The Richmond Park By-Election, 2016

The parliamentary by-election in the Richmond Park constituency held on 1 December 2016 was unusual, even for a by-election. It came about because the incumbent Conservative MP, Zac Goldsmith, had committed himself at the time of the 2015 general election, to resigning should a Tory government chose to proceed with a third runway at nearby London Heathrow. Earlier in 2016 Goldsmith had run for the Conservatives in the London Mayoral election – had he and not Sadiq Khan won, he would have resigned his seat then.

Because of the Conservative government’s Heathrow decision, in the December by-election Goldsmith stood as an Independent. Labour and the Liberal Democrats put up candidates against him but not UKIP, the Conservatives or the Green Party. In the June 2016 EU Referendum Goldsmith had supported Leave. The Liberal Democrat candidate in the by-election made it clear that she, like her party nationally post-Referendum, now supported Britain remaining in the Single Market. When the results came out, press coverage concentrated on Goldsmith’s losing his seat and the surge in the Liberal Democrat vote:

Much of the comment pointed to the high levels of Remain support locally in the Referendum earlier in the year. Anyone who attempts to look at this relationship more closely will encounter a problem: the Referendum results in London were reported at Borough level, not by parliamentary constituency. As the map below shows, the constituency (PC) of Richmond Park lies mostly in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames (LB RuT) and partly in the Royal (London) Borough of Kingston upon Thames (RB KuT). The rest of LB RuT forms the PC of Twickenham. The RB KuT, except for the wards contributing to the Richmond Park PC, forms the PC of Kingston and Surbiton. 

The Referendum results for LB RuT and RB KuT are shown below in the context of other areas in London and the UK. Both were in the top 10% of Remain favouring areas across the country, but locally KuT was only just above the average for London and RuT was not one of the top 10 London boroughs.

The prevailing opinion was that the Liberal Democrat’s by-election success could be best explained in terms of a reaction to the Referendum. That is to say, local distaste for Brexit in 2016 had replaced local endorsement of Goldsmith’s anti-Heathrow stance in 2015. And there does seem to have been a differential effect in the turnout with the anyone-but-Goldsmith voting holding up quite well.

Perhaps some insight into Goldsmith’s fall from grace can be found in his original rise to favour revealed by comparing Richmond Park to the other two constituencies mentioned above in the three consecutive general elections of 2005, 2010 and 2015:

In 2005, all three were comfortably held by the Liberal Democrats, part of a cluster of seats in south west London which they had built up in previous elections. In 2010, the Tories improved their position moderately in Kingston and Surbiton and Twickenham but made a considerable improvement in Richmond Park where their candidate, Goldsmith, was elected. In 2015, all three seats became Tory-held, some of the former Liberal Democrat voters apparently preferring Labour or Green after five years of coalition. The Conservatives would probably have done better but for the rise of UKIP.

Does the 2016 by-election herald a return to favour for the Liberal Democrats and offer prospects of regaining the other two constituencies? If there were to be by-elections in either of them soon, the answer is probably yes, given the enthusiasm in the boroughs concerned for Remain and the small Conservative majorities by comparison with Goldsmith’s in2015. However, once the UK has exercised Article 50 in March 2017, events will move on and the key issues for voters at the next general election, quite possibly three years away, are not yet obvious.

After the 2015 election and until December 2016, there was only one Liberal Democrat MP in London, Tom Brake (a far from household name), in Carshalton and Wallington, the seat he has held since 1997. That constituency lies in the LB of Sutton together with the PC of Sutton and Cheam. In the Referendum LB Sutton was 28th among the London boroughs by pro-Remain ranking and one of only five of the 32 boroughs to be more pro-Leave than the UK as a whole (Table 2 above).

It seems obvious from the general election results 2005-2015 above and Brake's small majority in 2015 that the Tories would have added his scalp to their collection but for the votes taken by UKIP. If there were to be a by-election in Carshalton and Wallington in the near future, it could well be taken by the Tories. This raises the interesting point that the anti-Leave position currently adopted by the Liberal Democrats may not work for them everywhere as well as it did in Richmond Park – Labour’s problem writ small. 

A future post will look more closely at the national Liberal Democrat position post -Referendum in terms of the constituencies now held and those they might want to regain. Another will provide some further analysis of the London boroughs and the parliamentary constituencies within their boundaries.

