County West Yorkshire Created 1885 | Electorate 68,129 (December 2010) Number of members One | |
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Major settlements Shipley, Bingley, Baildon Member of parliament Philip Davies (Conservative) | ||
Shipley is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2005 by Philip Davies, a Conservative.
Contents
Boundaries
1885-1918: The Municipal Borough of Bradford, and the civil parishes of Clayton, Eccleshill, Idle, North Brierley, and Shipley.
1918-1950: The Urban Districts of Baildon, Bingley, Guiseley, Shipley, and Yeadon, and in the Rural District of Wharfedale the civil parishes of Esholt, Hawksworth, and Menston.
1950-1983: The Urban Districts of Baildon, Bingley, and Shipley.
1983-2010: The City of Bradford wards of Baildon, Bingley, Bingley Rural, Rombalds, Shipley East, and Shipley West.
2010-present: The City of Bradford wards of Baildon, Bingley, Bingley Rural, Shipley, Wharfedale, and Windhill and Wrose.
1885-1970
This seat was created in the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Until 1923 the seat was almost exclusively represented by elected Liberals and Arthur Creech Jones was Secretary of State for the Colonies (1946-1950) during most of the Attlee Ministry.
MPs since 1970
Shipley was for a long time the seat of ex-Chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee, Sir Marcus Fox. He held the seat for almost 30 years between the 1970 and 1997 general elections.
At the 1997 general election, the young Labour candidate Chris Leslie won the seat from Fox, becoming the youngest MP of that parliament. He held the seat at the 2001 election and went on to become a junior minister. A number of traditional Labour supporters considered Leslie to be an ardent Blairite, though he was in fact equally close to Gordon Brown, one of whose staff he married, and whose campaign for election as Labour leader he helped run.
Leslie narrowly lost the seat in the 2005 election, when the Conservative candidate Philip Davies scored a narrow victory and won by 422 votes, then to be re-elected with an increased majority of nearly ten thousand votes in the May 2010 general election.