Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner
2010 Results:
Conservative: 28866 (57.5%)
Labour: 9806 (19.53%)
Liberal Democrat: 8345 (16.62%)
UKIP: 1351 (2.69%)
Green: 740 (1.47%)
Christian: 198 (0.39%)
Others: 899 (1.79%)
Majority: 19060 (37.97%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Conservative: 25580 (54.9%)
Labour: 10470 (22.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 8494 (18.2%)
Other: 1977 (4.2%)
Majority: 15110 (32.4%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 18939 (47.7%)
Labour: 8323 (21%)
Liberal Democrat: 10029 (25.3%)
Green: 892 (2.2%)
UKIP: 646 (1.6%)
Other: 841 (2.1%)
Majority: 8910 (22.5%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 18115 (48.8%)
Labour: 10578 (28.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 7177 (19.3%)
Green: 724 (1.9%)
BNP: 547 (1.5%)
Majority: 7537 (20.3%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 22526 (50.2%)
Labour: 14732 (32.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 7279 (16.2%)
Other: 296 (0.7%)
Majority: 7794 (17.4%)
Boundary changes: Gains the Pinner wards and Hatch End from Harrow West in order to bring the previously undersized seat up to size, changing its name from Ruislip-Northwood in the process. It loses South Ruislip, Cavendish, and Manor wards to Uxbridge and South Ruislip, while gaining part of West Ruislip ward.
Profile: The most north-westerly seat in London, covering Ickenham, Ruislip, Northwood, Eastcote and now Pinner and Hatch End. The western part of the seat is semi-rural taking in Ruislip Common, the village of Harefield and the farms surrounding it. This is wealthy, middle-class suburbia and is solidly Conservative. The addition of Conservative Pinner renders it even more so, and the new seat will be one of the Conservatives` safest.
Current MP: Nick Hurd(Conservative) born 1962, London, son of former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Educated at Eton and Oxford University. Former banker and chief of staff to Tim Yeo. First elected as MP for Ruislip-Northwood in 2005. Opposition whip since 2007 (more information at They work for you)
Nick Hurd(Conservative) born 1962, London, son of former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Educated at Eton and Oxford University. Former banker and chief of staff to Tim Yeo. First elected as MP for Ruislip-Northwood in 2005. Opposition whip since 2007 (more information at They work for you)
Anita McDonald (Labour) Hillingdon councillor. 
Thomas Papworth (Liberal Democrat) Born Northwich Park. Educated at St Joan of Arc, Rickmansworth and Royal Holloway. Policy advisor. Bromley councillor since 2007.
Graham Lee (Green)Jason Pontey (UKIP)Ruby Akhtar (Christian Party) Ian Edward (National Front)2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 89332
Male: 47.4%
Female: 52.6%
Under 18: 21.4%
Over 60: 23.1%
Born outside UK: 18.1%
White: 83.5%
Black: 1.8%
Asian: 10.9%
Mixed: 1.9%
Other: 1.9%
Christian: 64.2%
Hindu: 6.3%
Jewish: 4.8%
Muslim: 3.2%
Sikh: 0.8%
Full time students: 3.6%
Graduates 16-74: 29.4%
No Qualifications 16-74: 18.5%
Owner-Occupied: 77.2%
Social Housing: 12.2% (Council: 8.6%, Housing Ass.: 3.6%)
Privately Rented: 7.7%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 3.2%
Don’t think Electoral Calculus uses wards at all but take proportions of the whole constituency being moved.
An example of how this fails would be Edinburgh Central (Labour maj 2200+) in 1992.
Edinburgh Central lost two wards to Edinburgh Leith but gained two from the Tory held (and Labour in poor third place) Edinburgh West.
At first sight this would result in the seat possibly notionally changing hands, as it lost 20% of its electorate and gained 20% of a Tory seat where Labour were a poor third.
In fact it lost Tory inclined territory (The New Town and Stockbridge Wards) and gained the Labour core of Edinburgh West (Steinhouse and Moat wards).
What may at first sight appear as a very marginal Labour seat shifting to Tory territory may not actually be the case.
I think thats how many of Electoral Calculus notional results are odd.
In the original notionals it was done as you say so that for example the area moving out of Harrow West was treated as if it voted as the constituency as a whole giving it a small Labour majority, whereas we all know it would have had a substantial Conservative lead. Subsequently results were worked out for individual wards and the figures are provided on the site. These figures are truly bizarre in many cases. One example was in Taunton where the notional result gave a much reduced LD majority. Looking at the ward results which led to this one can see that in some of the departing wards the Conservatives apparently won no votes at all!
