Aylesbury
2010 Results:
Conservative: 27736 (52.17%)
Labour: 6695 (12.59%)
Liberal Democrat: 15118 (28.44%)
UKIP: 3613 (6.8%)
Majority: 12618 (23.73%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Conservative: 20592 (46.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 12910 (29.2%)
Labour: 8580 (19.4%)
Other: 2173 (4.9%)
Majority: 7682 (17.4%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 25253 (49.1%)
Labour: 9540 (18.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 14187 (27.6%)
UKIP: 2479 (4.8%)
Majority: 11066 (21.5%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 23230 (47.3%)
Labour: 11388 (23.2%)
Liberal Democrat: 13221 (26.9%)
UKIP: 1248 (2.5%)
Majority: 10009 (20.4%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 25426 (44.2%)
Labour: 12759 (22.2%)
Liberal Democrat: 17007 (29.5%)
Referendum: 2196 (3.8%)
Other: 166 (0.3%)
Majority: 8419 (14.6%)
Boundary changes:
Profile: Aylesbury constituency is tightly drawn around the prosperous town of Aylesbury itself to the North, but in the South widens to include a swathe of countryside around the Chiltern Hills (Coombe Hill, the highest point in the Chilterns, lies just South West of Wendover, near the Prime Minister`s country residence of Chequers), including small market towns and villages like Wendover, Stokenchurch, Great Missenden and Princes Risborough. The seat was once the pocket borough of the Rothschild family, but has been Tory since 1923. Aylesbury itself tends towards the Liberal Democrats, but the picturesque semi-rural commuter towns and villages to the South vote reliably Conservative.
Current MP: David Lidington(Conservative) (more information at They work for you)
David Lidington(Conservative) (more information at They work for you)
Kathryn White (Labour) Born Aylesbury. Barrister specialising in employment and discrimination law.
Steven Lambert (Liberal Democrat) Aylesbury Vale councillor.
Chris Adams (UKIP) born 1963. Works for Nigel Farage MEP. Contested Aylesbury 2005, Henley by-election 2008.2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 102436
Male: 49.6%
Female: 50.4%
Under 18: 24%
Over 60: 16.7%
Born outside UK: 9.1%
White: 91.7%
Black: 1.4%
Asian: 4.8%
Mixed: 1.5%
Other: 0.6%
Christian: 71.7%
Hindu: 0.6%
Muslim: 4.1%
Full time students: 2.2%
Graduates 16-74: 20.9%
No Qualifications 16-74: 22.9%
Owner-Occupied: 74.7%
Social Housing: 15.1% (Council: 12.6%, Housing Ass.: 2.5%)
Privately Rented: 6%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 3%
The Conservatives should do very well here in the event. The semi rural smaller towns such as Wendover should see them through, and they could get a majority over 10,000.
I would be interested to know what the political situation is in Aylesbury itself, leaving aside the rural areas.
Is it a close fight, or do the Tories win in the main town of this seat as well?
I would think it was very close in Aylesbury itself between LD and Tory in the last few elections with Labour topping the polll in a few wards also. I have worked out some figures which I have at home i’ll have a look later
seems i’ve only done it up till 2001 which is remiss of me.
I have the Lib Dems ahead in the town in 1997 (LD 34.6% Con 33.5% Lab 28.2%) and the Conservatives in 2001 (Con 36% LD 31.5% Lab 30.3%)
The result in 2005 wouldnt have been much different to 2001.
Ofcourse in local elections the Lib Dems win most of the wards in Aylesbury town many of them easily. All the county council seats in the town returned Lib Dem councillors on the same day as the last election
This is the sort of seat which exemplifies trhe north-south divide.
Aylesbury is a bit of a dump, to be honest – the town itself is largely not ‘posh’, but Labour can hardly win a seat here any longer.
That’s probably because Labour voters in Aylesbury itself sense that they won’t win, and so very largely don’t bother to vote, whereas in a northern setting they’d assume they’d do much better and therefore many more of them would vote.
The grottier bits of Aylesbury tend to be pretty solidly Lib Dem, so that’s where most of the Labour voters have gone!
