Wirral West
2010 Results:
Conservative: 16726 (42.48%)
Labour: 14290 (36.29%)
Liberal Democrat: 6630 (16.84%)
UKIP: 899 (2.28%)
Independent: 506 (1.29%)
Others: 321 (0.82%)
Majority: 2436 (6.19%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Conservative: 15792 (41.9%)
Labour: 15509 (41.2%)
Liberal Democrat: 5844 (15.5%)
Other: 534 (1.4%)
Majority: 283 (0.8%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 16446 (39.9%)
Labour: 17543 (42.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 6652 (16.1%)
UKIP: 429 (1%)
Other: 163 (0.4%)
Majority: 1097 (2.7%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 15070 (37.2%)
Labour: 19105 (47.2%)
Liberal Democrat: 6300 (15.6%)
Majority: 4035 (10%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 18297 (39%)
Labour: 21035 (44.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 5945 (12.7%)
Referendum: 1613 (3.4%)
Majority: 2738 (5.8%)
Boundary changes: Gains part of Pensby and Thingwall from Wirral South, and literally a handful of voters in Meols (actually Parkfields) from Wallasey. Loses part of Prenton to Birkenhead and part of Moreton West and Saughall Massie ward to Wallasey.
Profile: Western corner of the Wirral penisula, Wirral West is an affluent, prosperous middle class seat that had previously been regarded as safe Conservative territory (its predecessor Wirral had been held by Selwyn Lloyd, who served as foreign secretary and Chancellor before becoming Speaker). Like many other hitherto safe Tory seats, it fell to Labour in 1997 and has been held by Stephen Hesford since, though the minor boundary changes make it notionally a Conservative seat at the next election. The seat includes the towns of West Kirby and Hoylake, as well as Meols, Greasby, Irby, Pensby. The main area of Labour strength is the Woodchurch estate.
Current MP: Esther McVey (Conservative) born 1967, Liverpool. Television and radio presenter. Contested Wirral West in 2005.
Esther McVey (Conservative) born 1967, Liverpool. Television and radio presenter. Contested Wirral West in 2005.
Phil Davies (Labour) Educated at the University of Strathclyde. Wirral councillor.
Peter Reisdorf (Liberal Democrat) born 1962, Wirral. Mature student. Wirral councillor since 2000. Contested Wallasey 1997, 2001.
Phil Griffiths (UKIP) Contested Wallasey 2005.
David Kirwan (Independent) Educated at Wallasey Grammar School and Liverpool University. Solicitor. Wirral councillor.
David James (Common Sense)2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 70039
Male: 46.8%
Female: 53.2%
Under 18: 22.3%
Over 60: 27%
Born outside UK: 3.3%
White: 98.6%
Asian: 0.4%
Mixed: 0.5%
Other: 0.4%
Christian: 82.3%
Full time students: 2.8%
Graduates 16-74: 23.5%
No Qualifications 16-74: 24.1%
Owner-Occupied: 81.9%
Social Housing: 11.3% (Council: 9.7%, Housing Ass.: 1.6%)
Privately Rented: 4.5%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 8.2%
I can’t think of any reason why Caroline Lucas would have supported the Tories in the vote – quite apart from anything else, her own seat stood to be dismembered.
WRT the boundary changes – now cancelled, could Labour/LibDems etc team up (again) and repeal the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 completely and go back to the previous rules of establishing boundaries. Personally I think that MP’s voting on whether or not to accept the boundaries does undermine the independence of the boundary commissions proposals and they should go through automatically every 10 years as in the US.
Is there not some code of conduct on this matter that they have to abide by?
If hypothetically the boundaries were to get more and more unfair and because of this labour were to be in power indefinitley who would be there to stop them?
I personally reckon that the irony is that for all his expected fanatical Lib Dem lappping up of the proposed boundaries, that poor Doktorb’s discussion threads on the boundaries that never were must now be getting desperately undiscussed.
I think Joseph makes a very good point ( welcome back Joseph, you haven’t commented in a while). There is too much scope for direct political interference into the boundary review, even though the commissioners themselves are not biased. What is important is community or physical links, and boundaries which make some sort of sense. The terms of reference of the abandoned review made that well nigh impossible, but perhaps with a bit of luck the next one will have more sensible ones. I don’t object to changes which make the election results fairer even if they lose my party seats, per se; but they have to make some sort of sense, and as we know that review came up with some pretty appalling concoctions.