Funny that the tinkerings of the boundary commission have created two of the safest Tory seats in London surburbia (see also Beckenham), an area in which the Tories did disproportionately badly in 1997
If I had the vote I might be tempted to go for Hurd myself, on the basis that he espouses the same progressive, one-nation Conservatism of his father, which, it has to be said, is in stark contrast to his predecessor
Anthony,
Just a gentle reminder, the index to this seat still calls it Northwood and Pinner.
I’m surprised to discover that the London Borough of Hillingdon has its own YouTube channel called “HillingdonLondon”. Or maybe I’m a bit out of date and most councils have their own YouTube channel these days.
Labour have selected Anita McDonald here
I have discovered the Middlesex County election results by Division on Wikipedia if anyone is interested…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlesex_County_Council_elections
Please let me know when your local meeting takes place. I live in Ruislip Manor.
Please email me or phone 020 8869 9538.
The Lib Dems have selected Thomas Papworth here
Cons Hold= 18,000 maj
Con Hold
Maj 17 200
Con maj 16,000
Con 28000
Lab 9500
LD 9500
Green 2000
Others 2000
CON HOLD
Anthony
Is there any reason why the Index still refers to this seat as “Northwood and Pinner”.
Has Ruislip ever done you any harm?
There’re quite a lot of threads where the web address doesn’t correspond to the correct name of the seat. For example Broxtowe = “Broxstowe” in the web address. I’ve been caught out a few times by that one. But I think Anthony wants people to use the links he provides so that he doesn’t have to spend ages correcting the web addresses.
Matts prediction was rather good
I think this is now the Conservative’s 11th safest seat.
Mr Hurd is the Minister for Civil Society (charities, volunteering etc) in the Cabinet Office.
So I assume he’ll have a role in promoting / organising the ‘Big Society’.
It was one of the Tories’ safest seats in 1992:
C – 63.3%
Lab – 18.7%
LD – 17.4%
NLP – 0.5%
C maj – 44.6%
It would have been the safest of all I think on these boundaries, with the loss of South Ruislip and the addition of Pinner (which was much more solidly Tory then than now) and Ickenham. I reckon the Conservative share would have been about 68% and the majority not far off 30,000 (over 50%)
The boundaries are different, but it’s true this area isn’t quite as Conservative as it was.
But it would be churlish to complain about a 19,000 majority.
Maybe not so safe because of an increasing ethnic minority population although they would still tend to be a lot more likely to vote Conservative than most ethnic minority voters.
I assume the area is just as desirable in residential terms as it always has been, or maybe that’s not the case?
Thanks for pointing out, John D, that the MP here is a junior minister in the Cabinet Office.
I have suggested on threads about opinion polls that Cameron should “Walk the Talk” by reducing the number (perhaps it should be cost) of ministers by 25%, along with the Government Cuts to be announced in October. I know nothing about the MP for this seat, but as there are six ministers within the Cabinet Office (seven if you include Cameron), who should go? After all, middle management civil servants will be faced with similar decisions affecting individuals on a large scale.
And what will the psephological implications be if the Government maintains its, I think excessive, number of ministers whilst cutting the public setor generally?
When it comes down to the narrow psephology of this seat, the Conservatives are safe bar redistribution, and even then it is difficult to see other parties winning in this general area.
To what extent is the relative decline in the size of the electorate here due, as one suspects also in places like Kensington and Chelsea, due to the purchase of house by overseas nationals (probably mainly white, incidentally)?
This seat is very similar to (the new) Beckenham, politically and demographically.
One reason the Tories’ still-massive dominance in Beckenham is diminishing slightly is the trend towards higher housing densities – new blocks of flats sprouting up in someone’s former garden, etc.
Such new developments are generally smart and expensive so many of their residents will be Tory voters, but not so monolithically as the older residents. Some will be ethnic minorities, public sector workers etc, and will tend to be younger and hence more likely to be floating voters.
I would imagine the trends have been similar here.
Indeed they have and Nick Hurd has been very active in campaigning on the issue
http://www.nickhurd.com/gardengrab/
Frederic… re: the number (and cost) of government ministers.
I think reducing the number of ministers goes hand in hand with reducing the number of MPs – but the ambition of reducing the number of ministerial posts right now is complicated by the Coalition (giving the Lib Dems ‘enough’ positions).