Strawberry Hill House

The adjective ‘iconic’ is over-used, so much so that it probably ought to be avoided. Nonetheless, sometimes the subject is one which actually meets the definition of being “regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration”. For anyone interested in architecture, Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, South West London, certainly is iconic, being the mid-eighteenth century birthplace of the style later known as Strawberry Hill Gothic. It is generally regarded as the starting point for the revival of Gothic architecture for new buildings in the following century.

The history of Strawberry Hill House’s ownership is complex. After Horace Walpole, its creator, died in 1797 it passed into the hands of his family, an arrangement which unfortunately led to the sale in 1842 of the contents, several thousand items of art and antiquities which he had chosen. After being used for educational purposes for most of the twentieth century, the building is now on a long lease to the Strawberry Hill Trust which has undertaken extensive restoration. Since March 2015 it has been possible to visit rooms which had never previously been open to the public. Anyone intending to visit should be aware that the rooms are to a large extent empty of contents, but are handsomely redecorated in the style Walpole chose. He coined the term ‘gloomth’ to describe the parts of the house which were intentionally poorly lit (even more so than the Hall, below) and redolent of The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, which he wrote at Strawberry Hill.

The handsome Library perhaps conveys more of the original character than most rooms:

The Gallery, although empty, is very striking:

and the House is full of photogenic features:

Where possible the Strawberry Hill Trust hopes to restore the contents of the House prior to 1842 and already has in place some loan and reproduction items. The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University has a database of Walpole’s collection. The second floor Dressing Room currently has a display about the printing press set up by Walpole in 1757, one of the earliest private presses in England, on which The Castle of Otranto was printed. Curiously, in Richmond upon Thames, only a few kilometres away, Virginia and Leonard Woolf would set up the Hogarth Press in 1917.

Well worth visiting, the House's website should be consulted for opening times. National Art Pass holders and National Trust members are offered a 50% discount on the normal ticket price.

Carry on clinging on

A post earlier this month followed up a story in the Financial Times on 15 February about the division of the British middle-class into the 'über-middle' and the 'cling-ons'. Subsequently an article in The Times (£), Super-rich professions squeeze out traditional middle class, went over the same ground, quoting a little more data:

and the FT has returned to the subject, particularly the housing implications which I touched on in the last post. On 22 February (again a Saturday) the FT lead was High earners face London lockout, ‘Cling-ons’ priced out of homes by ‘uber-middle’, Camden and Hammersmith now unattainable. To help those who had missed the previous week’s story, it explained:

The purchasing power of a wealthy "über middle" is increasingly pushing the most desirable neighbourhoods out of the reach of "cling-ons" - the architects, engineers and academics whose salaries have failed to keep pace over the past 40 years. … People who could once have afforded Richmond, Wandsworth or Islington, are now buying homes in Barnet, Lambeth and Haringey, the data show.

“the data” came from Savills estate agency, as in my post. They were also one of the sources for a map on page 2 of the FT titled “Britain’s middle class has been forced out of “prime” neighbourhoods” showing how for various districts the percentage of electoral wards where average housing costs for a household with a net income of £58,000 are unaffordable (ie need more than 35%):

The accompanying article focussed on Oxford, quoting Savills’ man on the spot:

A lot of the families who lived in north Oxford up until the time that I started (in 1961) were academic families. A lot of those have sold and gone out. And the people coming in might have an academic background, in so far as they were undergraduates here, but they have gone off and made their fortune either in industry or in the City or as senior consultants or accountants and so on.

Another article described the difficulties faced by the cling-ons in affording private education, one of the attractions Oxford offers the übermenschen.  An FT video is available, British middle class splits in two, featuring St Albans as the context.

The FT offered an interesting point about London from Chris Hamnett, professor of geography at King's College, London, who has charted its "gentrification" over 50 years. He said that the capital was now "a global centre for the international rich whose desire to secure a home in the capital amounted to "a process of global asset diversification". Next month Evan Davies has a two-part series on BBC2, Mind The Gap: London Vs The Rest, which hopefully won’t be just a eulogy of Bojoburg and will be prepared to look at the strains the capital is starting to impose on the rest of the country.

Some interesting issues may emerge from this fission of the middle class into über and cling-on.

Firstly, the political implications. If the Conservatives start to be perceived as the party for of the über-middle and above in London and the south east, can they ever win a national election? The foreign owners of London properties don't even vote. Worse, many of the under-60 middle class, whose support the Tories need, will be increasingly aware of their precarious cling-on situation and may find Labour's concern for the squeezed middle appealing.