I think these boundary changes should be decided independently
although I think in the past they had to be voted through after the work was done (as it was delayed before the 1970 election).
Of course, this time the reduction in seats was an entirely new factor, and when you do that, you don’t necessarily expect to see all the parties go down in ratio from what would have happened if you equalised only,
because larger seats produce different results and I think tend to average things out more boosting whoever is ahead.
I would have thought that it therefore followed that the reduction in seats would have created more marginal seats which although favouring the Tories in 2010, could have been lost on a tiny swing.
Thanks for the Welcome Barnaby.
Another way which would make future boundary reviews more acceptable is for the BCE to be split into regional Commissions. This would mean that people sitting in Yorkshire (for example) can really concentrate on the boundaries just affecting Yorkshire rather than everything being drafted in London. Hopefully this would improve the boundaries in the future with more local expertise.
I think Labour will be looking towards population as much more of a guideline given that MPs caseload is often directed by the makeup of the population. Also natural constituencies. My own area of Crosby was split in two last time
Interesting by-election today in Pensby & Thingwall and an opportunity for Labour to increase further its majority on Wirral council – it’s a Tory seat. The pressure is on Labour to repeat its recent success in the area.
Pensby and Thingwall is an interesting ward. Pete will know more than me but I suspect the area covered by it was quite solidly Tory as late as 1992 but as since moved towards Labour at general elections (camouflaged until recently by a good LD showing at a council level). I recall Peter saying that the Tories would probably have carried Pensby and Thingwall in the 2010 general election- but only just- so it is yet another microcosm of the Tories’ problems in middle-class Wirral.
PS- I think the by-election is next week, Barnaby.
Its funny isn’t it.
We are constantly told by the neysayers that a right-wing Conservative Party could never win.
And yet the last time most of these areas were ‘solidly’ Conservative was when the party WAS unashamedly right of centre.
I don’t mind admitting-as someone who is fully signed up to the argument that the Conservatives have to adopt Cameronite metropolitan issues to win-I find it an anomaly and quite difficult to reconcile
Can’t these voters see that “David Cameron’s Conservative Party” is far superior to the mere “Conservative” alternative it replaced?
What’s wrong with these people?
“Pensby and Thingwall is an interesting ward. Pete will know more than me but I suspect the area covered by it was quite solidly Tory as late as 1992 but as since moved towards Labour at general elections ”
No doubt true, but its fairly difficult to gauge how it voted priot to the ward boundary changes. A small area came from Heswall but essentially Pensby was part of the very safe Tory Thurstaston ward and Thingwall was part of Prenton. Prenton wasn’t a very good Tory ward but this would have been one of the better Tory areas therein as it also included part of Woodchurch then as well as the area east of the M53 which is in the current Prenton ward
Shaun
The reality is that there are no easy answers.
It’s probably most accurate to say that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Tories to win full stop, whether they pursue a right wing agenda or a liberal Cameroon one.
The country has changed so much in the past 10-20 years – demographically, and in terms of employment and attitudes – that comparisons with the 1980s or even 1992 have little relevance.
The key is how the Tories can either tap into ethnic minority votes or make big inroads into the WWC outside the south. Neither a right-wing approach nor a cameroon approach has shown it can do either.
‘And yet the last time most of these areas were ‘solidly’ Conservative was when the party WAS unashamedly right of centre.’
The only time the Tory Party has been unashamedly right-of-centre was during their nadir years of 1997 to 2005 – and they bombed here as they did in many other previously safely Conservative areas
There’s no doubting that Thatcher herself – and some of her key ministers – Lawson, Howe in particular – were unashamedly right of centre, but her cabinets contained far more One Nation Tories than today’s government that you derscribe as a Liberal Democrat one
The Thatcher governments were never as right wing or as radical as their opponents and supporters in equal measue claim
Thatcher certainly talked the talked, but on most measures she was unable to transform the UK into the US-style free market ecomomy that she sought – and the main reason she didn’t was because her Parliamentary colleagues wouldn’t let her
“Thatcher certainly talked the talked, but on most measures she was unable to transform the UK into the US-style free market ecomomy that she sought – and the main reason she didn’t was because her Parliamentary colleagues wouldn’t let her”
Maggie also had much more common sense and pragmatism than the Tory prime ministers that followed her.
