Reading the entrails
David Butler
One of the fascinations of psephology is that the study of constituencies is the study of Britain. For the last thirty years, travelling about the country, I have always been sharply aware of what parliamentary division I was moving through and of what its current and past political complexion has been. Looking at Cotswold limestone cottages, or granite Aberdeen terraces, or brick Yorkshire back-to-backs, or stuccoed London suburbs, I have thought of the people behind the facades and wondered at the complex of family history and neighbourhood pressure, of house owner- ship and class status that has determined their vote — or their switch of vote. But I have always been conscious of the gaps in my knowledge of British economic geography and local history. Although the politics of Britain is in one sense national, involving broad sweeps of opinion that move the nation from Labour to Conser- vative and back again, it is also microcosmic, explicable only in terms of local people reacting to a local situation.
How did the Isle of Wight move from 22 per cent Liberal in 1970 to 50 per cent Liberal in 1974? How did Falmouth and Camborne change from a 3,000 Labour ma- jority in 1966 to a 17,000 Conservative ma- jority in 1979? Why did Cathcart switch against the tide by 13 per cent towards Labour in 1959 and then, after staying Tory through the 1960s and 1970s, become the only seat to go over to Labour in 1979? After this week it will be easier to tackle such questions.
The Almanac of British Politics by Robert Waller* is a single-handed tour de force. As a guidebook to the next election, it will be plagiarised shamelessly over the next few months by every political writer; and it will be xeroxed egocentrically by every candidate and agent. It charts the political and economic geography of the new parliamentary constituencies, linking them to the old, and offering pilotage through familiar but shifting shoals.
Some of the secret lies in the census *Croom Helm £12.95. figures. The politics of Britain is largely the politics of rich and poor, of owner oc- cupiers and council tenants, of whites and blacks. And the census figures have chang- ed. Southall, and Brent South, the seats with most voters from the Commonwealth (43 per cent) contained less than 10 per cent in 1961. Owner-occupancy has shot up from around 30 per cent in 1945 to around 60 per cent today. The proportion of manual workers in the population has fallen from nearly 80 per cent to about 60 per cent in a couple of generations. And the changes have had a very uneven impact between north and south and between city and suburbs.
The Conservatives fared about equally in the elections of 1979. But the Conservatives who in 1955 won 39 per cent of their English MPs from the north only got 27 per cent from that region in 1979. In 1955, 33 per cent of the representation of the big cities of Britain was Conservative; by 1979 it was 26 per cent.
Robert Waller's individual vignettes of constituencies are decorated with nice sum- maries of the last election result, of the dif- ferences made by the redistribution, and of the latest census data about housing tenure, class and ethnicity, and some fascinating facts emerge. The most working class con- stituency? Croydon South (76 per cent), Sir William Clark's safe Tory stronghold. The most owner-occupied? Bexleyheath (82 per cent) followed by Ted Heath's old Bexley, and Wyre in Lancashire (81 per cent). The most council tenants? Provan 93 per cent and Garscadden (89 per cent) both in Glasgow. The most unexpected Liberal pro- spect? Walsall North, once John Stonehouse's secure Labour seat of Wednesbury where, last May, the Alliance polled 42 per cent.
Robert Waller offers unexpected insights into the impact of the latest redistribution. Northern Ireland's new 17 seats contain eleven that are securely Orange and four that are Green (unless they are given to the Unionists by SDLP/Sinn Fein vote-
splitting); only Enoch Powell's South Down and Harold McCusker's Newry are marginal. Redistribution in North Wales seems to have saved Plaid Cymru's second seat, but given an extra one to the Conser- vatives. Scotland leaves the Liberals with a chance of gaining the new Gordon seat while the Scottish Nationalists are just ahead in the redrawn Moray. Some MPs may have made the wrong decision about their prospects: Mr Sproat, for example, may regret his move from Aberdeen to Ber- wickshire. Mr Rost, the Conservative MP who reproached the carpet-baggers by ostentatiously staying put to fight Erewash, would, it seems, still have had a reasonable majority there in 1979.
The next general election will be harder to assess than any of its predecessors: 590 of the 650 constituencies will have new boun- daries. And the Liberal/SDP Alliance has shown how unstable old party loyalties can be. Moreover, in Bermondsey and Darl- ington candidates did, apparently, make a difference.
It will still, of course, be possible to spot broad trends and to assume that local varia- tions will cancel out. But it would be more prudent to watch the opinion polls cautiously and to read and absorb Robert Waller's detailed assessment of individual seats. The overall picture is there: as he points out in his preface, if we all voted as we did in 1979 on the new boundaries the Conservatives would have won 360 seats (not 339), Labour would have won 257 (not 258) and the others 32 (not 27).
But if the Alliance makes any headway at all, and if the voters make even a limited ef- fort to discriminate between Tatchells and O'Briens, the regularities of the system, so manifest over the last forty years, may be less in evidence. If we have to disaggregate our vision of the nationwide sweep of British politics into the individualities of constituency situations, this brilliant in- novative guide provided by Robert Waller will save us from getting utterly lost.
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