Bristol South
2010 Results:
Conservative: 11086 (22.92%)
Labour: 18600 (38.45%)
Liberal Democrat: 13866 (28.66%)
BNP: 1739 (3.59%)
UKIP: 1264 (2.61%)
Green: 1216 (2.51%)
English Democrat: 400 (0.83%)
TUSC: 206 (0.43%)
Majority: 4734 (9.79%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Labour: 20778 (49.1%)
Liberal Democrat: 9636 (22.8%)
Conservative: 8466 (20%)
Other: 3448 (8.1%)
Majority: 11142 (26.3%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 8466 (20%)
Labour: 20778 (49.1%)
Liberal Democrat: 9636 (22.8%)
Green: 2127 (5%)
UKIP: 1321 (3.1%)
Majority: 11142 (26.3%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 9118 (22.3%)
Labour: 23299 (56.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 6078 (14.8%)
UKIP: 496 (1.2%)
Green: 1233 (3%)
Other: 746 (1.8%)
Majority: 14181 (34.6%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 10562 (21.2%)
Labour: 29890 (59.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 6691 (13.4%)
Referendum: 1486 (3%)
Other: 1230 (2.5%)
Majority: 19328 (38.8%)
Boundary changes:
Profile:
Current MP: Dawn Primarolo(Labour) (more information at They work for you)
Mark Lloyd Davies (Conservative) Educated at Royal Holloway and the University of Amsterdam. Government affairs manager for a pharmaceutical company and former Conservative Research department health advisor. Dawn Primarolo(Labour) (more information at They work for you)Mark Wright (Liberal Democrat) Software engineer. Bristol city councillor.
Charlie Bolton (Green) Bristol councillor since 2006. Contested Bristol South 2005.Colin McNamee (UKIP) Colin Chidsey (BNP) Craig Clarke (English Democrat)Tom Baldwin (TUSC)2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 99495
Male: 48.5%
Female: 51.5%
Under 18: 23.5%
Over 60: 20.5%
Born outside UK: 4.4%
White: 95.7%
Black: 0.8%
Asian: 1.5%
Mixed: 1.5%
Other: 0.4%
Christian: 65.3%
Muslim: 1.1%
Full time students: 2.7%
Graduates 16-74: 14.6%
No Qualifications 16-74: 36%
Owner-Occupied: 64.1%
Social Housing: 25.4% (Council: 21.2%, Housing Ass.: 4.2%)
Privately Rented: 6.8%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 10.1%
in a City I meant to say
Yes the Liberals carried Bristol – the first time I think since 1922. I guess it is the first time they have carried any large city in the UK since the 1920s
Labour usually carried Bristol since 1945. 1983 and 1987 were abberant rather than the norm. The Tories did narrowly carry it in 1959 but not in 1955 or 1970 or 1979, so not Tory in an even year, which in the 1950s was in contrast to say Birmingham or Liverpool
I’m surprised that the Lib Dems topped the poll – especially given that the Filton & Bradley Stoke seat does not count as Bristol
Some result considering they didn’t even hold a single seat in Bristol up until 2005 – and weren’t really competitive in any seat apart from Bristol West
like Bristol East and Kingswood, North West used to be a straight up battle between Labour and Tory.The Lib Dems couldn’t even manage 15% in 97
So how many cities did the Conservatives actually win parliamentary representation in?
None, except those like Salisbury, Winchester, perhaps Ely (maybe LD), Peterborough I think may be a City.
But you’re talking about larger urban areas.
Plymouth probably does. That would count.
There may be a few new fangled ones with City Status.
Well surely Cardiff and Bristol are both cities, and they have a seat in each.
sorry I misread your post completely,
I thought you were saying did the Tories poll the most votes in any cities,
assuming you were following on from the recent discussion about the votes across Bristol as a whole.
Well yes, of course they have.
They don’t have enough seats in the cities but they are not absent.
Yes, the question is how many cities* did the Conservatives win a seat or seats in?
* outside of London obviously
It depends how you are defining ‘city’. If you were referring to the likes of Winchester, Lichfield, Ely etc then plenty. I suspect you aren’t though and you actually mean big cities which again requires some definition. Would you include a two seater city like Portsmouth for example?
