Daventry
2010 Results:
Conservative: 29252 (56.5%)
Labour: 8168 (15.78%)
Liberal Democrat: 10064 (19.44%)
UKIP: 2333 (4.51%)
Green: 770 (1.49%)
English Democrat: 1187 (2.29%)
Majority: 19188 (37.06%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Conservative: 27997 (52.8%)
Labour: 15924 (30%)
Liberal Democrat: 7220 (13.6%)
Other: 1885 (3.6%)
Majority: 12073 (22.8%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 31206 (51.6%)
Labour: 16520 (27.3%)
Liberal Democrat: 9964 (16.5%)
UKIP: 1927 (3.2%)
Other: 822 (1.4%)
Majority: 14686 (24.3%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 27911 (49.2%)
Labour: 18262 (32.2%)
Liberal Democrat: 9130 (16.1%)
UKIP: 1381 (2.4%)
Majority: 9649 (17%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 28615 (46.3%)
Labour: 21237 (34.4%)
Liberal Democrat: 9233 (15%)
Referendum: 2018 (3.3%)
Other: 647 (1%)
Majority: 7378 (11.9%)
Boundary changes:
Profile:
Current MP: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative) born 1967, Epsom. Educated at Tiffin Grammar School and Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Prior to his election as an MEP worked in his family fruit and vegetable wholesale business. Contested Leicester South 1997, Leicester South by-election 2004. MEP for the East Midlands region since 1999. Conservative chief whip in the European Parliament from 2001-4.
Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative) born 1967, Epsom. Educated at Tiffin Grammar School and Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Prior to his election as an MEP worked in his family fruit and vegetable wholesale business. Contested Leicester South 1997, Leicester South by-election 2004. MEP for the East Midlands region since 1999. Conservative chief whip in the European Parliament from 2001-4.Paul Corazzo (Labour) Educated at Huddersfield University. Business developer. Kettering councillor. Christopher McGlynn (Liberal Democrat) Steve Whiffen (Green) Jim Broomfield (UKIP) Born 1957, Clun. Self employed businessman.Alan Bennett Spencer (English Democrat)2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 88891
Male: 49.9%
Female: 50.1%
Under 18: 23.6%
Over 60: 18.9%
Born outside UK: 4.1%
White: 98.1%
Black: 0.4%
Asian: 0.6%
Mixed: 0.7%
Other: 0.3%
Christian: 76.8%
Full time students: 2.1%
Graduates 16-74: 20.8%
No Qualifications 16-74: 24.4%
Owner-Occupied: 77.4%
Social Housing: 14% (Council: 10.5%, Housing Ass.: 3.5%)
Privately Rented: 5.4%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 4.4%
Sorry Pete. I just checked. Richard Harrington, MP for Watford has a constituency office in Watford (30 The Avenue).
And as for James Clappison, MP for Hertsmere, I wouldn’t imagine any MP would want to model themselves on him. Despite owning 24 houses he still claimed over 100k in second home allowances between 2001 and 2009. I wouldn’t be surprised if his constituency office is in London Colney (which is where he lives) as the only reason he seems to be an MP is to milk the system. He doesn’t live or have his constituency office in his constituency, I’d say he couldn’t give a damn about his constituents.
HH – read my previous post. We’re not talking a place that was in this constituency, we’re talking 14 miles away from the main town that has always been in the constituency.
“But you’d think an MP would want his/her constituency office …in the major town in their constituency”
Northampton is the major town for most parts of the constituency. Daventry town is only a small part of the seat which bears the name and is not geographically central. The seat extends to the east of Northampton at Earl’s Barton which is 24 miles from Daventry so you might ask how people there would feel about that. In reality its neither here nor there since constituency offices are dealing with correspondence via post, telephone or email rather than by people travelling there to see someone. But in a fairly far flung largely rural seat like this it makes plenty of sense to be based in the major urban centre of the whole area. Its likely also that as in the case with St Albans/ Hertsmere/ Watford the party is saving money by pooling office space
James Clappison moved to London Colney when he was first elected in 1992. At that time London COlney was part of Hertsmere constituency. Obviously it was subsequently (1997) removed but it is only just outside and is actually a quite good location for being close to all parts of the constituency in a way whicih living in Bushey or Potters Bar would not be
Daventry has a popoulation of over 22k, Earls Barton is 5k (2001 census). I’d say it would make more sense to inconvience as small a group of people as possible, hence it should be in Daventry. It is probably because Northampton has a train station whereas Daventry does not making it easier for Mr Heaton-Harris to travel to and from London.
