Talk:Terry Fields

Labour gain from Conservative

Quote: "Fields was selected as the Labour Party candidate for Liverpool Broadgreen for the general election in 1983 and became the only Labour MP that year to win a Conservative-held seat."

The page for Liverpool Broadgreen indicates that it was created in 1983, and the predecessor seat was Liverpool Mossley Hill. Yet Mossley Hill was also created the same year! As far as I can tell, Broadgreen was created from several other seats. It's possible the writers of these articles were referring to Liverpool Edge Hill, which was abolished in 1983, as several of the wards in that seat went into Broadgreen. Edge Hill was held by a Liberal MP, who kept his seat in the newly created Mossley Hill - yes, these boundary changes are all very confusing! The bottom line is, I fail to see any way that Terry Fields' election to Parliament in 1983 was a 'gain' for the Labour Party, from a Conservative, Liberal or otherwise. Unless you merely count the fact it was a new seat, and Fields won it - despite the fact it hadn't existed before. (Can you 'gain' something that didn't exist before?) --TrottieTrue (talk) 01:04, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

References

Noticed this old comment and as it indirectly relates to an edit I have made to this article I thought I would comment. Basically this comes from the fact that for the 1983 Election the BBC and ITN commissioned figures for what the 1979 result would have been based on the 1983 boundaries (a similar process happened in 1997 and 2010 when new seats were fought). This led some new seats to be listed as gains and other seats which had had boundaries altered to be counted as holds when the holding party had changed. Nowadays when seats a re fought on different boundaries, the media and political scientists tend to talk about wins rather than holds or gains as the process of estimating is only that and sometimes produces questionable results (or in some cases two different methods come up with different results). There were two or three seats in 1983 where the result was so out of line with the predicted notional 1979 result that questions were raised at the time about the accuracy of the projection (Birmingham Erdington for instance was predicted to have been Conservative in 1979, but was won by Labour in 1983 which given the other results in the West Midlands raised eyebrows). I have noted here simply that the notional 1979 projection for ITN and the BBC was that Broadgreen would have returned a Conservative MP with majority of 565, but have not described it as a gain (See also my edit to Liverpool Broadgreen (UK Parliament constituency)). Dunarc (talk) 20:51, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

It is also worth noting that 1983 United Kingdom general election lists Broadgreen as Labour's fifth target seat at the election (ie the fifth easiest seat for it to take). I suspect this is based on the ITN/BBC projection and again shows that it was treated (however questionably) as a notionally Conservative-held seat. Dunarc (talk) 20:48, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

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