How do the Mets fair?

I’ve written before about the big cities and their representation in government, but how do the Metropolitan Counties, or City Regions as government nomenclature have them nowadays, fare?

On average, any County (or at least any one predominantly represented by Conservative and Labour politicians) should expect a 130% return of their elected members getting into government over the last 40 years, or to put it another way, a quarter of a county’s MPs should make it into government in any given decade.  So, a county with 10 parliamentary constituencies will, on average, have had 13 MPs make it into government. Of course, these are averages – a county like Hampshire, with consistently very few Labour members, has underperformed this mark over the last decade and over-performed it the decade before. County Durham has been the reverse. The Highlands of Scotland, with a long history of electing Liberals/SDP/LibDems/SNP has had next to no representatives in government. So, where we should be looking at around about
30%, how do the Mets fare on this matrix?

A high proportion would suggest that the urban areas of the county have been well-represented; a lower proportion would suggest that they have not had their fair share in government (perhaps indicative, but certainly not proof of, not getting a fair crack of government resources) 

South Yorks 106%
Merseyside 100%
Gtr Manchester 96%
West Midlands  93%
West Yorkshire 91%
Tyne & Wear 85% 

South Yorkshire and Merseyside (perhaps coincidentally the last two of the Metropolitan Counties to get the European Union Regional Assistance Fund, Objective One) are the best performing on this index but neither come close to the average.

Looking in more detail at the two counties in the middle of this league, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, adjacent counties straddling the Pennines. 

Both are dominated by Labour, with 82% (GM) and 91% (WY) of the seats in the present parliament represented by that party, and little chance of that figure dropping below 2/3 in either case in the next election. 

Of the present batch of Greater Manchester politicians, 60% of them have been in government, 4 of them at Cabinet level. Half of the total governmental representation from Gtr Manchester over the last 40 years, and 2/3 of the Cabinet representation come from the present set of MPs. 

By contrast, over the pennines in West Yorkshire, only a third of the eligible (i.e. Labour – the Lib Dem and the Conservative were elected in 2005 and 2001 respectively)  MPs have ever been in government, just a third of the total West Yorks government representation. 3 of them have been (still are) in Cabinet – half the total from the county since 1970. 

As their demographics are much the same, it would appear that although over the last 40 years they’ve had a similar ‘shout’ in government but Greater Manchester’s strength has been in recent years, West Yorkshire’s spread out over a far longer period of time. 

Whilst over the 40 years the total city region total government representation has been more or less the same; City for City, Manchester versus Leeds, without doubt Leeds has had the more powerful representation.   The City of Leeds’ MPs have included Denis Healey, Merlyn Rees and Keith Joseph (as well as one of the fastest rising and longest serving of the present Cabinet, Hilary Benn); the highest ranking City of Manchester MP has been Harold Lever as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (sometimes a key post but hardly a key officer of state) in the Wilson/Callaghan government.

So, what does this tell us? That urban areas have been more poorly represented in government than the rural and sururban areas, that the City of Leeds has been one of the best represented cities at the top of British politics, and that the present crop of Greater Manchester politicians are the most numerously represented in government for many decades.