Secondly, for how much longer will the NHS be able to pay its medical staff über-middle rates of pay? 

Thirdly, are these stories underlain by an internal debate at the FT as to whether it should remain a national newspaper with declining print sales? Could it decide to push away the UK cling-ons? The FT could then concentrate its efforts on physical distribution only at the weekend and on-line subscription all week for the über middle and richer catchments, the dark bits in the map above and their equivalent across the Anglosphere? Much of the content of the FT’s How to Spend It supplements (see its “website of worldly pleasures”) concerns goods and services already clearly unaffordable by mere cling-ons. The weekend House and Home section is in a similar vein, Cheap as pommes frites*, being the headline of an article describing the cheapness of the French property market – from €4.5 million upwards.

*UK chips, US French fries.

 

UPDATE 6 MARCH

Tyler Brülé is the editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine and he also writes a weekly column, The Fast Lane, for the Weekend Financial Times. On 1 March, a few days after this post appeared with its concluding bit of speculation, Brülé chose to write about a new Australian newspaper appearing for the first time that day, The Saturday Paper:

It comes at a time when many of the world's big news groups are considering what to do with their print editions from Monday to Friday (go exclusively on-line? Drop home delivery? Limit distribution to big cities only?) while placing more emphasis on their weekend editions (The FT, for example, has a big global campaign to bolster its weekend offering).  

The Saturday Paper cuts out the cost that comes with running a newspaper throughout the week and is building on a readership base from an established sister magazine, The Monthly. Publisher Morry Schwartz's move to shake up weekend reading should be monitored closely by press barons, both established and emerging.

The FT on 1 March seemed to be giving the über-middle/cling-on thing a bit of a rest.

The view from the unter-middle*

On 15 February the Financial Times lead was one of those designed to sell copies of Saturday’s paper: Über-middle' pulls ahead' on pay:

In this tale of two middle classes, doctors, barristers and London's financial services workers emerge as the big winners. But this "über-middle" is dwarfed by a much larger group of "cling-ons" who have seen their relative position dramatically worsen even during the years of economic boom. The data, prepared for the FT by two of the nation's foremost labour market economists, Professors Brian Bell and Stephen Machin, shines a light on the shifting fortunes of the professional middle class.

Actually, there wasn’t that much data. From page 1 and supplementary material on page 2 under the heading The fractured middle, the reader can pull together the following:

There was also a graphic, Winners and losers: how professional salaries have changed over the decades, adding data for 1994 and for more occupations but using the somewhat opaque statistic of ‘Ratio of mean earnings for each profession compared with the top 10% of earners’:

The only two occupations which have pulled ahead are London finance and Medical practitioners. I was not surprised to read that:

Underpinning this shake-up in the top tier of society is a severing of the bond that for decades tied the top 1 per cent of earners to the 1 per cent below them. Since 1979, the very highest earners have increased their share of total earnings by almost nine percentage points while the rest of the top 10 per cent have captured only an extra four percentage points.

- hardly a revelation. In 2011 Will Hutton’s final report of the Review of Fair Pay in the public sector was published and it showed that the top 1% had been moving ahead since 1980:

in the UK and US that is. And from everybody else in the UK:

But I was surprised to read in the FT:

Doctors, Prof Bell pointed out, were the only group of public sector workers to have done well" "Public sector workers have almost disappeared from the top of the income distribution,"…

because Hutton’s Review had stated that

… public sector employees represent around seven per cent of the highest one per cent of earners [although] those seven per cent only receive one per cent of top earnings. Approximately one in 85 workers in the private sector earn over £150,000 a year, compared to just one in 280 public sector workers. (pages 17/18, 2009 figures)

Top civil servants had certainly done less well than local authority chief executives who, in turn, had failed to keep up with private sector chief executives:

 Hutton thought that when comparing budgets in the public sector and turnover in the private, together with “analyses of job size and complexity [it was still consistently found] that public sector roles pay considerably less than equivalent roles in the private sector” and produced a chart to back that up:

Hutton admitted that:

Simple comparisons of organisation size of course mask very real differences in the size of the role of the leader in what are very different types of organisation; and it may be objected that any private sector CEO can only be paid if his or her organisation is profitable - a crucial test that does not apply to the public sector.

