European Parliament constituency North West England Number of members 1 | Electorate 66,609 (December 2010) | |
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Westmorland and Lonsdale is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2005 by Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Contents
Boundaries
The constituency is based on the South Lakeland district of Cumbria. Important towns by size in the constituency include Kendal, Windermere and Kirkby Lonsdale. It is named for the historic county of Westmorland and the Lancashire Hundred of Lonsdale. (The main part of that hundred is still part of Lancashire. However, Westmorland and Lonsdale contains not only the old Westmorland part of geographic Lonsdale, Kirkby Lonsdale, but also some of the detached part of the old Lancashire administrative hundred of Lonsdale in the Lake District, made up of old Furness and Cartmel, both of which are not geographically in the dale of the River Lune, or "Lonsdale".)
Boundary review
Following their review of parliamentary representation in Cumbria, the Boundary Commission for England created a modified Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency, to deal with population changes.
The electoral wards used to create the modified seat, contested for the first time at the 2010 general election, are entirely within the South Lakeland district.
This removed Broughton-in-Furness from the constituency.
History
Having been a Conservative seat since its creation in 1983, the 1997 election saw the Tory majority cut to less than 5,000 votes. This was further reduced at the 2001 election. In 2005, the constituency featured among a list of seats held by high-profile Conservatives (in this case, the Education spokesperson Tim Collins) targeted by Liberal Democrats by deploying supporters from across each region in what was referred in the media as a "decapitation strategy". In the event, this was the only one of the "decapitation" seats to change hands in 2005, with Tim Farron gaining the seat by a marginal majority.
In the 2010 general election, this constituency recorded the largest swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats (11.1% Con-LD) in a seat where those two parties were in the top two positions. The constituency also produced the lowest share of the vote for Labour (2.2%, one of five lost deposits for Labour nationally). With 96.2% of votes cast for either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat candidates, Westmorland and Lonsdale also had the highest combined share of the vote cast for the Coalition parties.
Contrasting with its Conservative history the combined Conservative/UKIP vote narrowly failed to reach 40% in 2015. This was also the only constituency in that entire general election in which a Liberal Democrat candidate secured an absolute majority (i.e. over 50%) of all votes cast.
Elections in the 2000s
note: The Robert Gibson who stood in this election and the similarly named candidate in 1983 are not the same person.