{"id":2580,"date":"2019-04-26T10:45:26","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T10:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2580"},"modified":"2022-06-17T17:00:21","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T17:00:21","slug":"hackney-used-to-be-a-conservative-stronghold-and-other-secrets-of-the-suburbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2580","title":{"rendered":"Hackney used to be a Conservative stronghold, and other secrets of the suburbs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The suburban areas that were initially stereotyped in the late\nnineteenth century as \u2018Villa Tory\u2019 strongholds and exemplified by Hackney and\nIslington were places where appearances and stiff upper lips were kept up, and\nforeigners and radicals were kept down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flash forward a hundred years and these two constituencies\nreturn Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. How, when, and why, did the constituencies,\nand places like them in a ring around central London and in the big provincial\ncities, change their profile from \u2018Villa Tory\u2019 to \u2018bedsit revolutionary\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018Villa Tory\u2019<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Suburbia as a political force\nbegan in the 1880s after the explosive growth of the Victorian cities. In the\nlanguage of the 1880s, suburbia was \u2018villadom\u2019 \u2013 large and relatively new\nhouses occupied by a middle or upper middle class family with its domestic\nservants. From the 1880s until the 1920s, villadom tended to be regarded with a\ncertain amount of disdain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My examination of the evolution\nof electoral behaviour in these areas shows suburban politics was from the very\nbeginning essentially conservative, with a small \u2018c\u2019 that quickly became a big\n\u2018C\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The franchise and electoral system change in 1885 accelerated this\nprocess. The big cities were divided into single member constituencies, and the\nvilla suburbs were large enough to be the dominant influence in a significant\nminority of these seats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lord Rosebery described villadom\n(even if to decry the description as a caricature) as being a place full of\npeople who were concerned most of all with their own property, obsessed with\nstatus and respectability, and uninterested in politics or civic life beyond a\nvague conservative attachment to common sense and patriotism. The perception of\nan instinctively, rather than politically conscious, conservative suburban vote\nwas present in Edwardian politics too. So what happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Labour\u2019s progress<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Particularly at the lower end of the social scale, villadom was becoming more working class by around 1914. The villas themselves were losing their grip on \u2018respectability\u2019 and the mansion houses were being sold for land, on which working class terraces soon appeared. But with a new lease of life for the Villa Tory after 1918, it was not until 1945 that Labour broke the Conservatives\u2019 grip. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Table 1. Villa constituency electoral behaviour before 1914 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Table 2. <\/strong>Seats won at general elections in the villa?oriented constituencies, 1918\u201345 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The causes of Labour\u2019s increase of vote share in these areas are\na combination of an outward movement of the population to interwar suburbia,\nthe breaking up of villas into flats, and Labour’s increasing appeal to middle\nclass electors. My\narticle on this subject<\/a> has more details. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rising red tide in our cities<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The story in the other cities\nwith villa suburbs is broadly similar to that in London, except that there was\nno comparable small 1980s reverse in Labour’s advance (more on\nthis in my article<\/a>).\nMerseyside is something of a special case; the Conservatives also lost a clutch\nof villa?type seats in Liverpool in 1964 which never came back, and their vote\ncollapsed abjectly from the 1970s onwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The long?term change in these\nvilla and provincial west end seats between 1955 and 2017 is startling (see\nFigure 2). In 1955, each one was Conservative, usually by a big margin. But the\nConservatives last won a contest in any of them in 1992. By 2017, Labour won\nevery seat and had a 39 percentage point lead over the Conservatives. Although\n2017 was particularly dramatic, the change has been gradual and continuous: in\nevery election since 1959, Labour has beaten the national swing in this group\nof seats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The party’s exceptional results here in the 2017 election are, therefore, a new peak on a long?term trend rather than a breakthrough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Figure 2: Vote share in ten provincial villa seats 1955\u20132017 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The similarity between the\ntrends in the villa seats in London and the comparable seats in metropolitan\nBritain since the 1950s suggests that what has happened in London is no mere\npeculiarity of the capital; it is an electoral and social phenomenon in all the\nlarger cities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The electoral cleavages based on urban\/rural settlement, levels of education, ethnicity, public and private sector and youth and age have not emerged all at once in 2017, but have been developing for decades. Much attention has been devoted to one side of the phenomenon, namely the increasing openness of white working class communities to voting for the Conservatives or parties further to the right, but there has been little corresponding focus on the suburban constituencies which have been steering to the left. Yesterday’s conservative utopias have now become some of the safest socialist strongholds in the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A longer version <\/a>of this article originally appeared in the Political Quarterly journal.<\/em>
<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The suburban areas that were initially stereotyped in the late nineteenth century as \u2018Villa Tory\u2019 strongholds and exemplified by Hackney and Islington were places where appearances and stiff upper lips were kept up, and foreigners and radicals were kept down. Flash forward a hundred years and these two constituencies return Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":2584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1395,1396],"tags":[1534],"coauthors":[1610],"class_list":["post-2580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-comment","category-uk","tag-labour"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Hackney-used-to-be-a-Conservative-stronghold-and-other-secrets-of-the-suburbs-marine-dumay-1269771-unsplash-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2580"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}