She had a good idea where free market ideology would not work….for example telling both Nick Ridley and Cecil Parkinson when they were Transport Secretary that she was opposed to privatising British Rail – a sensible position her successor John Major should have paid attention to.
Tim Jones – Thatcher led from the front and spoke with conviction, as did her Party Chairman, Tebbit. Whether you were the 45% with her throughout the ’80s or the half against, people knew her stance. Compare that with Cameron and Warsi is surely Shaun’s point. HH – London has, but seats like this haven’t changed ethnically at all.
Hemmelig, surely you can’t argue the railways would be in a better state now had they not been privatised. I could understand people saying that back in the years either side of the Hatfield crash, but not now. As an almost daily user of the train then and now I think its pretty clear the service has improved since then (albeit at the cost of higher fares). I am sceptical as to whether that would have happened had we stuck with BR.
Certainly Thatcher was never keen on the idea of rail privatisation, although she was eventually persuaded as to its merits. Had she not been deposed in 1990, and had the party been re elected, I’ve no doubt something like the 1993 Railway Act would have been passed under her watch.
I don’t think she was sceptical because she thought privatisation couldn’t work in that context, rather I think she viewed railways as largely irrelevant to the country’s future transport needs; that the real was merely one of managing their decline. It was a common enough mindset in the decades following WW2.
‘Thatcher led from the front and spoke with conviction, as did her Party Chairman, Tebbit. Whether you were the 45% with her throughout the ’80s or the half against, people knew her stance. Compare that with Cameron and Warsi is surely Shaun’s point.’
i don’t think that’s Shaun’s point at all
Like Peter Bone, Shaun has long maintained that a more distinctly Conservative approach from today’s Tory leadership would yield greater electoral dividends – a theory I simply do not buy
Of course everyone knew where Thatcher stood, but even she was unable to reform the UK as much as she would have liked due to the Tory Parliamentary party in her day being considerably more moderate than it is today
Clearly she has far more genuine poltical convictions than any of her successors (particularly Major and Cameron who are foremost pragmatists) but as with the US I just don’t think there’s enough angry white men to win elections on the type of robustly right-wing manifesto Shaun has long advocated, and let’s face it desoite the current mess, the UK had far bigger problems in the 1970s, some of which required a dose of Thatcherism to alleviate
‘Hemmelig, surely you can’t argue the railways would be in a better state now had they not been privatised.’
I’d suggest you were mad if you tried to argue anything but
It’s funny that most people who argue that privatising British Rail has worked are people who hardly ever use the train
The cost of travelling by train compared to other countries in western Europe is completely obscene, and that’s without considetring the generally appalling sevice on offer, and this is one issue where the Left got it right (no pun intended) – with commuters just having the absolute p*ss taken out of them so company directors can pay themselves six-figure salatries for doing a jjob that a chimpanzee could do more effectively
When was the last time you used the train Keiran?
If insufficient competition can exist within the market, any sensible right winger would say it should be state ran as the lack of competition will not increase efficiency just increase costs for the company to operate on a profit.
“When was the last time you used the train Keiran?”
About seven hours ago Tim. Hence my writing “As an almost daily user of the train then and now…” in my above post.
Train services have improved modestly from BR days at the cost of an eightfold – yes EIGHTFOLD – increase in real terms subsidy.
The fragmented nature of the privatised railway menas that there are huge inefficiencies in terms of one bit trying to interact with another.
If BR had been given an eightfold increase in public funding we would have a railway that was the envy of the world today.
Plus Tim’s point about fares is absolutely correct.
The only real success of rail privatisation – acknowledged to be the case by those such as Chris Austin who were senior players during the privatisation – is that it smashed up the power of the rail unions and prevented widespread rail strikes from ever happening again.
“If BR had been given an eightfold increase in public funding we would have a railway that was the envy of the world today”.
