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St Ives (UK Parliament constituency)
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St Ives is a county constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election.
constituency comprises the whole of Penwith and the southern part of Kerrier districts. It also includes the Isles of Scilly, not shown on the map (and having only some 1,700 electors out of a total 70,000). It takes in the most southerly (The Lizard) and westerly (Land's End) points of the English mainland.
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St Ives is a county constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election.
Current Boundaries
The constituency comprises the whole of Penwith and the southern part of Kerrier districts. It also includes the Isles of Scilly, not shown on the map (and having only some 1,700 electors out of a total 70,000). It takes in the most southerly (The Lizard) and westerly (Land's End) points of the English mainland. Main towns are Penzance, St Ives and Helston.
Boundary review
Following their review of parliamentary representation in Cornwall, the Boundary Commission for England has increased the county's representation by one seat. This has caused consequential changes to the existing constituencies.
The modified St Ives constituency will be formed from the following electoral wards':
- The Isles of Scilly
- From Penwith - Goldsithney, Guval and Heamoor, Lelant and Carbis Bay, Ludgvan and Towednack, Madron and Zennor, Marazion and Perranuthnoe, Morvah, Pendeen and St Just, Penzance Central, Penzance East, Penzance Promenade, Penzance South, St Buryan, St Erth and St Hilary, St Ives North and St Ives South.
- From Kerrier - Breage and Crowan, Grade-Ruan and Landewednack, Helston North, Helston South, Meneage, Mullion, Porthleven and Sithney, St Keverne
History
St Ives has elected MPs to every Parliament since 1558, except for a brief period during the Protectorate. It was originally a parliamentary borough, and returned two MPs until the Great Reform Act of 1832, when its representation was cut to a single member. In 1885 the borough was abolished, but the St Ives name was transferred to the surrounding county constituency.
St Ives borough
The borough established under Queen Mary consisted of the parish of St Ives in western Cornwall, a seaport and market town in which the main economic interests were fishing and the export of ores mined nearby. In 1831, the population of the borough was 4,776, and contained 1,002 houses.
The franchise was initially restricted to the town corporation, but after a judgment in a disputed election in 1702, the right to vote was exercised by all inhabitants paying scot and lot; in the early 19th century this amounted to a little over 300 voters. This was a wide franchise for the period, and taken with the reasonable size of the town meant that St Ives was one of the few boroughs in Cornwall that could claim not to be a rotten borough.
Elections were usually contested, and although the local gentry were able to exercise considerable influence on the outcome, no one interest was entirely predominant; the result could rarely be taken for granted and it was necessary to court the voters assiduously. From the 17th century, there were at least three competing interests - those of the Hobart family (Earls of Buckinghamshire from 1746), the Praeds of Treventhoe, and the Dukes of Bolton (who owned one of the manors of St Ives) - and by the mid 18th century the Stephens family also had to be taken into account. In 1751, however, John Stephens, who had previously allied himself with the Earl of Buckinghamshire and managed the borough's elections on the Earl's behalf, struck out on his own account and secured the election of his son. Later in the decade Stephens and the Earl once more began to work together, but were unable to prevent Humphrey Mackworth Praed from establishing sufficient influence to secure a hold of one of the two seats.
But by 1761 the alliances had shifted again, Buckinghamshire and Praed on one side nominating candidates against Stephens and the Duke of Bolton on the other. The by-election in 1763, when Buckinghamshire's brother-in-law Charles Hotham was re-elected after being appointed to a position in the Royal Household, cost the Earl £1,175 even though his candidate was eventually returned unopposed - the expenditure included payments of 7 guineas to each of 124 people (all presumably qualified voters, ensuring that it would be futile for his opponents to put up a candidate).
There was a further bitterly-contested election in 1774: allegations of bribery were investigated by a House of Commons committee, whose proceedings are recounted at length by the contemporary historian of electoral abuses, Thomas Oldfield, in his Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland. Samuel Stephens, defeated by 7 votes, accused William Praed and Adam Drummond (the Duke of Bolton's candidate) of benefited from several types of corruption. Humphrey Mackworth Praed, the candidate's father, was said to have lent large sums to voters on the understanding that repayment would not be demanded provided they voted for Praed and Drummond; but the counsel for Praed and Drummond offered evidence that Stephens had also resorted to bribery. Furthermore, it was alleged that many of Stephens' supporters had been prevented from voting by rating them as not liable for the scot and lot and therefore not eligible to vote; this was a frequent abuse in scot and lot boroughs, but as the petitioners could not bring any evidence of criminal misconduct by the parish overseers the committee decided they had no jurisdiction to interfere at St Ives. In the end, the committee upheld Drummond's election but declared that neither Stephens nor Praed had been properly elected, and a writ was issued for a by-election to fill the second seat.
