Keighley and Bradford West
A local correspondent
Keighley is a solid Yorkshire textile and engineering town with Howarth Moors within its boundaries. Miss Joan Hall, the Tory MP, had a majority of 616 in 1970, a lead of only 1.4 per cent. That she won at all is put down to her own personality — she worked as hard as she talks, non-stop, and did 2 per cent better than the national swing.
But things look better for Joan Hall now because of a bitter Labour split. The official candidate is Councillor Bob Cryer a left-wing lecturer at the local technical college. His selection angered many party members, particularly John Binns, right-wing engineer and MP for Keighley from 1964 to 1970. Binns, also a member of the town council, put himself forward as an independent and has now donned respectability with the Dick Taverne social democratic cloak. He is almost as well known as Joan Hall and many people still think he is their MP, so that most of the present Labour effort is trying to get across the fact that Bob Cryer is their official candidate.
A Liberal — Wilfred Whitaker, a lecturer at Hull College of Technology—is fighting his first election. On past form in Keighley, he should get 7,000 or 8,000 votes — at whose expense is anyone's guess. But the key factor is the personal vote for Binns and Hall and this should leave the seat unchanged.
Two retiring MPs, Edward Lyons (Labour) and John Wilkinson (Conservative), both bright, promising politicians, oppose each other in Bradford West, because of boundary changes in which Lyons's safe seat in the former Bradford East has disappeared. The changes have left Bradford West even more marginal. It is finely balanced between residential areas for top people, solid working-class areas and slums. It has several thousand Asian immigrants. There is a Liberal — Roderick Atkinson, recently graduated to politics from a protest group; Ralph Herbert (Independent Democratic Alliance) and a former local councillor, Jim Merrick, who founded the British Campaign Against Immigration in the city but who now leans heavily on the National Front. The seat, one of the belt of marginals in the textile areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, has mirrored the national swing in the past. Now it looks a little less safe for John Wilkinson but he is expected to scrape home.
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