Thats right – Labour were able to win a few seats in Aylesbury into the 1990s but as in many southern towns the LD have taken on the mantle here (unlike in nearby Wycombe)
See the figures i posted above as a guide to how the town votes in general elections. This seat is not unlike Macclesfield for example, if you want a northern comparison. The main town accounts for about half the elctorate and is not especially strong for the Tories, but the other half of the seat consists of very affluent villages and commuter areas where the Tories pile up their majority
Macclesfield isn’t a bad comparison. Even in the supposedly “dreadful” May 2006 elections, Labour won a number of wards as they did this year.
Wendover is very Tory county feel, but is a little more Lib Dem than I expected.
The Tories increased their majority in May 2007 on Aylesbury Vale, having suffered a dose of yellow in 1995.
I agree with the analysis that the Lib Dems tend to squeeze Labour’s vote – even in their landslide period – 1995,1997, 2001, there seemed to be a ceiling on Labour’s vote.
Yes, I agree – and this does suggest that Labour will always do better in the north than the south.
The Lib Dems have selected Aylesbury councillor Steven Lambert here
Surprisingly few posts for this seat
Aylesbury may be safe Tory, but as it is 82 on the LibDem target seat it is the sort of constituency they need to get if they are ever to break through. Although, on recent opinion poll findings, frankly it currently appears more plausible that one or more of the minor parties, such as UKIP or the Greens, may be on the haul to serious status – Nationalist experience in Scotland and Wales suggests it takes several decades – than that the LibDems will get back to their pre-First World War status. I suspect the Liberals/SDP/LibDems blew their big chance in the 1980s: they really should have gained seats like this whilst Labour was a shambles and the Tories were arguably wrecking the economy.
From the LibDem point of view, at least they have pulled ahead of Labour: Electoral Calculus currently predicts:-
C 54.47%
LibDem 25.59%
Labour 10.71%
Other 9.25%
(Obviously, the decimal places are way beyond the real accuracy of such statistics).
There are a number of other Home Counties seats, for instance in Kent where I come from, where the Tories get a similar percentage, but Labour and the LibDems are slugging it out, on current predictions within a percentage point or two of each other, both under 20%. So the LibDems should be comparatively pleased with their performance here.
My personal impression on briefly visitng Aylesbury itself, which I do not know at all well, agrees with previous comments that some parts of the place are far from prosperous. And the implication is that Labour is underperforming, although whether it matters much to them is another matter. But it is doubtful whether there is much scope for the LibDems to squeeze Labour further than the Electoral Calculus prediction.
The most significant aspect of the 2010 General Election result here may be the UKIP vote. On 4.8% last time, they should certainly expect to save their deposit now. And if a Conservative government becomes unpopular, as may well happen given the country’s current economic mess, UKIP could make considerable advances next time.
A side issue for UKIP is whether they will generate a “halo effect” from Nigel Farage’s candidacy in next door Buckingham, along the lines that some of us think the Greens may do comparatively well in Brighton Kemptown and hove because they are next door to Brighton Pavillion where Caroline Lucas is standing.
Which brings us to the observation that there is no mention on this site of a Green candidate, and one wonders how well they might do. Is there much Green activity at local level?
Cons Hold= 12,000 maj
CON 11000
C hold maj 13000
Con Hold
Maj 11900
Con maj 12,000
CON HOLD
Con share is up 10.6% against 1997 as far as I can tell, allowing for boundary changes.
Stoke Mandeville is included in this seat.
Coombe Hill is attractive, although it’s not immediately obvious how high it is until you are up it.
That’s a big increase in the Conservative vote without corresponding falls in the other parties.
Dodgy notionals perhaps?
since 1997 that is,
so not all that surprising.
Labour is down a similar amount since then,
although they do still have a small base
The proposed boundary changes make Aylesbury noticeably less Conservative. Anthony’s notionals put the Tory and LD vote shares back to ’97 levels (44% and 29% respectively). Labour has 11%, UKIP 8%, and ‘Others’ 6%. I’ve rounded all the figures, so they add up to 98% rather than 100.
The notional majority with these alterations is 7,000 (15%).
The Tory position in Wycombe is strengthened somewhat… I presume it takes some territory from here.
