...



Couple of points:

*The SDP have their own colour [a sort of purple; SDP colours were red and blue so...] which shows up fine on my computer, but might not on some others. If you get confused, I can give you a list of SDP seats.

*Interesting to note that, despite the landslide, very few Tory seats had majorities over 40%. It's also strange to see so many Labour strongholds with such small majorities.

*This election was the last one in the Pre-Benn era of Chesterfield

*As always if the forum auto-resizes the map, just copy it onto a paint file to look at.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be interesting to see how it maps the "spoiler effect" of the SDP.

I could do that, yes (probably on a smaller scale map with some zoom-in's just for my sanity).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And here is '92:



*It's interesting to see how very different electoral geography was then; one big difference between now and '92 is in multi-cultural and well educated liberal areas (where Labour did a hell of a lot better in '92 than '05) and in working class suburbs (where the situation is reversed).

*An interesting feature of the election was regional backlashes; the largest was in Wales (where you'll note that Labour racked up a load of majorities in South Wales that were even more jaw-droppingly huge than normal. Also note the narrow win in Pembroke; Labour toppled a 10pt majority there and in a seat that's only previous Labour M.P (in the '50's and '60's) had actually been extremely conservative) and the PC gain in Ceredigion) while the big one in Scotland from '87 was drawing back somewhat. There was also a smaller one in East Lancashire, caused largely by textile job losses IIRC.

*Also note that the tiny Tory majority was based on a freakish string of extremely marginal wins...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And here's 1979...



As you can see it was quite a strange election and very much a warning shot of future regional polarisation; note the fact that while it looks like a Tory landslide in the Southeast, up North Labour actually held a load of traditional marginals; including bellwethers like Bolton West, Keighley and of course Bury.
It's almost certain that Labour would have won had the election been called in 1978 and it's very likely that they'd have won had the turkeys (read: SNP) not voted for an early Christmas (and you can see how Scottish voters rewarded the SNP for that) in the no-confidence vote, and the election been held a few months later. Liberals did badly as well (look how hard Thorpe went down in North Devon...)

This was also the last election in which the real counties were used to draw constituencies from...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That would be the Valleys; an old coalfield/steel area (I say old but to be fair quite a lot of strip mining goes on down there these days. Still one deep pit open and it's doing pretty well). These days the economy there is based around manufacturing (although most of the factories are along the coast; a hell of a lot of people commute down from the Valleys to places like Baglan Bay daily).
Been solidly Labour since the '20's. Only serious challenges to Labour at a national level is the occasional Independent Labour candidate (one got elected in the seat based around Ebbw Vale last year for example) and frankly they don't count... last serious threat at national level from *outside* the mainstream Labour movement was the Communists... and even then only in one part of the Rhondda Valley...
Politically the whole area is extremely left wing economically and IIRC it has the highest rates of union membership in the country. It's also one of the most socially conservative parts of the U.K (although as Chris Bryant proves it's certainly not a bigoted area).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The bit you are referring to is basically a paradise for Al given that all that used to happen there was coal mining.

Were some steelworks in the bits that used to be in Monmouthshire though. And if you go back far enough there was some iron mining as well.

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And there families still do

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Just like to take this oppertunity to point out that the extremely dark red constituency in western Cardiff was Mr Speaker's seat...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Any suggestions for the next election to do? Anything from 1955 onwards is mappable.
I'm thinking of doing 1964 or 1997, but am open to suggestions

[Filuwaúrdjan]

1955, 1955, 1955 !!!!!

O.K

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And now for '55...



1. Obviously a hell of a lot of things have changed in half a century; both demographically (looks at rural eastern England and thinks of a time when agriculture was still a big employer; looks at how London has both expanded and got "thinner" etc, etc...) and also politically (looks at the Orange vote in central Scotland... and also much of Lancashire, especially Liverpool and Manchester, looks at north/west Wales before that bloody dam was built, looks at the crooked deals with Tories that kept the Liberals semi-alive... etc, etc...).
2. And yes, your eyesight is fine, the Liberals won a seat in Bolton, a seat in Huddersfield and also Carmarthen [later lost to Labour in a by-election; Labour's candidate was DLG's daughter] while failing to win any in the West Country or the Highlands...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Labour vote in NW Wales will come back IMO.

It's certainly *started* to... after all we hold Ynys Mon again and have re-asserted our natural (ie; 2nd at the very least) place in Caernarfon, following boundary changes it'll be ours again methinks.
But the question is how far the road to recovery will go... know what? I think we need another Goronwy Roberts...

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Not at the moment; for one thing I don't have the results by constituency

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Can you do a Welsh map for the other parties please? (I.e Dem from Wales, Ind from Wales, Others from Wales)

Yep; which election? Could do it for the last Assembly election if you want.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Whats the blue dot in the middle of the Yorkshire Coalfield ?

Doncaster believe it or not. Not the only working class town to vote for the Tories by narrow margins either (look at Carlisle, Glasgow and Sunderland). IIRC the old Donny seat didn't include all the town (as in the urban area; it probably included the county borough. I think Donny was a county borough...).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Al, can you tell me which parties have held Orkney and Shetland when?

Been Liberal since 1950 when Jo Grimond took it back off the Tories. It was Tory in 1945 (although marginally so). I think it was always Liberal before the whole National Government mess (not entirely sure though) though. Not sure about '31 or '35.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Since when has it been one constituency? I seem to recall that in the 18th century, although Scotland as a whole was woefully underrepresented, Orkney and Shetland were two separate constituencies.

Since 1918 at the very latest. Boundaries before 1918 were very strange, especially in Scotland...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In the 18th century, four or six (not sure which) of the smallest Scottish counties were represented only in alternate parliaments.

It was six... Buteshire was paired with Caithness, Clackmannanshire with Kinross (interestingly the various "Ochil" seats post-1997 are a bit like that) and Cromarty with Nairnshire. Amusingly Midlothian was technically called "Edinburghshire"...

Oh and I've checked this and Orkney & Shetland was just one seat back then... sort of... Kirkwall was in the Tairn Burghs constituency (along with Tairn, Dingwall, Dornoch and Wick).

Crazy, eh?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh well, not everything I say is true in every case.

In practice it's quite close to being true though; IIRC Kirkwall was fairly large (well... relatively speaking...) back then.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I made this map as an experiment; it's the % vote for Labour in the 2004 Euro elections (by local authority in England and Wales, by Holyrood constituency in Scotland). One shade represents one %. Note that the highest Labour vote (Blaenau Gwent in South Wales) was actually a few %'s over 50%; but as it was the only local authority with over 50% I kinda fudged things to keep my sanity... oh yes... suprisingly there wasn't a single local authority under 7% (there were several Westminster constituencies under that in 2005; evidence of tactical voting if I ever saw it...).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Despite what is written on the map, this is 1959 (not 1955)...



In many ways an election with very similer patterns to 1955, but with some important exceptions here and there; SuperMac solidified much of the South East on a permanent basis and the beginnings of the long trend to Labour in Lancashire is just about spottable. Thorpe's narrow win in North Devon is also quite significant... and you can also see the New Towns beginning to have an electoral effect here and there.