A reasonable definition of a big city might be one which has three constituencies or more. This would then include (apart from London): Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Hull, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Stoke, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Brighton & Hove, Bristol and Cardiff. If you exclude those constituencies which are in the Leeds, Bradford and Birmingham metropolitan boroughs which do not have the city’s prefix (which is reasonable IMO) then it would be only the last three named plus Wolverhampton which have any Conservative MPs. At a push you could include Plymouth which has two whole seats plus the greater part of a third.
I think one can count Plymouth, which has a population of about 1/4 of a million doesn’t it?
I think Plymouth should be included in such a list but its unfortunate it doesn’t have three whole seats anymore. I would certainly be reluctant to count it as a city with Tory representation if that only consisted of Devon SW as it did from 1997 to 2010, but now they have a seat wholly contained in the city it can properly count.
You could include Bolton and Southampton too under the three name rule.
It’s notable that the Conservative city gains still tended to have below average swings – Bristol NW, Cardiff N, Wolverhampton SW, Brighton K and Hove.
And there weren’t many above average swings to the Conservatives in cities as a whole – Nottingham S, Nottingham N and Leeds C were some of them.
I wonder if Pete could work out the average swing in the cities (with and without London) and the average swing in the rest of the country?
I thought about Bolton, but the majority of both Bolton SE and Bolton W are areas which were not in the old Bolton CB (ie Bolton ‘proper’) but consist of other areas like Horwich, Westhoughton, Farnworth etc. Southampton differs from Plymouth in that the 2 wards of that city which are with Romsey form a relatively small minority of that constituency, where as the Plymouth wards provide a majority of the electorate of Devon SW.
Southampton, if included, would certainly be the exception which proved your rule about the below average swings in cities.
The reason for asking the question above (one that would be easy enough to answer if I checked an election map) , was precisely to find out what others meant by the term “city” for the purpose of elections.
I think places like Chichester, Lichfield, Ely and Winchester, with relatively small populations don’t count for the purposes of this argument, not to belittle their city status of course.
I thought of the three seat rule myself before Pete suggested it and I think it’s a reasonably good rule of thumb, but nothing more. I suppose personally I would count Southampton and Plymouth as cities.
And I also would agree with Pete that places like Elmet and Rothwell, Shipley or Sutton Coldfield, whilst within a city’s metropolitan borough don’t count as city seats.
But as I said I was more interested to hear what others think…
Preston North & Wyre
Preston has city status, but is not even a unitary,
and I think that seat only includes a small part of Preston which is outside the main area, Fullwood.
doesn’t come anywhere near to your definition.
Some people have referred to Southend and the surrounding area of Rochford etc as a small metropolis where the Tories have resisted Labour,
can’t think of any more at the moment
Bournemouth/Poole (& Christchurch) is a significant conurbation – five seats in all and the Conservatives won them all in 1997
I’m not sure I’ve actually given you a definition but in the meantime, for no reason other than my own personal amusement, I’m compiling a list of places with city status where the conservatives managed to win a seat (I’m going to omit those with a little bit of city and large rural area attached eg Romsey and Southampton North).
England:
Brighton & Hove (this fits the 3 seater rule!)
Bristol
Canterbury
Carlisle
Chester
Chichester
Ely
Gloucester
Hereford
Lancaster
Lichfield
Lincoln
City of London
Norwich
Oxford
Peterborough
Plymouth
Portsmouth
Ripon
Salisbury
St Albans
Truro
Westminster
Winchester
Wolverhampton
Worcester
York
They lost Wells
Wales:
Cardiff
St David’s
Straight from Wikipedia’s “List of Cities in the United Kingdom”.
That makes the Conservatives’ performance in cities look reasonable, when it clearly wasn’t.
I would set the definition of at least two whole seats,
but two and a bit is acceptable.
Would Reading or Northampton count as cities under your two seat model?
Reading clearly wouldn’t because it has only two seats both of which are made up by a majority of part of the town but also areas outside the. Northampton could plausibly since it has two whole seats plus three wards are in Northants South. On the same basis that Southampton would qualify, Northampton would.