I don’t think that is relevant because the constituency office is not necessarily where the MP lives.
May I say BigD that I think you have only quite recently started posting on this site, but you have very rapidly achieved the title of most tedious poster. As that title was previously held by Tim Jones, that is quite an achievement
Although I am what you might even call a virulent, tribal Labour supporter, I don’t think that the perceived shortcomings of James Clappison are particularly relevant. I would like to try & keep this site as free as possible of personal attacks on politicians, be they Tory right-wingers like Peter Bone, Tory centrists like Clappison, Labour Blairites like Liam Byrne or left-wingers such as Dennis Skinner. Hang it, let’s even include the Lib Dems in that. If perceived faults are relevant to the voting in a consituency, then fine. If not let’s not bother.
Well Pete that is a matter of opinion. I pointed out that you were wrong about Watford. The Tory MP, quite rightly, does have a constituency office in Watford. Call me old fashioned but I think that is important. Secondly you were the one who suggested it might be in Northampton to make it easier for people from Earls Barton to get to his constituency office, which seems to contradict your point that people don’t travel to their MP’s constituency office. Again I was merely pointing out that as Daventy is four times bigger than Earls Barton and I’d of thought that you’d want to inconvience as few of your constituents as possible you’d put your office in Daventry. Foruthly, I did not claim that Heaton-Harris lives where his constituency office is I said (my theory just as your comments on this issue are theory because we do not know the reason behind it) it was probably becuase he finds it easier to travel to and from London from Northampton as Daventry does not have a train station. From my experience MPs do tend to work in their constituency office, particulary on Fridays. This would make travelling from Westminister on Friday morning to do a day in the constituency office easier. I wasn’t criticising him for it. In fact it makes sense to me.
Barnaby – Since what MPs do/say has an impact on the vote they get in an election I feel it is legitimate to post that on this site. Pete was the one who brought Clappison into this discussion to claim it was perfectly ok to have your constituency office outside your constituency. I was merely pointing out that he is not someone I would model myself on if I was an MP. A lot of MPs did terrible things on all sides of the polticial spectrum when it comes to expenses.
I don’t know who elected/appointed either of you to sit in judgement of other posters on this site. I suspect no-one did so I suggest you keep your nasty comments to yourself. At the least do not direct them to me! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR???
BigD
You don’t live in Slough do you, previously posting under the name Mal??
I suspect the last paragraph of your last post is going to get you either banned or on heavy moderation.
I’m pretty sure the average voter doesn`t much care whether or not their MP has an office in the constituency.
So you’re above criticism are you BigD? What consequences will I suffer if I deign to criticize you (which I haven’t done previously)? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for the original purpose of this site to be adhered to by supporters not just of the Tories but of all parties including my own. There are plenty of sites where the behaviour of James Clappison or other MPs can be discussed until the cows come home with impunity, but I honestly don’t think it’s seriously relevant in this instance. Something which would have a serious political impact on that particular constituency or indeed any other would be a different matter.
Barnaby
I didn’t say I was above criticism. I take exception to being called “the most tedious poster” on this site. If people want to engage in a debate fine. But slinging round nasty comments is not acceptable in my view. Neither is throwing round generalities such as “all your posts are partisan”. I admit I can get carried away sometimes but comments like that are not justified. Maybe I should of ignored them, but unfortunatley I reacted to it. If it happens again I will just ignore it!
Lib dems will gain Watford, Northampton North, and Southwark and Bermondsey with nailed on stupendous momentum.
Daventry could be down to the wire 500.
It won’t be necessary to gain Southwark & Bermondsey you still old sausage, you already have it
Also, if you nail momentum on, it kinda stops it. Momentum has to be allowed to run free to be momentum. Otherwise it stops.
Hope this is of assistance.
silly* old sausage. Who’s a silly sausage now.
I predict a 15k Tory majority in this seat next time with Labour second and Lib Dems a poor third.
You have to remember that parts of this seat have been quite Labour in the past. Earls Barton has a Labour County and Borough Councillor (though Geroge Blackwell probably has a large personal vote) and it did have 3 Labour Borough Councils for a couple of elections up to the 2003 Borough Council elections. The Lib Dems have no Councillors on Daventry District, Lab have only one, and the Lib Dems have no district Councillors in this constituency at all. Given their position in the polls and the fact that I don’t think they have any chance of recovering, I’d say they will lose second place here. 2009 County Council elections are something of an anomoly in my view given the popularity of Labour at the time.
@ Gloy Plopwell – I admire you’re optimism you silly old sausage!
