Bradford West
Bradford West is a constituency in West Yorkshire represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2015 by Naz Shah of the Labour Party.
Constituency profile
The Bradford West constituency is located within the City of Bradford metropolitan borough in the county of West Yorkshire. It contains Bradford city centre and the neighbourhoods to its west, including Manningham, Allerton, Clayton and the outlying village of Thornton. The area has an industrial heritage; Bradford was once a global centre for textile manufacturing, particularly in the wool trade. Like much of post-industrial Northern England, Bradford has experienced economic decline with the decrease in importance of the textile industry.Compared to national averages, residents of the constituency are young and have low levels of income, education and professional employment. The area is highly deprived; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government data ranks Bradford West as the third most deprived constituency in England. Bradford's Pakistani community is concentrated in this area of the city; a majority of the constituency's residents are of Pakistani origin and 61% in total are Asian. Like the rest of Bradford, wards in the constituency are represented by Labour Party or independent councillors at the local district council. An estimated 51% of voters in the constituency supported remaining in the European Union in the 2016 referendum, marginally higher than the national figure of 48%.
History
The constituency was originally created in 1885, but was abolished in 1918. For the 1955 general election the constituency was recreated, following a boundary review.Since its recreation in 1955, Labour and Conservative Parties held the seat marginally in various years up to 1974, since which time the Labour Party always won the seat, with the exception of the 2012 Bradford West by-election. In 1981, however, Edward Lyons, the sitting Bradford West MP, joined the newly established Social Democratic Party, consequently losing the seat at the 1983 general election.
This seat has a history of bucking the national trend. In 1997, the seat was one of only two Labour seats in the country, the other being Bethnal Green and Bow in London, to have seen a swing towards the Conservatives away from Labour. This was attributed to the local party association selecting a Sikh, Marsha Singh to stand when the majority of the seat's population is Muslim. In 2010, however, Singh retained his seat with a swing in his favour, against the national result.
George Galloway of the Respect Party won the seat in the 2012 Bradford West by-election with 55.9% of the votes cast; his 30.9% majority was at the time the largest majority in the history of the modern constituency, but he lost the seat in 2015 to the new Labour candidate Naz Shah by a substantial margin. Despite Galloway's threats to contest the result, he neither launched a legal challenge nor stood again in 2017, in which Shah surpassed his record by winning a majority of 48.1%, the largest margin for a Bradford West MP in any incarnation of the seat. Despite Galloway not standing, his former Respect colleague Salma Yaqoob did stand as an Independent, garnering 6,345 votes, not far behind the second-placed Conservative candidate.
At the 2019 general election Shah increased her vote share by 11.5%. This was easily the highest increase in the Labour Party's vote share in any constituency in the United Kingdom, in an election where Labour's vote share decreased in all but 13 constituencies. This means that Bradford West has bucked the national trend thrice, as it also did in 1997 and 2010. Bradford West, during the 2019–24 Parliament, was the safest seat in the region of Yorkshire and the Humber for Labour. In 2024, when the Labour Party won a landslide nationally, the Labour share of the vote dropped dramatically to just 31% of the vote, reducing the Labour majority to 707 votes.
Boundaries
1885–1918: The Municipal Borough of Bradford wards of Allerton, Bolton, Great Horton, Heaton, and Manningham.1955–1974: The County Borough of Bradford wards of Allerton, Great Horton, Heaton, Manningham, and Thornton.
1974–1983: The County Borough of Bradford wards of Allerton, Heaton, Little Horton, Manningham, Thornton, and University.
1983–2010: The City of Bradford wards of Clayton, Heaton, Little Horton, Thornton, Toller, and University.
2010–present: The City of Bradford wards of City, Clayton and Fairweather Green, Heaton, Manningham, Thornton and Allerton, and Toller.
The 2023 Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies left the boundaries unchanged.