General Election 2019: How safe is your MP's seat?
Friday 6 December 2019 10:10, UK
The window for candidates to be put forward for the general election has closed.
No new names can appear and nobody can withdraw.
Sky News has analysed election data for England and Wales since the Second World War to discover how safe seats across the country are.
The Conservatives have the strongest grip on seats in England, according to our analysis.
There are more than 120 seats across England and Wales which have not changed hands in the Commons since 1945 with the Conservatives retaining a majority of them.
Two-thirds of the seats have been Conservative since the 1945 election.
Sky News analysis shows voters who live in the North of England or Wales are more likely to be in a seat which has remained Labour for decades.
Those living in the South East might find themselves in a Conservative stronghold.
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However, there are a handful of seats in both regions which buck the trend. The seat being vacated by Rory Stewart, Penrith and Border, has been Conservative since the 1940s, as has Rishi Sunak's seat in Richmond, Yorkshire.
In the South, it's London seats which tend to remain Labour. Vauxhall, currently occupied by the de-selected pro-Brexit Kate Hoey for Labour, is one of those which hasn't turned in several decades. Both Hackney North and Hackney South are also pretty safe for the Labour Party.
Track how your constituency has voted over the years by selecting it from the drop down menu below.
North Durham's Labour MP picked up a sizeable margin in the last election, winning nearly 60% of the vote, close to double the 30% the Conservatives achieved.
Similarly, Jeremy Hunt's seat in South West Surrey has a large margin for the Conservatives. He won 55% of the vote in 2017, but Labour only picked up 12.9%. In fact, his closest rivals are the "other" parties who polled 21.8%.
Sky News analysed electoral results since the 1940s. As some constituency names have changed during this period, we have tracked their previous ones to get historical data.
Given the periodical boundaries changes, this analysis has used the "index of change", a measure calculated by academics Colin Rallings, Ron Johnston and Michael Thrasher to quantify the extent to which constituencies are changed by boundary reviews.
Sky News has only included those constituencies with an index of change below 20%, so the "core" of the constituency has remained almost unaltered geographically over this period.
We looked at the split of MPs among the regions in England and Wales, and found the Conservative Party has been traditionally stronger in the South East, while Labour has done better in Wales and the North East.
Historical vote share also shows how the parties have fared over the years in regions as a whole.
Scotland's vote share has also been included here, showing the huge rise of the SNP as Scottish independence became a bigger issue north of the border.
Labour has maintained a dominance in Wales over the years, but in the West Midlands, there has been a more complicated relationship between Britain's two biggest parties.
This analysis has been guided by Professor Michael Thrasher from the University of Plymouth. The average index of change is for England constituencies only.