Not the only objection I would have thought. Take the position of university vice-chancellors as reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement last year:

The vice-chancellor with the highest salary in 2011-12 was the University of Birmingham’s David Eastwood, who took home £372,000 in basic pay; he also collected £34,000 in pension contributions. (However, the highest remuneration package overall went to the University of Oxford’s Andrew Hamilton – [£371,000 salary, unknown expenses, £53,000 pension]. That is dwarfed by the remuneration awarded to Mark Allan, chief executive of student housing company Unite Group. According to Unite’s accounts, he received not only £393,000 in basic pay but also a £428,370 performance- related bonus and £78,600 in pension contributions for the year ended February 2012 - a total package of almost £900,000, not including long-term share options. The FTSE 250 company’s annual income of £219.5 million is less than half of Birmingham’s £472 million income in 2011-12 and only about a fifth of the University of Oxford’s £1 billion income over the same period. Oxford’s Hamilton received £371,000 in basic pay and £53,000 in pension contributions in 2011-12, less than half Allan’s income. 

But is the comparison with the private sector reasonable? While vice-chancellors might increasingly need to act like CEOs, captains of industry would surely claim that their business models - and levels of risk - are nothing like the work of politically protected institutions largely reliant on public funds (regardless of whether that money flows through research and teaching grants or state-subsidised student loans).

To appreciate what might be meant by "levels of risk", consider the Bath/Bristol area of SW England where there are four universities within a 12km radius:

and whose vice-chancellors were rewarded as in the table below in 2011-2012:

In similar geographical circumstances in the private sector, one can’t help thinking that the vice-chancellor equivalents would be under pressure from institutional shareholders and, more scarily, private equity to rationalise to reduce overheads in what are very similar areas of business and increase profitability. This table certainly brings out the FT’s point that the average academic is now what they charmingly describe as a cling-on. Professors are hardly in the über-middle. The FT also pointed out the concentration of the best paid jobs of all kinds in London and the southeast. The further the cling-ons are from that region, the better off they probably feel. However, housing costs across a large part of southern England are driven by a London effect extending into the South West , as shown by this map produced by Neil Hudson of Savills Research last year:

*Why the FT chose “cling-on”, as opposed to “unter-middle” (or unter-Mitte even), wasn’t explained – perhaps too close to Untermenschen. Anyway that’s where I put myself, for sure!


UPDATE 18 APRIL

Some data from Bell and Machin here.

Bojoburg

Two members of the commentariat fixated on the same idea last week. The London Evening Standard on 14 May ran a piece by Simon Jenkins, London should quit the EU and ditch the UK too, and, the next day in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch explained why it was necessary to Unshackle London from the backward shires.

According to Jenkins:

There is an easy solution to Britain in Europe. Let the rest of Britain stay but let London leave.  

… Its future is global. Its two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. They depend on self-government, on regulatory discipline and on the value of the pound. Financial services are worldwide in application. They are clearly threatened by what Lord Lawson called “jealous European banking officials”, by regulations designed to underpin German bankers and clip London’s wings.  

The new city state would have a physical boundary, roughly that of the M25. Digital mapping would police the circumference, though open borders are no great problem. They exist like those between Gulf states, between Ireland and Ulster, Monaco and France. London already has its own government under its elected “monarch”, Boris Johnson.  

The rest of Britain may have reasons for wanting to “stay in Europe”. It is time for London to “get out”, of both the EU and the UK.

Goodness knows what Jenkins thinks digital mapping is. Aaronovitch saw the problem as being one of culture, typified in PMQs the day before:

… of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.  

… Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.  

… Londoners differ from some of their compatriots in attitudes towards the outside world. The pollsters Ipsos/Mori sent me figures for the regional variations on immigration and the EU. Aggregated for January-December 2012, polling showed an average of 21 per cent of Britons naming race relations/ immigration/immigrants as “one of the most important issues facing the country”. The highest figures were the South East with 28 per cent, then the East Midlands, East of England and Yorkshire/Humberside all on 25 per cent. In London it was 13 per cent. This was less dramatically true for Europe/EU. In the South East 10 per cent had it as a vital issue, compared with 5 per cent in London and 6 per cent nationally.  

