The Conservative Party controls Thanet and Dover District Councils and Kent County Council. Labour controlled Thanet and Dover District Councils from 1995 to 2003. The neighbouring constituencies to South Thanet are North Thanet (Roger Gale, Conservative), Canterbury (Julian Brazier, Conservative) and Dover (Gwyn Prosser, Labour).

For the next General election the South Thanet boundaries will change . Roughly speaking, Minster will move into North Thanet, Sholden into Dover and the Cliftonville seats currently in North Thanet will move into South Thanet. The changes will be beneficial to the Tory Party but no-one really knows how many votes they will gain and estimates range between a few hundred and a thousand votes.

 

 

‘Electoral Calculus’ carries out an independent assessment of recent opinion polls and publishes a prediction of each UK seat based on those polls.

 

For the latest electoral calculus prediction click here

 

Steve Ladyman first won the seat from Jonathan Aitken, a Conservative Cabinet Minister, in 1997. At the 1992 elected Mr.Aitken had a healthy majority. The change in voting intentions was partly due to significantly changing demographics and growing unemployment under Conservative control and partly due to national changes in voting attitudes. The local swing is often, wrongly, attributed to scandals surrounding Jonathan Aitken but the court cases involving him occurred after the 1997 election and the Conservatives did no better in 2001 with a different candidate.

The 2002 election result is shown below:

Dr. Steve Ladyman was re-elected as MP for South Thanet in the 2005 general election. The result in full:

The 1997 and 1992 results for South Thanet are shown below:

email:  stephenladymanmp@souththanetlabour.org.uk

Politics in South Thanet