STV for the rest of West Yorkshire
Wakefield, Kirklees and Calderdale
Outside of the two larger Cities, the West Yorkshire region consists of three other boroughs, Wakefield, Kirklees and Calderdale. They are the areas of interest in this post, together with a small part of Leeds.
The Geography
The latter is down to the Boundaries Commission, that joined for 2024 the town of Rothwell, part of Leeds Council area, in the Wakefield constituency. I recently asked someone more involved in the politics of the area if he has an problem with this - and he said ‘not at all’… So I’m free to follow the commission in joining it with the whole of Wakefield Borough.
Did I say the ‘whole’… well no, because Wakefield has a population for 3 MPs so part of the borough had to move out. The towns of Ossett and Horbury were joined with rural parts of south Kirklees.
Kirklees will be an unfamiliar name to people outside the region, but is a joining of Huddersfield and Dewsbury together with a few small town and a bit of countryside.
This first map shows Wakefield and Kirklees minus Huddersfield
Wakefield (to elect 3 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Normanton and Hemsworth; Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley; Wakefield and Rothwell)
Dewsbury and Spen Valley (to elect 3 MPs covering the current constituencies of Dewsbury and Batley; Ossett and Denby Dale; Spen Valley)
Calderdale is a small borough that currently has 2 constituencies, and it fits well with the western end of Kirklees.
Huddersfield, Halifax and Valleys (to elect 4 MPs, covering the current constituencies of Calder Valley; Colne Valley; Halifax; Huddersfield)
The Politics
All the three constituencies making up this ‘STV for Wakefield’ has Labour in first place and Reform second, though Wakefield (without Rothwell) was held by a Conservative until a by-election in 2022. Outside the eponymous town and Rothwell, these are working class ex-mining areas of the kind where Reform has an appeal.
I’d guess they would take one MP, Labour the other two, one of these would be the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. The Conservative might have held one pre-2024, but lost it at that election. The Liberal Democrats have councillors at each end of the area but that wouldn’t be enough in a 3 MP constituency.
Predicting what would happen in Dewsbury and Spen Valley would be hard. Dewsbury and Batley fell to the pro-Palestinian Independent cause by a dramatic amount, but a similar candidate lost his deposit in Spen Valley and there was no such candidate in the Osset and Denby Dale. A later post will explain how STV calculates the winners, but in this seat a candidate would have needed just over 30,000 votes to be elected. this can include transferred from from other candidates. The first choices of these two candidates comes to about 17,000.
Could the Pro-Palestinian cause add more votes from transferred votes to add to the 17,000 they won? That, for now, is an open question.
I suspect Labour would get at least one MP here, since they won the other two Constituencies. Given their overall vote share here, I’m sure Reform would target one, but for this new constituency, I’m not going to predict if they’d be successful.
The Huddersfield and Halifax STV constituency would be a highly competitive contest. All four MPs after the 2024 landslide are Labour, but only Huddersfield is habitually Labour-held. While Labour would likely expect to win two seats under STV, this outcome couldn’t be guaranteed. In a typical year, the Conservatives would view it as a significant failure if they didn’t secure at least one seat.
There is also reason to believe that the Green and Liberal Democrat votes have been squeezed here by the dominant battles between the main parties. Colne Valley, for instance, was a Liberal seat until the 1980s. Additionally, Reform has put up a reasonable showing in the area.
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Lets finish on something local to the area!