I know the LDs are strong in Aylesbury but I’m surprised by just how much the Conservative position here is weakened.
I don’t think it is weakened really. The figures are misleading (which is not to say they are wrong). Around 15,000 voters are moved out of this seat to Wycombe and Chesham & Amersham in area which are indeed very heavily Tory but around the same number are added from Buckingham in almost equally Tory areas around Princes Risborough and Haddenham. But of course there was no Tory candidate in Buckingham in 2010 so no Tory voters transferred from this seat (note however the high UKIP and Others vote). That said the same applies to the LDs who also had no candidate in Buckingham so I’m surprised their vote share is actually up and I suspect it is a bit on the high side and I should have thought the ‘others’ vote is a bit low given that a fifth of the new Aylesbury seat is from Buckingham and something like 80% of votes cast in that seat were for ‘others’.
I don’t think in reality this will be any less safe a Tory seat.
Thank you for the explanation, Pete.
I did wonder if the Buckingham result might have messed things up a bit in terms of calculating notional results.
Interesting figures. Lucky voters to be moved out of Buckingham, so they can have a Tory MP instead of that ghastly Bercow person.
This is a seat affected by HS2 though.
I do think if we are going to do HS2 it would be better to do it cleanly and quickly Victorian style, so we can get the tunnelling and cuttings done, rather than
have blight hanging over people who will fear the worst for 10 or 15 years.
I said at the outset of my previous post that the notional result maybe misleading without actually being wrong, in other words whatever the correct notional result is it will be misleading because of the absence of the three main parties from that part of the new seat which comes in from Buckingham. Having looked in some more detail at the notional result here I would have to say they look wrong.
The raw votes for the parties on the new boundaries
Con 21093
LD 13857
Lab 5372
UKIP 3962
oth 3155
Since none of the voted for the three main parties can have come from Buckingham, all of them must have come from Aylesbury. It is therefore possible to calculate the projected votes for them in that part of the existing Aylesbury seat which is set to depart. A rough stab at UKIPs vote can be taken by dividing their total by 5.
This would give totals for that part of the current Aylesbury seat which are departing as
Con 6643 66.8%
Lab 1323 13.3%
LD 1261 12.7%
UKIP 723 7.3%
It clearly isn’t credible that Labour would have won more votes than the LDs in this part of the seat, nor that they could have won a higher vote share than they actually did in the constituency as a whole, given that their vote is heavily concentrated in Aylesbury town. They probably wouldnt have got much better than 5% of the vote in this area. the Conservative and UKIP shares are not implausible in themselves, but the LD share is implausibly low.
One possibility is that Anthony has allocated a proportion of John Stevens’s vote from Buckingham to the LD notional total. This would probably amount to about 2,000 votes and would therefore add that number to the above figures to give.
Con 6643 55.6%
LD 3261 27.3%
Lab 1323 11.1%
UKIP 723 6.1%
This would still be far too high a Labour vote and probably too low a Labour share too. If John Stevens vote is included in the LD total it would also explain how they achieve a higher share in the notional result than they got in the existing seat, despite not being on the ballot paper for a fifth of the seat. I can understand the possible reason for John Stevens vote being included with the LD total, but if this was done then it would have been equally justified to include John Bercow’s votes in the Conservative total. If this has been done it gives the LDs a lead of c 2,000 in the incoming territory when in reality they will probably start c 2,000 behind the Tories in that area.
There is still more that doesn’t add up, even if John Stevens’ votes have been treated in this way.
Around a fifth of the total electorate from the Buckingham seat is to be moved into Aylesbury which amounts to around 15,000 voters and, assuming typical turnout, about 10,000 votes. In Anthony’s spreadsheet there are columns for the six main parties and ‘others’. The only parties of the six main parties to contest Buckingham were UKIP and the BNP who achieved just under 20% between them which means that 80% voted for others which would equate to almost 8,000 votes. But in the notional result ‘others’ have only 3,021. Even if it is the case that John Stevens vote has been included with the LDs this would still leave more like 6,000 who voted for others (ie Bercow and the various other Independents and micro-parties).
It would be useful if Anthony could explain his methodology here as several things don’t add up.