It is clear that London and the South East are in some ways two different countries and that is why Boris has to be Janus-faced. To become Tory leader he must somehow finesse the fact that he knows a lot of rural/ suburban Tory-Ukippery just doesn’t make sense in the big, competitive, changing world. Like Boris, I do not want to inhabit this parish of 1950s retro enthusiasts.  

… So we may need to secede from the hinterland. And the same is true of our other great cities and university towns which, together, could make an outward-looking, open-minded polity.

So not so much an island state as an archipelago one. Well pundits have to write about something – in 2011 Aaronovitch thought the UK should become part of the USA. And it might have been inhibiting if the position Mrs Thatcher found herself in in 1982 had been remembered:

On the morning of Wednesday 22 September I and my party took off from Tokyo, where I had been visiting, for Peking. Fifteen years remained of the lease to Britain of the New Territories which constitute over 90 per cent of the land of the Colony of Hong Kong. The island of Hong Kong itself is British sovereign territory, but, like the rest of the Colony, dependent on the mainland for water and other supplies. The People's Republic of China refused to recognize the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, by which the island of Hong Kong had been acquired by Britain. Consequently, although my negotiating stance was founded on Britain's sovereign claim to at least part of the territory of Hong Kong, I knew that I could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony. (The Downing Street Years, page 259)

London, with its “boundary, roughly that of the M25” (see above and the surrounding regions), would be far worse-placed than British Hong Kong. Being on the coast (see below, right), the former colony could trade with the rest of the world without having to enter PRC airspace or territorial waters and at least produced its own electricity and gas.
 

Somehow I don’t see “monarch Boris” converting Tate Modern back into a power station. A secessionist London would have to import electricity and gas from the English grids, would be dependent for its water on the English Thames into which it would also have to discharge its sewage. No doubt the supply of all these things, and a few others (like the westward extension of Heathrow or its replacement) could be arranged amicably – at a price and in return for financial services from London. Until BNP Paribas arrives in Bristol and Crédit Agricole in Birmingham. Of course, London has virtually no armed forces apart from the ceremonial, so all defence capabilities including the nuclear deterrent would be in the hands of the Welsh-English-Scottish rump, as would GCHQ. London would be run out of the Mayor’s office because Jenkins thinks that:

The bulk of British government would have to relocate out of the present capital. Because no one would agree on where, departments would be fragmented around the provinces, to the benefit of all. Parliament could relocate, perhaps to Salford or to an Orwellian “Elizabethville” in south Yorkshire. Essex and Sussex would concentrate development around Stansted and Gatwick, relieving pressure on Heathrow.

All quite barking because London, unlike Singapore (above, left), is land-locked and geography dictates that it cannot become an island city-state. But perhaps there is an even deeper flaw in Jenkins’ concept that London’s

… two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. … Financial services are worldwide in application.

He should have read an article in the Financial Times (£) on 7 May, Cornwall beach buoys London’s financial status. It explained that a beach near Bude in north Cornwall in SW England:

… is one of the main landing points for thousands of miles of submarine cables that carry trading data from New York. Britain’s westerly location means data can reach traders in London several milliseconds quicker than competitors in Frankfurt and Paris – a key advantage in the era of high-frequency trading.  

… “The UK is an underwater cable hub for all the financial institutions in Europe,” says Jack Steven, asset manager at the Crown Estate. “The alternative is to go through somewhere like Portugal, which is closer to the US but which historically hasn’t developed capacity in the same way.”  

According to the Crown Estate, about 95 per cent of the UK’s communication, such as email, internet and telephone calls, is transmitted through submarine cables. They are cheaper and more reliable than satellites, which are expensive to get into orbit and vulnerable to collisions with space debris. The shorter the cables, the quicker data can be transferred. It takes about 65 milliseconds to trade between London and New York. From east London it takes a further five milliseconds to Frankfurt.

Anyone interested can learn more about the global undersea cable network (above) on the Guardian Data Blog.

Boris Johnson, to be fair, has not expressed any opinions, as far as I know, in favour of London’s independence, even though Aaronovitch seems to think he is a closet isolationist. A shame when London could so easily be renamed Bojoburg in his honour as its first head of state. I don’t think either Aaronovitch or Jenkins think for one minute that their proposals will ever happen but, as part of London’s media elite, they are expressing their exasperation with the rest of us.  But most people don't live on six-figure salaries, probably getting away with a day’s work a week writing a thousand words or so about whatever they chose, and having expenses-paid lunches in top restaurants with interesting people talking off the record.