Climate Change by Electoral District

With the UK on the eve of a general election one political issue that has been conspicuous by its absence during the election campaign is climate change. I don't blame the political parties themselves too much for this. They spend a fortune on opinion polls and focus groups. Presumably they therefore know that the voting public are not concerned by climate change.

They should be!

A new map from University College London reveals that much of the UK has already warmed by 1°C since the 1970s. Using the Climate change projections by constituency over Great Britain map you can click on your electoral district and view the local temperature increase since the 70s. The map also allows you to view the 'past changes' in precipitation, and the increase in temperature on the hottest day of the year.

The UCL map can also be used to view a 'near-term future' projection of climate change by constituency. These changes are predicted using  a range of different global projections'.

The hexmap of UK constituencies used by the UCL map was created using Open Innovations' Hexify. This is a tool that can be used to turn defined areas into a hexagon map. You can use Hexify to create a HexJSON file which can then be used with Hexviz to create a hexmap. A hexmap of UK 2024 General Election constituencies is also available from Automatic Knowledge. Automatic Knowledge's UK Constituency Files contain a number of downloadable election resources, including a hexmap of UK electoral areas.

Tory Candidates Violently Attacked

Election riot on 26 June 1865 in Nottingham

Disturbing reports of violence, carried out by supporters of the Liberal Party, have been reported across the whole of the UK. In Shoreham a gang of 300 Liberal supporters attacked poll clerks. In Grantham Liberals set polling booths on fire. In Alfreton a crowd of thousands attacked properties 'associated with Conservatives'.

These acts of electoral violence took place during UK elections in the 19th Century and are all documented on the Victorian Election Violence Map. The Victorian Election Violence Map visualizes nearly 3,000 incidences of violence which occurred in England and Wales during national elections held between 1832 and 1914. The map shows where violent election events took place, from minor incidents (such as the breaking of windows) to major political riots involving the deaths of many people.

There were 20 general elections in Britain between the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Great War starting in 1914. These elections were often accompanied by extreme violence. This violence often included major riots involving thousands of people, leading to the deaths of many people and large scale property damage. For example on the first day of polling in the 1868 General Election, there were at least 18 different riots across England & Wales. 

Supporters of the Conservative Party were not averse to using violence themselves. For example in Worthing the Liberal candidate for Mid-Sussex, Mr Hubbard, was "showered with stones upon his arrival to an election" and a "member of his party, Major Gaisford, was reportedly badly cut in the face". In "Andover, the Conservative party brought in railway navigators from Salisbury and Bishopstoke and plied them with beer, then set them loose in the crowd."

France Surrenders to Facism

The far-right National Rally has won 33% of the vote in the first round of France's parliamentary elections. You can view the results in each constituency in Le Monde's French elections: Map of the first round's results.

Le Monde's map is a sea of brown, revealing that the National Rally has managed to become the most popular party in electoral districts across the whole country. There is a degree of the non-equal representation of districts on the map over-egging the popularity of the National Rally. Generally the party performed better in the larger rural areas and not so well in the smaller inner-city districts.

Zoom in on many of France's largest cities and you can see that the National Rally is not quite so popular in the more multi-racial areas of the country. For example there is a distinct lack of support for the National Rally in most of the electoral districts in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse (although the National Rally were the most popular party in nearly every district in Marseille - the second most populous city in France).

However despite the fact that Le Monde's election map visually over emphasizes the scale of National Rally's success there is no denying that the far right party were the most popular party in the first round of the French parliamentary elections.

If you click on a district on the map you can view which candidates have qualified for the second round of the election. On Sunday France will hold the second-round of elections. In previous elections the center-right and center-left parties have often agreed to stand down candidates in order to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote. The left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, has already announced that they will withdraw all their third-place candidates from the next round of elections. The French President Emmanuel Macron has also asked voters to support 'republican and democratic' candidates.

In The main lessons of the first round in six maps (paywalled) Le Parisien has mapped out the success of individual parties across the whole of France. For example the map above shows the rise and fall in support for Macron's 'presidential bloc' since 2022. Macron's bloc has seen a significant fall in support from 26% to 20% in just two years. Le Parisien has also mapped the high turnout in Sunday's election across the whole of France (almost up 20% since 2022). 

One result of the high turnout was that a number of candidates were able to be elected in the first round. The main winners were again the far-right National Rally, who already have 39 deputies elected to the French parliament from the 76 candidates directly elected in the first round of the French elections.

Bloomberg published an interesting map visualizing the surge of support for Le Pen's National Rally. In Le Pen’s Support Surges in Nearly Every City, Town and Village in France (paywalled) peak markers are used to show the rise in votes for National Rally at the municipality level. The map shows that the party increased its share of the vote across most of the country.