Great Britain 2009 European Election result maps

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No you're more or less right, Birmingham itself is a light shade of purple but the dark purple shades include a lot of the greater conurbation and a lot of Birmingham commuters tend to live there. They're Birmingham exurbs if you will...

Wolverhampton exurbs as well. Kiddy is its own town though, and the UKIP strength in Dudley probably came from the town itself, rather than Halesowen et al. UKIP success in the West Midlands was quite striking of course. They somehow managed to stitch together a very diverse, very weird in some ways, electoral coalition; but then I guess protest parties are like that.

Btw, Brum has released results at constituency and ward level.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Done!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you look carefully, you'll note some relatively strong support for Labour in some Welsh speaking areas as well - Carmarthenshire is the obvious one, but it's even true of up here to an extent. It was the Welsh speaking end of Conwy that gave Labour it's relatively (an important word in this context) good percentage here, while the Labour percentages on the Island and in Caernarfon were noticably higher than in agricultural parts of England.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Western Isles always surprise me for their relatively strong support for Labour. I can't understand why one of the last remaining enclaves of Gaelic aren't uber-solid SNP areas.

(...)B The southern end of the island chain is Catholic. Reformation never reached this part of the UK. The area went Labour as soon as the Tories ceased to be Jacobites and never looked back.

Nobody corrects me when I spout bullsh!t.

Of course, the Jacobites in the Southern Hebrides still vote Jacobite Scottish Nationalist, not Labour.

You know more about that area than I do, so...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Birmingham ward map.

Making things clear from the start - Moseley & Kings Heath was tied between Labour and the LibDems and Brandwood was Labour not UKIP. This is very much a low turnout map and it shows. UKIP did very well in almost all outer wards and seems to have taken its vote fairly from all three major parties, depending on the ward in question.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Brandwood being the easternmost of that four-ward tier at the south end, the other three being the only UKIP wins? Just making sure I read your color scheme right.
The tie is clearly the triangle-shaped northwestern purple one.

Brandwood is indeed the easternmost of those four wards, but you've called the tie wrong - that's Oscott* and was won by UKIP (bloody UKIP using purple as their colour... bah). The tie is in the circle-ish-ward between Brandwood and Sparkbrook.

I'll be doing party vote maps fairly soon. Other areas where lower level data can be found are (as far as I know) Glasgow, Edinburgh and (for some reason) Cannock Chase District.

*A HW (Hilarious Ward) in terms of municipal politics. Since its creation it has swung wildly and unpredictably between Labour and the Tories often on big, big swings (they both tied on 20% in the Euros, though UKIP were ahead of both). Nearly went BNP in 2006.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A little error spotted on the leading parties map; Labour led in Mansfield.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Labour vote in much of the inner city was kinda off the scale for this election (almost as though we've returned to the 1980's). This obscures patterns in the outer parts of the city a bit - I might try to do something trying to show them better at some point later. Springfield as the LibDems best ward is a real wtf though - the best wards for the other parties are exactly the ones you'd expect for a low turnout PR election. UKIP plus the Greenies, probably, explains that.

Edit: credit for the data goes to Cllr. Bowen (LD, Acock's Green and an old hand at internet election junkie-ery) who posted the full ward results on a public forum.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Slutton Four Jokes is the richest ward in Birmingham and one of the richest in the West Midlands. Vile place.

The similarities between the BNP and UKIP are very interesting.

So are the differences - UKIP also doing well in the "we don't want to be part of Birmingham!" middle class suburblands of the far north.
Tieing in well with the overall differences of the two parties' bases, of course.

If I get my way, the Sutton Coldfield parliamentary constituency would be renamed Birmingham North. The main indicator, for both parties, seems to have been whites that don't work in the public sector.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Slutton Four Jokes is the richest ward in Birmingham and one of the richest in the West Midlands. Vile place.

I think Hash meant Edgbaston.

Ah, right. Well that's a Con 37 area. If he meant Edgbaston then the answer is yes and no - Birmingham wards are huge. Most of Edgbaston proper is pretty posh, of course (it was developed as an exclusive suburb and hasn't changed in the way that similar places in, say, Manchester have) though not in the way it used to be (we're talking highly paid public sector workers rather than industrialists and managers - most of them are in Slutton these days) but as you get closer to Ladywood it starts to fray - subdivisions, social housing and so on. Absurdly the ward currently includes part of Deritend (proper inner city territory and once classic slumland). Needless to say, the Tory vote doesn't come from these areas (turnout in them is usually piss poor). The ward also includes the main University (and quite a few students, even though most of them live in Selly Oak ward) and the Q.E (the latter meaning that I lived, if that's the right word, in the ward in most of June and a lot of July).