The cost of electioneering in St Ives seems eventually to have led to both Buckinghamshire and Bolton withdrawing, and by 1784 Praed was considered unchallenged as patron. Nevertheless, the Stephens influence was by no means entirely extinguished, and it was recorded that the patrons at the time of the Reform Act were Samuel Stephens of Tregarron and Sir Christopher Hawkins of Trewithan (who had purchased the manor from Mr Praed).
The Reform Act extended the boundaries of the constituency, bringing in the neighbouring parishes of Lelant and Towednack and increasing the population; nevertheless, the borough lost one of its two seats. There were 584 qualified voters at the first reformed election, that of 1832.
Even with a further extension of the franchise in 1868, the electorate never passed 1,500, and had fallen to barely 1,000 by the next Reform Act, under which the borough was abolished with effect from the general election of 1885.
St Ives county constituency
With the division of counties into new single-member constituencies effected in 1885, Cornwall had six county divisions. The westernmost of these, in which St Ives stood, was formally named The Western or St Ives Division of Cornwall; it was often referred to simply as St Ives or as West Cornwall.
This new constituency also included the towns of Penzance, Paul, Ludgvan and St Just, and stretched not only from Land's End to St Erth but also included the Isles of Scilly. It was a constituency abnormally low in owner-occupiers, with a strong non-conformist presence, and the Conservatives were consequently very weak. However, local sentiment was strongly against Irish Home Rule or independence, seen as a particular threat to the livelihood of the fishermen and other maritime employees who made up much of the electorate, and St Ives therefore became a Liberal Unionist stronghold from 1886. (Even though its MP from 1906, Sir Clifford Cory, was nominally a Liberal rather than a Unionist and standing against Liberal Unionist candidates, he opposed Home Rule and was careful to explain this to the voters at each election.)
After the boundary revisions introduced at the general election of 1918, which brought in most of the villages on the Lizard Peninsula (though not Helston), the constituency was simply called Cornwall, St Ives. It underwent further boundary changes in 1950, bringing Helston into the constituency, and in 1983, when it was again extended to include all those parts of the new Penwith local government district which had previously been excluded.
The character of the constituency was little changed any of these revisions, but party loyalties may have been disrupted by the 1918 changes. Labour put up a candidate for the first time in 1918, and took more than a third of the vote; at the next election, with Labour withdrawing and the Irish issue no longer able to help Cory, a Conservative was elected for the first time. For the next decade St Ives was a Conservative-Liberal marginal, and changed hands four times in the 1920s. However, the split of the National Liberals from the Liberals apparently offered a compromise which suited the voters, and St Ives was thereafter a safe seat for that party, and later for the Conservatives when the National Liberals finally merged with them in the 1960s, until the formation of the Liberal Democrats re-invigorated the competition in the 1990s. Andrew George captured the seat after the retirement of the sitting Conservative MP in 1997, and took over half the vote in both 2001 and 2005.
At general elections, the constituency is usually one of the last in Great Britain to declare a result; the delay in bringing the ballot boxes over from the Isles of Scilly means that counting does not begin until the following day.
Members of Parliament
St Ives borough
1558-1640
1640-1832
1832-1885
St Ives county constituency (1885-present)
Notes
Election results
Elections in the 2000s
Elections in the 1990sElections in the 1940s
Elections in the 1930s
General election of 1935
In the 1935 UK general election, Walter Runciman, National Liberal was elected unopposed.
General election of 1931
In the 1931 UK general election, Walter Runciman, National Liberal was elected unopposed.
Elections in the 1920s
Elections in the 1910s
Elections in the 1900s
General election of 1900
In the 1900 UK general election, Edward Hain, Liberal Unionist was elected unopposed.
Elections in the 1890s
General election of 1895
In the 1895 UK general election, Thomas Bedford Bolitho, Liberal Unionist was elected unopposed.
General election of 1892
In the 1892 UK general election, Thomas Bedford Bolitho, Liberal Unionist was elected unopposed.
Elections in the 1880s
St Ives By-Election 9th July 1887
In the 1887 St Ives by-election, Thomas Bedford Bolitho, Liberal Unionist was elected unopposed.
Elections in the 1830s
Candidates for the next general election
Confirmed candidates for St Ives at the next UK general election:
See also
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