Most conservative part of the UK?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Definitely Northern Ireland. It's the least urbanised, which correlates well to social and economic conservatism, and I think it may also be less educated (or at least it doesn't get back most kids who go elsewhere for university.) Sinn Féin's positioning on social issues is left-wing, but that's not what most of their base is responding to.

Though what 'conservative' means in different parts of the UK varies wildly - eg Scotland seems more left-wing if you look at its election results, but if you look at attitudes there's either no difference to England and Wales or it actually comes out slightly more conservative.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Sinn Féin's positioning on social issues is left-wing, but that's not what most of their base is responding to.

A lot of SF strongholds are pretty leftist though, right? People Before Profit do quite well in West Belfast.

They don't do very well in West Tyrone.

[EastAnglianLefty]

the first answer that comes to me is Surrey: absolutely no Labour tradition (the county has never elected a Labour MP, and even the areas of the county that were absorbed into London contains some of the most anti-Labour regions of the capital), no real Liberal tradition (they returned 3 Liberals in the 1906 landslide and Guildford ramdomly returned a Lib Dem in 2001; they've enjoyed some local success, but as small c-conservatives), no radical tradition before then (well, unless you go to like, the Diggers, who weren't exactly popular locally). It basically transitioned seamlessly from sleepy gentry-controlled rural fiefdom to favoured domitary of the most well-off of London commuters, with little of the more working-class/lower middle-class towns that dot many of the other supposed "bourgeois" Home Counties. Of course, in the supposed realignement of Brexit, the Lib Dems desperately tried excising Tory domination, but their efforts proved fruitless.

One partial sort of exception - Spelthorne elected a Labour MP in 1945. However it was wholly in Middlesex at that time, and a lot of the seat then is in Greater London now.

Croydon South elected a Labour MP in 1945 (on boundaries much more like the present Croydon Central), as did Wimbledon and Mitcham, and they were all still in Surrey at the time. Although even those were narrow victories, so Surrey's claim to be the most conservative part of the UK still stands up.

[EastAnglianLefty]

As I said, the lack of New Towns and Garden Cities (for whatever reason) is also really important: the idealistic and planned nature of these projects mean that counties full of them like Hertfordshire have a fair amount of council estates and social housing, which often are politically relevant at least at a local level. Nor do they have any random ethnic enclaves like Luton, pockets of extreme poverty like Jaywick in Essex (the most deprived village in the entirety of England) or much in the way of an industrial tradition, which exists in Kent (Kent even had a few small collieries near Dover, although I don't think they were ever large enough to mimic the more famous coal mining areas of the country). The leftward turn of university towns (most notably seen in the Kentish town of Canterbury) has not been seen in the campuses of Surrey Uni in Guildford, as far as I am aware; I don't know enough about that institution to comment.

I would agree with this overall, but I think you can quibble with just about every individual detail:

• Pretty much every village in Surrey, as is the norm for southern England, has some council housing and had significantly more three decades ago before RTB. They will have been solidly Labour back in the day, much less so now (though still capable of doing so on occasion) but won't have been enough to vote out the rest of their villages. You've also got a couple of towns with that kind of demographics - Camberley still fits the pattern and Redhill did before it got drowned out by commuters.
• Woking has a majority Asian ward. Amusingly, when it has had elections annulled for postal fraud, the perpetrators have usually been Lib Dem or Tory - this is a reasonably common pattern in areas where there aren't enough potential Labour votes elsewhere in the authority, so local powerbrokers have more incentive to throw in their lot with the local administration.
• There's nothing as deprived as Jaywick, but Jaywick itself is perfectly capable of voting Tory - and not just down to anti-immigration feeling, either. The other areas in the ward vote Tory/UKIP because they despise Jaywick and want it burnt to the ground*, whereas Jaywick itself has terrible turnout but a lot of the residents who vote are extremely aspirational and actually like living there, for reasons that are frankly baffling to everybody else in the local area.
• There's nothing resembling the Kent coalfield (which was actually ultra-militant, partly because it was always pretty marginal and was hence petrified of pit closures) but there was quite a lot of light industry in the county. Including, of course, the father of the current Labour leader.

*Actually, suggestions that Jaywick should be bulldozed and its residents rehoused somewhere decent have generally come from the left, because the Tories know that none of their voters want Jaywick's residents decanted into a council estate next to their village.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I saw someone post that Kent was the most conservative; although between 1997-2010 they returned a fair few Labour MPs (it appears to be 8 according to a 2005 article)

But it's no surpise as the parts of Kent that were Labour friendly certainly seemed to be the centre of the gravity that New Labour was obsessed with retaining; tough on aslyum seekers, tough on benefit 'fraud'  but happy with a modest bit of redistribution to build a new school, re-do the town centre and create a nice PFI hospital.

The above probably equally applies to some of those essex seats; my impression of Kent has always been that the rural/village parts are full of the exact same Tories you see across the country (socially conservative, owner occupied etc) but that parts of the seat are more friendly to a small c vision of Labour.

South Essex and the north Kent towns have a lot more in common with each other than with the rest of their counties. There is a shared Estuary identity.