This seat will probably be significantly redrawn to include Lutterworth.
I would say Daventry and Lutterworth something like:
Con 30100 58.3 (+0.7)
Lab 10900 21.1 (+5.8)
LD 6700 13 (-6.8)
UKIP 2600 5 (+0.8)
Others 1300 2.5
@ A Cairns
Interesting. I’m probably out by a couple of thousand Tory majority out if you include Lutterworth. I’d say:
Con 29,500 55.6% (-0.9%)
Lab 12,600 23.73% (+8%)
LD 6,000 11.3% (-8%)
UKIP 3,000 5.65% (+1%)
Others 2,000 3.77% (+0%)
Personally I can’t see the Conservatives losing many or gaining many votes at the next election but I do predict a large swing from LD to Labour. That is of course how things stand at the moment. A long way to go until 2015 though!
I agree with Big D. The Tories will not lose votes, but will not gain votes. Their vote share will stay about the same while the LD share will go down and Lab share will increase.
As for where constituency offices are, I don’t think it really matters as long as people have an address to post letters to or a number to call.
‘but you have very rapidly achieved the title of most tedious poster. As that title was previously held by Tim Jones, that is quite an achievement’
Tedious I maybe, but it’s preferable to being persistently unpleasant, arrogantly scornful and downright nasty to anyone who dare diagree with anything said by Lord Peter
It’s a shame as I personally find Whitehead’s posts amongst the most interesting and informative on the whole site but since any contribution I’m likely to make will result in the usual mouthful of abuse from the author, it’s all rather pointless
Come on Tim don’t be so humourless. I am actually on record on here as saying that this site would be more boring without your contributions which I actually find quite amusing. You can’t deny however that you engage in absurd levels of partisan baiting at times – indeed you’ve said you were put on automatic moderation at times because of it. Your constant railing against the political right in this country, which you have demonstrated on many occasions that you simply do not comprehend, does become tedious at times. But on the whole I don’t think you engage in the kind of relentless attempts at petty point scoring as the gentleman on this thread did and has done on other threads
Just to let you all know I shall now not be posting on this site again. My intention was never to upset people and as I can get rather carried away at times it is probably best I go back to what I’d done for many years before I started posting which is to use this site to check the latest polls and read comments only.
Goodnight and goodbye!
BIGD – I’m sorry to read that. A wide variety of comments from different people is usually a good thing IMO.
Tim I have a go at you sometimes but you have good psephological knowledge & understand many areas very well. I would be sad if you stopped contributing whatever my differences with you. We also like to have a dig at you for describing areas as dumps but I’m sure we’re all guilty of that from time to time.
Big D and Tim Jones should continue posting.
Pete is the most knowledgable, no question. I’m particularly grateful for the way he reconstructs figures, and he is objective, despite his strong views.
One of the best things about this site is that people post comments showing a variety of opinions and I would not want anyone to stop commenting.
I’m grateful to Joe and Tim. It certainly isn’t ever my intention (and isn’t my place anyway) to make anyone feel unwelcome on this site. It is always a problem with internet or text communication that the tone is missing and that therefore comments which are essentially tongue in cheek may get taken more seriously than was intended. I think this is the case with Tim who I have ‘known’ on this site for many years now and it is quite fun to pull his leg at times but it isn’t generally intended to be malicious or nasty.
I’m loathe to return to the subject of the latest controversy, but the reason I became irritated with BigD was that he had phrased his original question in a way which might have suggested he was interested in an answer ie ‘I’ve just found out that Chris Heaton-Harris’s constituency office and the Daventry Conservative Association Office is…in Northampton. Any suggestions for why this is the case?’
I don’t hold any brief for the Tory MP here (who I know nothing about) nor for that matter for James Clappison but I did seek to offer a reasonable explanation as to why this might be the case. It was then apparent that BigD was not actually interested in such a reasonable explanation and wanted to pick an argument about the whole thing which I could not be bothered to engage in because the whole issue struck me as both trivial and boring. I think it would have been obvious to anyone without such an agenda that my reference to Earls Barton was by means of an example of part of the seat that is much closer to Northampton than to Daventry and was not the be all and end all of the point. Therefore discussing the relative populations of Daventry and Earls Barton was indeed tedious and irrelevant and smacked of petty point scoring. The point which I reiterate was that a large part of the constituency (of which Earls Barton is but one small part) is physically closer to and more accesible to Northampton than it is to the town of Daventry. Anyone who is genuinely interested in the question should have a look on election-maps.co.uk, get the constituency outline and will see that the seat covers a very large area in the North, Centre and West of Northants with Daventry itself tucked away in a corner on the western side. All the major roads running through the constituency lead to Northampton and few lead to Daventry. Just about all parts of the seat which are east of the M1 (which is a clear majority of the electorate) would be closer to (would probably work in, shop in etc) Northampton than to Daventry. This point would have been understood by anyone genuinely interested in an answer to the question which was originally posed. It was clear that there was no genuine interest in such an answer , that rather there was an agenda and an attempt to point score and I’m not interested in that.
