Elections in the UK: Labour Gets Whomped

The center-left didn't just lose in the elections for European parliament - they got creamed in local elections in the UK. This map, from Times Online, shows the comprehensiveness of the shellacking:



Says the BBC:

The Tories took councils from Labour and the Lib Dems including Derbyshire, run by Labour since 1981.

The Lib Dems won control in Bristol while Labour lost control of all of its four councils.

Labour deputy Harriet Harman admitted the results were "disappointing" but said the party would learn from them.

The Conservatives took Staffordshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire from Labour - which had run all of them for more than 25 years - as well as Devon and Somerset from the Lib Dems...

With all the results in from the 34 councils which held elections, the Tories gained 233 councillors while Labour lost 273 seats and the Lib Dems four - although Sussex's results are provisional pending a recount in one ward.

According to the BBC's projections, the Conservatives garnered 38% of the national vote with Labour falling to a historic low of 23%.

The Lib Dems polled an estimated 28% of the vote, with other parties on 11%.

I understand there are certain peculiarities in British politics at the moment. Nonetheless, the poor results for Labour are no doubt partly due to the fact that the economy has gone hang-gliding without a glider on Labour's watch. And it kind of points up one of the absurdities of representative democracy: utterly contingent factors play an enormous role in the outcome of elections. For instance, the Great Depression traumatized countries around the world. In the US, the response was to elect Franklin Roosevelt and the most liberal government in US history. In Germany, the response to elect Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In both countries, the economy eventually improved; and in both countries, the new government got the credit. Likewise, the tanking economy didn't help the Republicans in the US last fall, and it's not helping Labour in the UK now. But all of this is quite aside from who's actually responsible for the tanked economy.

The Road to Canterbury

If, like me, you like literature and English is your primary language, you probably have this occasional nagging sense that you ought to read Canterbury Tales. But - again, if you're like me - you probably haven't. Well good news! There's no need. You can just go and check out NPR's interactive map of the journey about which Chaucer's work was written.



The map is connected to a series of stories NPR is doing on modern England, and the sorts of changes that have happened there since Chaucer's time. From NPR:

Chaucer's stories, published in the late 14th century, follow a collection of travelers from London to visit the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales offers readers a "concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country," wrote Oxford scholar Nevill Coghill.

Yep. Definitely ought to read that some time...

Depression in England and Wales

From Mark Easton, another interesting social map of the UK. This one shows the number of anti-depressant prescriptions per 1000 patients for January of this year.



Anti-depressant demand is especially booming in Wales and northern England. Says Easton:

The top seven [districts for anti-depressant prescription] are all Welsh Local Health Boards (LHBs) in a small area in the south of the country. Of the top thirty prescribers, 12 are in Wales and 10 are Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in the north-east of England.

We even see a local health authority prescribing at a rate greater than one prescription for 10 patients. In Torfaen, the area around Pontypool in south Wales, GPs handed out 104 prescriptions per 1,000 patients during January. This appears to be an astonishing level of anti-depressant use. GPs we have contacted blame a shortage of counselling for the high prescribing levels.

Those two areas have relatively high rates of unemployment. Easton also points out, though, that London, which has lots of poor folks, has some of the lowest rates of anti-depressant use; so a simple correlation to economic factors can't explain away all the trends. Beyond that: is it too trite to say that northern England is just a more depressing place to live than London? There's the bad economy, but there's also the erosion of infrastructure, the past-their-primeness of cities and institutions, and the general sense of malaise of a region whose industrial might peaked during some century other than the one we're in. If, as in my imagined picture of the place (which I have never visited), the actual north ofEngland is like the Michigan or Upstate New York of The UK, I think that maybe no great exegesis is needed to explain the region's higher anti-depressant use.

Regarding Wales, though, I don't have any overly simplistic and ignorant opinions to offer. Commenters on Easton's blog variously suggest the availability of free scrips in Wales; decrepit housing; unaffordable housing; oldness of the population; poor whiteness of the population; the social history of the region; the fecklessness of Labour politicians; Thatcher's anti-union policies; and average annual rainfall. I will go out on a limb and say: some or all of those factors may or may not be involved.