I think not really.
I don’t think of those as cities or metro areas, but large towns, like Swindon, Milton Keynes, Basingstoke.
There are only two big Cities in the south – London and Bristol, and Plymouth just counts.
The south seems to have quite a lot of these larger towns, more than the north – as a rough guide.
You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,
and most seats have an urban element somewhere.
I do think of York as a proper City but that’s subjective.
Replying to Robberbottom (but agree with Pete)
I must say, trying to decide what a city actually is seems really good fun.
Trying to pretend places like Reading are cities doesn’t convince in my mind.
I recently went from London to Bristol and there’s no doubt in my mind that I was going from one major city to the next major city, and the only one in the south,
apart from possibly one.
I suppose it is slightly subjective.
I agree you wouldn’t think of Reading as a big city by any definition. Portsmouth and Southampton have more of a claim
Goodness, so many comments just from today. Sounds like an interesting discussion though.
“Trying to pretend places like Reading are cities doesn’t convince in my mind.”
The most annoying one IMO is Croydon.
How can you call a place a city if its only a collections of suburbs of a bigger city?
I think being a ‘regional capital’ also allows a location to call itself a city when it might not necessarily have the population eg places like Plymouth, Norwich and Aberdeen.
My list of cities:
London
Southampton
Bristol
Plymouth
Norwich
Birmingham
Coventry
Leicester
Nottingham
Sheffield
Hull
Leeds
Bradford
Manchester
Liverpool
Newcastle
Cardiff
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Aberdeen
Belfast
Richard. To partly answer your earlier question, the swings in those cities and the comparison with their respective regions was as follows:
London 2.46 5.14 (England)
Southampton 8.57 6.51
Bristol 6.41 5.83
Plymouth 6.50 5.83
Norwich 8.89 7.03
Birmingham 3.44 6.30
Coventry 4.27 6.30
Leicester 3.68 6.85
Nottingham 5.79 6.85
Sheffield 4.66 6.39
Hull 6.11 6.39
Leeds 6.48 6.39
Bradford 4.44 6.39
Manchester 3.80 4.31
Liverpool 0.12 4.31
Newcastle 5.10 6.76
Cardiff 5.44 5.59
Edinburgh -2.12 -0.78
Glasgow -2.46 -0.78
Aberdeen 1.19 -0.78
In the three southern regions outside London the cities swung more than the region is a whole, but this really just reflects how much higher Labour’s share of the vote was to start with in these cities compared to the rest of the region.
In every other city the swing to the Conservatives was lower than in the surrounding region (or in the Scottish case the swing to Labour was higher than in Scotland as a whole) with the exception of Leeds and Aberdeen.
There were some big swings in city seats like Birminham Erdington and Leeds Central but notably not in Birmingham Edgbaston or Leeds North East
Nottingham South was quite a good result in my view – although rather in the context of a deteriorating position at every election after 1979. But nevertheless to get that swing in a seat like that is a partial success.
I’m a bit worried that Bristol NW wasn’t a very convincing win.
I’d have felt more comfortable with Labour still in second place, but the LDs may implode anyway, particularly if we can stop them getting AV.
It would have been a bitter pill to swallow for the Tories if they’d got even closer to winning Nottingham South but had failed to win Broxtowe by 100 votes or thereabouts.
I wonder whether they could build on their improvement in Nottingham South, or whether a lot of the LD vote is likely to go to Labour.
It could also get cut up by the seat review, something which is going to preclude a lot of our forecasts, aswell as it being 5 years.
They have fixed-term parliaments in Australia but their next election is scheduled to be before our next election which seems a bit strange. I don’t personally think 3 or 5 years is the right amount of time for a fixed-term parliament. I don’t know why we couldn’t follow Scotland and Wales with 4 year terms.
This seat would have gone Lib Dem under AV:
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/parlij/gsq042.pdf
BBC Bristol reporting Dawn Primarolo to retire at next election. So there will be at least one new Deputy Speaker.
What will be the boundary changes in Bristol S, if any? Will it be more safe or more marginal?
There are no boundary changes proposed for Bristol South