For the time being, I’m happy with the 5% cut in ministerial pay, and subsequent pay freeze for the rest of this Parliament.
But I do agree there are a little too many people attending Cabinet, and too many ministers overall.
John. I agree with you that there are too many people attending Cabinet. I have identified in other posts a number of ministries that look superfluous – I am thinking all the time of posts, not people – and in addition, I understand that the number of non-Cabinet Ministers who have been the right to attend has grown. Traditionally, it used to be the Chief Whips of the Commons and the Lords, The Attorney General and the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet, the last named writing actions into his notebook and subsequently producing some (not very informative) minutes.
Looking at it outside, with some education and work experience (although not professional qualifications) relevant to HR, the pool of Government MPs is not large enough, once one has discarded those who are evidently unsuitable (for instance because they have passed the stage of holding office) to recruit sufficient able ministers. Particularly when you consider the unattractive remuneration and conditions for MPs compared to the jobs people with roughly equivalent experience in in Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner will hold.
And, whilst I take your point, John, about the LibDems, the shallowness of the pool of LibDem talent when it comes to supplying the number of ministers they currently have is in my opinion positively embarrassing. This became evident by the lack of an experienced replacement when David Laws had to resign. The LibDems would in my view do better to have fewer ministers so that the ones they do have are competent. Not least because the Labour Party are rightly targeting the LibDems like fast bowlers aiming their bouncers at the new boys in a cricket team.
The number of MPs is being reduced by much less than 25%. I personally think it should have been reduced much more, accompanied by the creation of more regional or local full-time political roles along the lines of the First Ministers in Scotland and Wales and the Mayor of London. To repeat my argument elsewhere, MPs. spend far too much time on constituency casework and not enough on legislation and executive oversight. Once they had got over the organisational change required, I think many MPs would actually be happier in a more local, but powerful role (with fewer travelling and overnight expenses), as was demonstrated by the number of New Labour MPs (not least “BlairBabes”) who retired after five or ten years. Too many Labour MPs had been interested in social policy – Education, Housing and Health – at local level and found when they got to Westminster that they did not have the extra power they had hoped for. Whatever else, I think the personnel underpinning the ConDem coalition, particularly on the Tory benches, is better in this respect., not least because Cameron improved the selection procedures.
In relation to the post of the MP here, but not as a reflection on him, the effective duplication of the main ministerial hierarchy by a smaller Cabinet Office hierarchy is a sign that the UK ministerial team is not working efficiently.
All this of course relates to Parkinson’s Law, as developed by C. Northcote Parkinson, the distinguished Professor of Economics at Belfast in the 1950s, as I recollect. If one reads the first chapter of his amusing and instructive book “Parkinson’s Law” you will find that the original example concerned the increasing number of Admirals whilst the number of ships decreased – a highly topical matter. In another chapter he did specifically address the tendency of Cabinets to grow in size, eventually becoming nominal bodies (like the Privy Council) whilst the real work moved to an inner group – as is now happening with the Cabinet office.
Given that this seat covers Northwood, the armed services example in Parkinson’s Law is particularly relevant to this constituency. I would also suspect that this seat has more of its share of people, such as senior civil servants, who will be affected by the 25% cuts as managers. And also business people who will be able and interested to judge the organisational effectiveness of the current Government in turning round UK Government as a body.
From the declining Labour vote in this seat, it would appear that constituents in this seat were not impressed by Blair and Brown. But on the other hand, nobody other than the Tories have benefited. Not least, the vote here for other parties such as the Greens and UKIPis noticeably low. One reason, may be that this is the sort of amorphous suburban seat it does not occur to the minor parties, or even to some extent the LibDems, to work over the long tern needed to get a significant foothold.
To answer the question as to whether this is as desirable a place to live as ever, one would have to say even more so with the excision of South Ruislip & the advent of Pinner. There may be a very creeping move downmarket in one or two areas of Ruislip but it doesn’t amount to much.
Mostly that would be occurring anyway in the southern wards which were removed (which as you indicate were already more downmarket to start with. Meanwhile Harefield has become more upmarket as many new private estates have been built in recent years. Certainly though Pinner has become significantly more Asian and Northwood is becoming so too, which doesn;t make it more downmarket, given the types of Asians moving in, but may make it less solidly Tory
At an estimate, the Tory percentage is 0.1% up on 1997 here – so not a great result to be honest.
It’s just a very strong seat, with these new boundaries.
I remember the by-election in Harefield in August 1993 which had a swing of about 13% since the local elections of 1990.
The council went from Conservative to Labour control overnight.