The Disappearance of the English Countryside

A study from the Campaign to Protect Rural England maps the effect of urbanization and development on the english countryside.






From the summary of the report:

We have developed a method of mapping areas of intrusion in England. These are areas disturbed by the presence of noise and visual intrusion from major infrastructure such as motorways and A roads, urban areas and airports. The resulting maps show the extent of intrusion in the early 1960s, early 1990s and 2007.

The report also has extensive data tables so you can see, for instance, that Oxfordshire County has gone from 75.45% undisturbed in the 1960s, to 54.63% in the early 1990s, to 41.45% today. It has such figures for all counties in England.

The maps are interesting in their own rights; but I'm also intrigued by the difference in the premise of this study from what you might see coming from a conservationist society in the U.S. In the States, you don't see much of this sort of concern with the aesthetic corruption of the countryside; what you do see is a concern for keeping areas in a state of uncorrupted wilderness (however that is defined). The American approach may be sentimental, in some ways, but it's not particularly aestheticist. I'm sure this has to do with the fact that the U.S. has an enormous amount of rural land, and it's not under threat of being consumed whole by a nation-swallowing urban conglomeration; and then, too, there's the fact that England doesn't really have any wilderness left to preserve. But I wonder if there's also a different approach to nature going on here: Americans see nature as an Eden to be preserved, or exploited for its resources; Brits see it as a garden to be managed. But this is just an idle hypothesis - anyone have any thoughts on this (poossible) cultural difference?

The Housing Bubble, Mapped

From USA Today (via The Urbanophile.):

Two maps, one from 2000 and the other from 2007, show the share of Americans taking on huge new debt to buy a home increasing dramatically across the country. By 2007, the national average was 9% of all borrowers, a rate higher even than at the peak of the U.S. housing boom in 2006.

I think we all have a pretty good sense by now that the housing market went through a bit of a maniacal phase in the recent past. But it's interesting to note that the distribution of mania was far from geographically uniform: it was a phenomenon of the West more than the East (including the interior West to a greater extent than I'd realized); of Minneapolis more than Chicago, and Chicago more than the rest of the Midwest; of Boston and DC more than Philadelphia. And Texas appears to be entirely blameless in the whole fiasco.

And here's a similar map for England:



It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, as this map shows housing prices rather than mortgage rates, but it seems that the bubble in England was much more geographically uniform.

A 4th Grader's Map of Great Britain

Hee Hee...



Real places, every one. For some reason, I can't get over 'North Piddle.'

Social Cohesion in the UK

Here's another map on the social health of England:



Mark Easton gives a description of the map:

The map colours range between bright green (where 100% of the population think that "people from different backgrounds get on well") to bright red (where 40% or fewer believe the same). Broadly, green means good race relations while brown/red suggests tension.

As with the anomie map, I'd be interested to see a version of this for the US. In both the UK and the US, my educated guess - and it's not more than that - is that you'd see better reported relations between races in areas that either have very low minority populations, or a very high degree of diversity. In the former sorts of places, minority groups aren't sufficiently prominent to pose a threat to the local majority group. In the latter sorts of places, there may be no majority group (as is the case where I live), and so members of diverse groups are pretty much forced to live and work together (and are liable to find that the world does not come crashing down upon doing so). In between, however, are communities where a majority of the population has historically been empowered (whites, in England), but where a significant minority population seems to represent a threat to their erstwhile hegemonic control.

Of course, tons of other factors, especially historical and economic ones, contribute to the nature of race relations. (I'm sure you'd find different attitudes on race in Vermont compared with southern Appalachia, even though both regions are almost entirely white.) But it would be very interesting to compare this cohesion map with a map of ethnic population by county in the UK. (I've been looking - I can't find one, but I'll post if I do.)