Possibly. More likely much of the money would have been wasted, as was the case with the last great injection of public money under the 1955 Modernisation Plan. The failure of much of that plan led the treasury, and every subsequent government, to be terrified of throwing good money after bad, leading to decades of reduced services and under investment.
“More likely much of the money would have been wasted”
But it has been wasted under privatisation, to a much greater degree than the modernisation plan. I repeat, an eightfold increase in subsidy just to yield modest service improvements.
To its credit the present govenment have realised their mistake and that the costs of running the railway have to come down massively. But politically there can be no going back and the whole infrastructure of BR has disappeared never to return….so unless we tolerate swathes of the network closing down or huge fare increases we are stuck in this situation in perpetuity. Certainly I rate rail privatisation as one of the biggest political blunders/financial scandals since WW2.
“Plus Tim’s point about fares is absolutely correct.”
Actually it isn’t. While the headline fares appear on the face of it to be more expensive, in actual fact the versatility of fares in the UK make them comparable, indeed favourable, to many of our EU neighbours. Germany, for example, generally has lower “premium” (i.e. walk-on, not pre-booked) fares, but their pre-booked fares offer very little discount when compared with here. I was able to travel from Hagley via Birmingham to London for £8. Not sure you could get from, say, Hamburg to Frankfurt for 10 Euros.
Hemmelig, I don’t know where you got the figure of an eightfold increase in rail subsides since privatisation. I don’t doubt that the level if support has increased, but that appears to be something of an exaggeration. This article gives a pretty good summary of the real state of affairs:
http://fullfact.org/factchecks/taxpayer_subsidy_train_network_nationalisation-3391
‘If insufficient competition can exist within the market, any sensible right winger would say it should be state ran as the lack of competition will not increase efficiency just increase costs for the company to operate on a profit.’
Exactly – the only way you could get genuine competition on the railways is if at least one other company came along and laid down a whole new set of tracks – which obviously will never happen
Whilst i can understand the notion that governments can’t afford to run such services, the amount of money they still provide the industry in a form of a subsidy makes that argument totally irrelevant
Look at Holland. The distance between Schipol Airport and Amsterdam is roughly the same as Gatwick Airport to Brighton, which in the case of the latter costs a tenner and usually arrives at its destination late.
In Holland that costs you just over three Euros, has never been late (and I’ve made that journey many times) and is usually on a better maintained train too
The state of our railways is one of the few things that makes me ashamed to say I’m British.
For me rail privatisation is up there with the poll tax and high unemployment being a ‘price worth paying for’ as one of the primary sins of the 18-year Tory government – it certainly tarnished the Major administration
“Hemmelig, I don’t know where you got the figure of an eightfold increase in rail subsides since privatisation. I don’t doubt that the level if support has increased, but that appears to be something of an exaggeration. This article gives a pretty good summary of the real state of affairs:”
Thanks for the article.
I think my eightfold figures came from one of Christian Wolmer’s books. From the article it looks like they must have been nominal figures, which would tally with Christian Wolmer’s quote that in real terms subsidy has risen fourfold since the early 90s.
It is important to remember that subsidies have been focused entirely on passenger trains. One of the most disgraceful aspects of the privatisation has been the decimation of freight traffic since the early 1990s, and indeed the complete elimination of Royal Mail and parcels traffic, resulting in an absolutely massive increase in lorries on the roads and causing a lot of the motorway congestion we all moan about.
What a tremendous debate – just because I flagged up a council by-election!
Anyone whose read this site regularly over the past few years will know I don’t need much of an excuse to write about trains.
The more I look at the issue the more It reinforces my initial opinion that the “poll tax on wheels” characterisation of the effects of privatisation is more than a decade out of date. It seems to be the case that it was Railtrack that was the source of the majority of the problems immediately following privatisation.
Since the collapse of Railtrack and its replacement by Network Rail in the period following the Hatfield crash just about every indicator of performance has been moving in a positive direction. This document provides a good summary: http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/upload/pdf/quarterly-nrt-report-2012-13-q2.pdf
The article I linked to above also shows that the level of government subsidy is trending downwards. It is still far higher than in the days of BR, but I have no problem with that. We are simply paying for a better service.