It seemed to be confirmation that the government was finally in serious trouble.
Labour went on to win both seats in Harefield easily in 1994 but lost them narrowly in 1998. by 2010 their vote had utterly collapsed and they came third behind the LDs and not far ahead of the NF.
They were closer to winning PInner South
I wonder whether these NF candidates are official ones or DIY ones.
I remember there was one in the Epping Forest by-election in 1988 – and this was already after the BNP had pretty much displaced them.
Indeed they are official NF and the candidate in Harefield is the current party leader, Ian Edward
Narrowly is the word Pete – I seem to remember Cllr Crawley lost by one vote. I was there when the ward was won in 1993 and there were so many party workers some were turned away as not needed.
Hillingdon I think saw a collapse in the LD (formerly Alliance) vote in 1990 compared to 1986, but the Tories got the slightly bigger slice of it and hence overall control.
It was only by one seat of course, hence this by-election being crucial, and an important opportunity for Labour.
There can’t be very many other councils where overall control can change from one party to the other on one by-election,
but the Tories had to endure two by-elections in Wandsworth in 1987 and 1989 until the 1990 result made them apparently secure enough to withstand however unpopular the national party was.
Tories have selected Cllr Sachin Rajput (Barnet) as their candidate for GLA Brent & Harrow constituency.
Atiq. Though the information is of course of some interest to those of us who follow elections (even though he has virtually no chance of being elected), was it really necessary to cross post this on six different threads?
By being irritating, Atiq is at least being consistent.
Pete – as a London election expert – what are your thoughts on the GLA constituency seats? Do you think the Tories are likely to lose some of the more marginal ones (eg. Barnet & Camden)? Do you think Boris will be re-elected or will his WWC vote go back to Labour and let Ken back?
Pete might not have seen the last post so I’ll bump the thread.
I hadn’t seen it – obviously its a bit late to give predictions now, but I probably did on other threads. Fwiw I was sure Brian Coleman would lose but thought we would hold Ealing & Hillingdon so that was a bit of a disappointment, but not exactly a huge shock
Census results – white British, 2001 / 2011:
Hatch End: 66.4% / 47.8%
Pinner: 69.3% / 51.8%
Pinner South: 69.0% / 51.6%
Eastcote & East Ruislip: 82.9% / 72.2%
Harefield: 88.6% / 81.5%
Ickenham: 84.6% / 72.1%
Northwood: 69.1% / 54.9%
Northwood Hills: 74.0% / 57.1%
West Ruislip: 81.6% / 73.5%
TOTAL: 75.9% / 62.0%
White overall – Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner:
2001: 83.5%
2011: 70.4%
Interesting IMO to take a look at the Asian other category for the whole of Hillingdon:
Hillingdon, Asian Other:
2001: 4,539 / 243,006 = 1.9%
2011: 17,730 / 273,936 = 6.5%
That concludes this survey of London constituencies and wards according to white British ethnicity. I hope readers found it informative. It was for information purposes only, not to promote any partisan agenda. (I thought I’d better add that bit although it probably sounds rather pompous).
Maybe by looking at religion we can shed some light on the mystery of the increase in the Asian Other category:
Hillingdon:
2001:
Total: 243,006
Christian: 155,775 = 64.1%
Muslim: 11,258 = 4.6%
Hindu: 11,197 = 4.6%
Sikh: 11,056 = 4.5%
Jewish: 1,977 = 0.8%
Buddhist: 943 = 0.4%
Other religion: 984 = 0.4%
No religion: 32,486 = 13.4%
Not stated: 17,330 = 7.1%
2011:
Total: 273,936
Christian: 134,813 = 49.2%
Muslim: 29,065 = 10.6%
Hindu: 22,033 = 8.0%
Sikh: 18,230 = 6.7%
Jewish: 1,753 = 0.6%
Buddhist: 2,386 = 0.9%
Other religion: 1,669 = 0.6%
No religion: 46,492 = 17.0%
Not stated: 17,495 = 6.4%
Andy
Thank you for the superb job you have done (again)
For once I concur with H.Hemmelig.
Much appreciated Andy
It’s nice to see the site buzzing with intelligent comment again….such a contrast to the past couple of months.
For that we have to thank Andy’s census data, and Chris Huhne.
Good to see Shaun back here as well.
Seconded – I find some of Shaun’s comments incomprehensible at times, but I still welcome him back
Thanks for your comments. I was hoping to provoke spirited debate with the census data and haven’t been disappointed.