The electoral record of Tony Benn

On the first of November 1950 Tony Benn – then known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn – was selected as the Labour candidate for the Bristol South East by-election, a by-election triggered by the resignation (due to ill health) of former Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps.*  Bristol South East was a working class suburban constituency based around the districts of St Georges and Brislington. It also extended out beyond the boundaries of the city to include the Kingswood area.  The by-election was held on the 30th of November, and Benn polled 19,367 votes (56.7%) and was elected with a majority of 7,349 (21.5%).

At the 1951 General Election, Benn polled 30,811 votes (65%) and was elected with a majority  of 14,256 (30.1%).

At the 1955 General Election, Benn polled 25,257 votes (59.5%) and was elected with a majority of 8,047 (18.9%).

At the 1959 General Election, Benn polled 26,273 votes (56.2%) and was elected with a majority of 5,827 (12.5%)

Following the death of his father on the 17th of November 1960, Benn succeeded to the Peerage as the second Viscount Stansgate. This meant that he was no longer eligible to sit in the Commons and so his seat became vacant. Benn was not particularly happy with this state of affairs and made the frankly badass decision to stand in the ensuing by-election, which was held on the 4th of May 1961. Technically Benn won – polling 23,275 votes (69.5%) and leading by 13,044 (38.9%) – but as he was not eligible to sit in the Commons his Conservative opponent, Malcolm St Clair, was declared the victor. St Clair held the seat until the Conservative government gave in to Benn’s characteristically noisy campaigning and passed the Peerage Act of 1963 which allowed Hereditary Peers to disclaim their Peerages. Which Benn promptly did. Sinclair then did the decent thing and resigned his seat. This led to another by-election, in which Benn (against an assorted range on independents** and no Conservative opposition) polled 20,313 votes (79.7%) and was elected with a majority of 15,479 (60.7%). And with ruritanian absurdities dispensed with…

At the 1964 General Election, Benn polled 29,117 votes (60.2%) and was elected with a majority of 9,835 (20.3%)

At the 1966 General Election, Benn polled 30,851 votes (61.3%) and was elected with a majority of 11,416 (22.7%)

At the 1970 General Election, Benn polled 29,176 votes (55.4%) and was elected with a majority of 5,688 (10.8%)

Over the next few years several important things changed. Benn’s leftwards political journey led to him announcing in October 1973 than instead of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he would rather be known as plain Tony Benn. The Liberal Party got its act together (to the limited extent that it was capable of doing such a thing, anyway) and basically swore to never again leave most constituencies uncontested: this ended the era of two-candidate elections in Britain for ever.*** And there were boundary changes in Bristol. The constituency of Bristol Central was abolished and the new suburban (outside the city boundaries, but most definitely part of the wider urban area) constituency of Kingswood was created. Benn’s Bristol South East was greatly altered in the process: it lost Kingswood to Kingswood (duh) and was compensated with parts of abolished Bristol Central.

At the February 1974 General Election, Benn polled 26,540 votes (47.0%) and was elected with a majority of 7,912 (14.0%)

At the October 1974 General Election, Benn polled 25,978 votes (49.1%) and was elected with a majority of 9,373 (17.7%)

At the 1979 General Election, Benn polled 24,878 votes (45.4%) and was elected with a majority of 1,890 (3.4%). For the first time in his career, Benn no longer represented a safe seat.

A further set of boundary changes before the 1983 election saw Bristol South East transformed into Bristol East. The notional Labour majority in Bristol East was  larger than the actual majority in Bristol South East had been, but given Benn’s highly controversial public profile at the time it was likely that this would not be so in practice. As part of Bristol South East had been added to the safe seat of Bristol South, Benn initially sought selection there instead, hoping that his popularity with Labour activists would see him through against Michael Cocks, who had held Bristol South since 1970 and who was the Party’s Chief Whip. Unfortunately for Benn, Cocks knew every trick in the book and edged him out.**** Benn refused subsequent offers from left-wing CLPs in safe seats, and stood in Bristol East.

In the 1983 General Election, Benn polled 18,055 votes (36.9%) and was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Jonathan Sayeed, who was elected with a majority of 1,789 (3.6%).***** Apparently, the swing was highest in the parts of the constituency not previously represented by Benn.

The first seat to fall vacant in the 1983-87 parliament was Chesterfield, an industrial constituency in North Derbyshire held since 1964 by Labour right-winger Eric Varley, who had resigned to become chairman of Coalite (a manufacturer of smokeless fuel). Varley had been a cabinet minister in the 1970s and he and Benn had swapped jobs in 1975 (Benn went from Industry to Energy, Varley from Energy to Industry). His majority in 1983 was 7,763 (15.6%). Benn was selected as the Labour candidate.

The by-election was held on the 1st of March 1984 and was something of a circus. Given Benn’s high profile this was basically inevitable. Sixteen candidates stood, only three of which kept their deposits. Benn polled 24,633 votes (46.5%) and was elected with a majority of 6,264 (11.8%). Incredibly for a by-election, turnout was actually higher than at the previous General Election.

At the 1987 General Election, Benn polled 24,532 votes (45.5%) and was elected with a majority of 8,577 (15.9%)

At the 1992 General Election, Benn polled 26,451 votes (47.3%) and was elected with a majority of 6,414 (11.5%)

At the 1997 General Election, Benn polled 26,105 votes (50.8%) and was elected with a majority of 5,775 (11.2%)

Tony Benn retired at the 2001 General Election.

*Who, interestingly enough, had rather similar politics and concerns to Benn.

**One of which was the tiresome ex-Liberal crank Edward Martell.

***And causes irritating problems for those into electoral geekery, because it makes it difficult to properly compare elections before and after 1974. Is a candidate who polled 50.4% in a two-way race (say) actually more popular than someone who polled 48% in a three way race in which the third party polled 15%? And so on.

