The Golden Age

Over to the right you should now see a link that says “Election results from the Golden Age of Capitalism”. Click on it and you’ll find lists of the average Labour vote in each constituency for all elections between 1955 and 1970. I’d have liked to have included the 1951 and 1951 elections, but there were significant boundary changes in a few years before the 1955 election so…

Anyway, the basic idea is taken from the Six Election Average in Pelling’s Social Geography of British Elections, although for this period it makes more sense to use the Labour vote than the Conservative one. In this period, as in 1885-1910, there were only two candidates in each constituency. Therefore an average vote of over 50% would indicate that a constituency was Labour more often than not, one over, say, 55% would indicate that the constituency was a safe seat and so on and so forth. Needless to say it isn’t nearly as accurate in areas in which Liberals or minority parties were active, but it’s still useful. Eventually maps will be made.

Things will be updated on a fairly regular basis.

Picking over a carcass and reading entrails are linked

Good article in what is now yesterday’s Grauniad … “Just get over it, Ken”. This bit rings especially true:

“…The raw psephological truth is that Livingstone’s rainbow coalition was not enough to keep him in office in 2008. His studious nurturing of a radical, internationalist, urban core saw him lose the vote of the suburbs and white working class. Outside central London, the electoral map was daubed deep blue…”

Looking over the borough results from that election, two things stand out. The first is that Livingstone nearly lost Barking & Dagenham (!). The second is that he actually managed to lose Greenwich (which Labour carried in both GLA elections on the same day). The pattern is even more stark, and interesting, at ward level.

Relative Truth

Hard to disagree with this;

“MPs get scrutinised because they are scrutinisable. Every time we demand more scrutiny of MPs while not expecting commensurate transparency from elsewhere, we are undermining parliamentary democracy. We are offering a relative promotion to MPs rivals.”

From: Never Trust A Hippy

A tealeaf from the cup that did have a storm in it

There’s not much point commenting at length on the absurd row that’s sprung up because a perfectly reasonable post by Glasgow South M.P Tom Harris was taken out of context and grossly distorted by the usual suspects. For what my opinion is worth (ie; not much) the main flaw in what Harris wrote was a failure to write of the sort of assumptions people in the ’50’s had of economic growth and prosperity (for which see what Crosland had to say about the economy in The Future of Socialism)… oh… and he didn’t go nearly far enough either. Aha. But then I did spot this:

“…but the comments were denounced by shadow treasury chief secretary Philip Hammond, who accused him of living on a “different planet” from ordinary hard-working families”

The obvious point to make is that Hammond is being deeply dishonest and trying to score cheap political points, but there’s somethinge else there as well (the bit in bold). I decided to check Hammond’s biography on wikipedia (hey, Hammond is a very dull man who I know little of) to see how much he’s likely to know about the lives of ordinary people. So here it is:

Philip Hammond was born in Epping, Essex, the son of a civil engineer, and educated at Shenfield School (now Shenfield High School) on Alexander Lane in Brentwood, Essex and University College, Oxford where he was awarded a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

He joined the medical equipment manufacturers Speywood Laboratories Ltd in 1977 becoming, in 1981 a director of Speywood Medical Ltd. where, in 1982, an automatic electrocardiograph electrode manufacturing plant figured amongst his notable achievements of the time. He left in 1983. From 1984, he was a director in Castlemead Ltd, and from 1993-5 he was a partner in CMA Consultants, and from 1994, a director in Castlemead Homes. He has many business interests including house building. He has acted as an economics consultant to the World Bank in Washington, D.C. since 1986, and was a consultant to the government of Malawi from 1995 until his election to parliament.

Clearly Hammond is A Man Of The People. I should also add that his constituency is in Surrey and is rather well off.

Philip Dunne is an idiot

I’m registered to vote in the Ludlow constituency. This means that my M.P is Philip Dunne; a former businessman and (I do realise that this term is perhaps less popular now than a few weeks ago, but it’s true in his case) a toff. In addition to that he’s also a depressingly dull right-wing hack; a quick trawl through his columns in the (Tory-supporting) local rag reveals that, despite being a man who used to run a chain of bookshops, he either has all the writing skills of an eight year old or has so little interest in the printed word that he gets a bag carrier with all the writing skills of an eight year old to write his petty, bigoted little columns for him. But that’s a much longer introduction than this man really deserves.

Anyway, Dunne has written some report or other which claims that over the past decade the Labour government has diverted vast amounts of money from rural areas to “Labour heartlands” and that this is A Bad Thing and part of A War On The Countryside (I’m not sure if he actually used either term but he might as well have done). Because Dunne is a nasty little man with very little in the imagination department, he’s also claimed that this amounts to some form of electoral bribery.

While I’m not going to defend government policy on rural areas (other than to point out than it’s certainly no worse than previous, and probably future, governments in this regard), Dunne’s claims are faulty and dishonest in almost all respects. There is one reason why industrial and inner city areas have had more money spent on them by government than elsewhere and that is because these districts are, by far, the most deprived in the U.K. The gap (if that’s the right word to use) in terms of poverty between these areas and the rest of Britain is all publically available (and so easy to access! The National Statistics website is actually great fun to use) is both vast and shocking. In contrast the “shires” that Dunne claims have been shafted are generally the least deprived parts of the country. People who follow British politics will probably be aware that poorer people (when they vote at all) tend to vote Labour and that rich people tend to be Tories. Most of the additional claims that Dunne has made are so dishonest that it would be wrong to even so much as dignify them with any attention. I would argue here that it is right than more government money gets spent on the parts of the country that have the most social problems and that people that think otherwise are, probably, being rather selfish.

Now, this isn’t to say that there is no poverty in English agricultural districts (there most certainly is), but it’s a seperate, complex issue (and not one that Dunne has ever seriously addressed). In any case if “rural” (because many shire districts are actually full of rich, middle class commuters) and rural districts did get more government money the chances of the rural poor benefiting would be remote for a whole host of reasons. One of these reasons, by the way, is that local politics in the shire districts tends to be dominated by people like Dunne.

I suspect that this won’t be the last post written by me on this subject (I do so loath Philip Dunne). I may even upload a few maps.

I’m back…

For a long list of reasons (workload and illness being the main two) I’ve not bothered with this for months now. But now that it’s summer, I’ve less work to do (the early stages of my dissertation excepted) and I’m a little better…

Actually, I never really stopped the whole blogging lark; I’ve been doing a rarely updated blog on elections and maps and so on here: http://uselectionatlas.org/WEBLOGS/al/ but I’d like to make a few random rants on various issues that don’t seem appropriate there, so I thought…