Diversity of posters is a good thing in general, but on a site like this there is a limit to how far you might want to extend it. If you want a free-for-all where comments range from detailed technical discussions to baiting and insults, there is always Mike Smithson’s site.
But if the main purpose of this site is to discuss psephological matters that kind of approach will not work very well – the useful information will become drowned in the trolling and hackery and over time the informative posters will drift off as well.
No hard feelings Pete – I just feel your attacks on people who take a differing line to yourself can be a little scathing at the best of times, especially to newcomers
Daventry is a bit of a misnomer anyway as, and I’m sure Pete will let me know if I’m incorrect here, from what I can tell about half of the old Daventry seat is actually now in Northamptonshire South, with the new Daventry seat made up of the town itself, the northern part of the old seat, and the western part of the pre-2010 Kettering seat, making Northampton an accessible enough base for Heaten Harrises constituents
I’d also urge Big D to keep posting. There used to be a very knowledgeable poster from the Left called Mersey Mike but I don’t know what’s happened to him as he doesn’t seem to post any more, leaving Barnaby as the only consistent poster from the Left
Mersey Mike has posted recently on some of the Sefton borough threads, but he is now posting under his own name
I like the wide range of posters and opinions here, but I have to agree with Runnymede on this. I will not miss BigD who, as Pete says, was only interested in trolling and winding people up. That’s not the purpose of this site and it damages it.
Tim, there are also other posters from the left, who are generally well informed and nice. AKMD and A Cairns being 2 examples I can think of. Merseymike is OK if we keep away from subjects concerning extreme political correctness.
One side-effect of the changing political weather has been the disappearance of who Pete called the “winning here Lib Dems” from the site – chiefly Mark Senior, GetReal and Tim13. I guess, being from the left of the party, they are very disillusioned today, in the knowledge that their brand of chirpy liberal dogshit-cleaning pavement politics is gone for a generation. I have to say they are the posters I always found most tiresome on here.
Interestingly the more independent minded Lib Dems on here like Tim Jones, Doktorb and Galloglass seem to have stuck around.
I have to say I find the extreme/republican lefties on the opinion poll threads annoying as they treat it as their own thread to back slap each other. Particularly as they never posted from 2008 to 2010.
Can’t face it when things are not going well.
Interesting how those threads used to be more dominated by Lib Dems “winning here”
In Richmond, it’s now Lib Dems “losing here”.
Not just in Richmond.
But I have a lot more respect for those Lib Dems who have continued posting.
Both Conservative and Labour posters have a lot of experience of their party being very unpopular in the past decade but it’s a new experience for Lib Dems.
I keep away from the poll threads. On the subject of republicans…did anyone see Peter Tatchell interviewed the other day? He said he was against the monarchy because it ensured that Britain could never have an ethnic minority head of state. It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial of issues rank above all others for such people. Thankfully the British public, both white and non-white, are more sensible.
I haven’t generally found Tim13 (Tim Dumper) all that irritating, certainly not in the GetReal class & I don’t think as annoying as Mark Senior was certainly capable of being.
Joe – the facts are rarely allowed to get in the way of the Winning Here! slogan. We were treated to this tiresome formula again in the North Richmond by-election, despite the fact that the LDs don’t hold the ward, the constituency or the council – in other words they’re losing here at present. Perhaps the slogan “Lib Dems – not losing here quite as heavily as Labour at present!” wouldn’t quite have had the same snappiness. They will no doubt use it in the forthcoming Grove by-election in Kingston, where it will at least have truth more on its side.
Mark Senior always struck me as a very bitter man, but he clearly had a lot of knowledge so wasn’t always easy to refute,
except he predicted 500 Lib Dem gains in the 2011 council elections
and I don’t think has posted since.
Heaton-Harris’ antics of late leave a lot to be desired…
No I disagree – keep ‘em coming Chris!
Peter Tatchell is a fool. Its a bit of a pity he has become a spokesperson for the gay rights issue when it could do with someone who didn’t have ridiculous, extremist views as it makes this issue appear as such.