County Greater London Major settlements Tottenham Number of members One | Electorate 79,172 (December 2010) Created 1950 | |
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Member of parliament Rt Hon David Lammy (Labour) | ||
Tottenham /ˈtɒtnəm, -tənəm/ is a constituency created in 1950 represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2000 by Rt Hon David Lammy, a member of the Labour Party. The 1885 to 1918 version of the seat is also covered by this article.
Contents
Boundaries
1885-1918: The parish of Tottenham, and the area [small exclaves] included in the Parliamentary Boroughs of Bethnal Green, Hackney, Shoreditch, and Tower Hamlets.
1950-1974: The Municipal Borough of Tottenham wards of Bruce Grove and Stoneleigh, Chestnuts, Green Lanes, Stamford Hill, Town Hall, and West Green.
1974-1983: The London Borough of Haringey wards of Bruce Grove, Green Lanes, High Cross, Seven Sisters, South Tottenham, Tottenham Central, and West Green.
1983-2010: As above plus Coleraine, Harringay, Park, and White Hart Lane.
2010-present:
From 2018 (proposed): As above plus Stroud Green.
The constituency is in the London Borough of Haringey in north London, covering the borough's central and eastern area.
1885 to 1918
The seat sided with the Conservative party candidate until the January-to-February-held 1906 election, a party noted for the gradual social reforms of Benjamin Disraeli in the early 1880s, particularly in education and urban deprivation. By the time of the United Kingdom general election, 1906 the Liberal Party (UK) was at its final apex and stood on the moral high ground on issues of free trade and abhorrences in the Boer War which turned the seat in the Liberal landslide result of that year to the party's candidate. The two elections in 1910 (before a near eight-year long hiatus in elections due to World War I) were one-member parliamentary majority results nationally between the two then-dominant parties but the Liberal Party's People's Budget proposed at the first 1910 election saw Liberal incumbent Alden narrowly returned to serve Tottenham and again at the end of the year.
1950-date
This constituency was recreated to cover a narrower, more focussed seat on the largest town or London District itself, of Tottenham. Parts of two wards were in the former Borough of Hornsey which had a seat, abolished in 1983 to make way for Hornsey and Wood Green.
During its modern period of existence, Tottenham has been won consistently by the Labour Party, however one member in the early 1960s, Alan Brown, defected to become independent in opposition and then, crossing the floor, became a Conservative. Brown failed by a wide margin to win re-election in 1964. The closest result since 1950 was in 1987 when the Labour Party candidate seeking re-election won by 8.2% of the vote ahead of a Conservative Party candidate. The first by-election to Tottenham occurred in 2000 on the death of a member.
In 2005 and 2010 — reflecting a national swing — the runner-up was a Liberal Democrat candidate.
The re-election of Lammy in 2015 made the seat the 12th safest of Labour's 232 seats by percentage of majority; and third safest in the capital.
Rt Hon David Lammy, the present member was Minister of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills until the change of government in 2010.
Constituency profile
A cosmopolitan, inner-city seat in the London Borough of Haringey, Tottenham has a large ethnic minority population - around a fifth of the residents are black, and there is a large Muslim population. Excluding the South of the Constituency, The percentage of white residents understates the ethnic variety of this constituency, similar to the borough as a whole which includes major Cypriot, Irish, Eastern European, Jewish and Russian communities. The seat has a large central shopping area and the major London football club, Tottenham Hotspur F.C. ('Spurs').
The seat covers Tottenham a large town in north London. To the east is the River Lea with its valley trail and the Tottenham marshes, while to the south the seat takes in Finsbury Park. The constituency includes the Broadwater Farm estate, notorious for the 1985 riots, following which the estate underwent a massive facelift and is no longer a crime blackspot, but other areas of the seat like Northumberland Park continue to be blighted by social problems, including overcrowding.
The proportion of people workless and registered as jobseekers was in November 2012 significantly higher than the national average of 3.8%, at 8.0% of the population based on a statistical compilation by The Guardian. Though this is not the case in the southern side of the constituency. At that time the London average was similar to the national average, at 4.0%.