****He was less successful in 1987 and was deselected in favour of Dawn Primarolo.

*****Member of Parliament for Bristol East 1983-92 (defeated),  for Mid Bedfordshire 1997-2005. Resigned under an ethical cloud at the 2005 General Election.

The New Birmingham

Birmingham’s official motto is ‘Forward’. It is basically impossible to understand the city without grasping the implications of that.

Anyway, the following picture is a page* from a piece of council propaganda (public relations… whatever) from the late 1950s (or was it early 1960s? Can’t remember, but do have it written down somewhere) called ‘The New Birmingham’…

As you can see, it’s a plan of post-war redevelopment. The five highlighted districts were the locations of the city’s most notorious 19th century slums. The idea was to transform these hellholes into pleasant and self-contained districts (note the use of the word ‘town’) that would be integrated into the wider city without being overwhelmed by it (and, in so doing, return to their original status as low-status housing districts). It was quite overtly Utopian. The planning jargon for all of this was ‘comprehensive redevelopment’.**

Things did not exactly work out as intended (certainly the Utopian dream was never realised), but it is probably important to point out that the really serious damage to the area happened when the economy of Birmingham basically collapsed in the early 1980s. Though there were certainly mistakes made in the planning of the so-called ‘New Towns’ – for instance the Inner Ring Road was supposed to connect them to the rest of the city, but actually did the opposite for reasons that probably count as slightly to obvious to bother with explaining in any detail.

An interesting post-script of sorts concerns the area marked on the map as Lee Bank (née Bath Row). Now there’s a notorious name, at least to people from the Midlands. The area is currently the site of a massive redevelopment project. The jargon being used to describe the approach is… er… comprehensive redevelopment.

*Well most of a page. Apparently it was tricky to get it to line up properly to photocopy or something. It was a while ago now and I don’t remember exactly, so this is just a presumption.

**An interesting detail: Frank Price, the Chairman of the Public Work Committee at the time (and author of ‘The New Birmingham’), grew up in one of these districts (Summer Lane, now Newtown). He’s still alive and lives in Spain.

Luxury waterfront nightmares?

During the past three decades in which finance capital has ruled triumphant above all other things, many dreams have been sold of lifestyles and products that are utterly unaffordable even to most in the affluent ‘West’. Hell, unaffordable even to many comparatively affluent people in the affluent ‘West’. I’ve no interest in pretending that this has been a particularly new phenomenon, as luxury goods have existed since time immemorial and have often played an important role in consumer booms. Probably the only unique thing these luxury dreams is their reach and ubiquity. And, right now at least, I’m really only interested in one specific dream, rather than the whole edifice.

A particularly powerful dream, because it involves property.

I am thinking of one of the defining physical features of our age: the luxury waterfront development. The exclusive riverside flat. The apartment on the (often socially cleansed, and certainly thoroughly re-branded) old dock. The mansion by the river. Etc.

Gross oversimplification follows.

Rich people these days seem to like to live in close proximity to water. Those who are not particularly rich but would like to be dream of being able to do so. In pursuit of this dream, they have been amply aided by the usual suspects in the private sector and by the power of the state. The London Docklands – officially an attempt to ‘regenerate’ a depressed postindustrial district, a fact that tends to be only half remembered now – are emblematic, but other examples abound. And not just in other large cities: many smaller settlements have also seen a great surge in luxury waterfront development.

Now, historically, rich people have tended not to live particularly close to water. In urban areas at least, rivers were literally full of shit until fears of waterborne diseases and the sheer ghastly smell became too much for the new middle classes of the nineteenth century to bear. And even after that they were filthy: watery spaces of industry and wholesale commerce. And then there was the damp. And the risk of flooding. And these were factors outside the city, so even in pretty little river towns, the tendency was the rich to not actually live right by the river. Or at least not on the floodplain. Similar concerns existed with regards to the sea: again pumped full of raw sewage and industrial waste, again the fear of flooding (and a surge from the sea is something like thirty billion times scarier than the average river flood). So when rich people lived by the sea, the tendency was to do so in safe places; away from industry, and in a safe place from the worst of the winter storms.

These days, with clean rivers, with working ports generally miles from the city centre, etc, things are quite different. Frankly all of the above paragraph sounds like something from a past considerably more distant than thirty years ago or so. The dream of the luxury waterfront property is an extremely powerful one, and such developments have mushroomed across the globe.

But I used the word ‘nightmare’ in the title, and not ‘dream’. And I do this for one very, very simple reason: climate change. Sea levels are rising, while extreme and freak weather events are becoming palpably more frequent. The luxury waterfront development becomes vulnerable to flooding. We have seen a bit of this recently in the Thames Valley. It will become ever more common, I suspect. Despite the efforts that rightly go on flood protection in big cities.

I’m making no predictions, but fashions change. Perhaps the luxury waterfront development will remain a compelling dream to the wealthy, but it now seems at least possible that it might be seen rather more as a curious historical mistake.

I place a great deal of emphasis on the word ‘perhaps’, there.

Geography and Freedom

“The history of Europe has everywhere been marked by the stubborn growth of private ‘liberties’, franchises or privileges limited to certain groups, big or small. Often, these liberties conflicted with each other or were mutually exclusive. Clearly, these liberties could exist only when Western Europe as such had taken shape and become relatively stable. Undefended, or strife-torn, it could afford no such luxury. Liberty and stability were inseparable.”

Fernand Braudel, in A History of Civilizations. Which he wrote for school children.

Observations

A recent observation by Umberto Eco:

“Despite many legends, which still circulate on the internet, all medieval scholars knew that the world was round.”

A markedly less recent observation by Harry S. Truman:

“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”

My view is that the two observations complement each other very nicely indeed.