The table is clearer if clicked on and thus displayed full size.Note that the ranking is logical: the 1st in the Life Expectancy column has the highest expectancy, whereas 1st in one of the Poverty columns means the ward has the highest level of that poverty in Medway.
There are few surprises: for example, the wards with the highest population densities tend to have Labour or (occasionally) Liberal Democrat or Independent councillors – although not all of them, I notice – and the longest life expectancies are to be found in Conservative-represented wards.
So far, so good. Mind you, I hadn't realised just how high density Rochester East is: it's the second highest at 69 people to the hectare, more than double the density of the adjoining ward that I represented for several years, Rochester South & Horsted at 32 to the hectare, which in turn is double that of the remaining Rochester-named ward, Rochester West at just 16 per hectare. My old ward became that high when the boundaries changed and some higher density (largely ex-Labour ward) areas were added on.
I knew that a previous Labour administration of the former council had got a large amount of social housing put into the Rochester East area back in the 'eighties, in order to shift voting patterns in their direction, but that really is high density! It's actually in the Troy Town part of Rochester East, which used to be a ward by itself until the boundary changes that came into effect in 2003. I think they probably targeted that area because it already had a lot of this style of high density housing, thus giving them a head start...
This is the largest shopping parade in the ward, apart from the Co-Op off to the right, as captured for Google Street View a couple of years ago. It's just like this even today...
It's just what one expects in an area with Labour-supporting demographics.
Such factors as fuel poverty and child poverty also follow the political pattern, helping to illustrate the well-documented and proven fact that Labour always keep people in poverty and State dependency, their "client base" as it's sometimes known.
That's where you'll find Labour councillors, once solidly embedded in the highest poverty wards such as Chatham Central, Gillingham North (though contested with other non-Conservatives), Luton & Wayfield and of course Rochester East. They'll claim all sorts of things about this, but the reality is that they need this hold over this substantial chunk of their voter base, as much as they need the Unions and the Scots and Welsh. The last thing they need is for those residents to climb out of poverty and dependency.
If any area starts genuinely improving (i.e. not just looking like it on the surface) it then tends to drift away from supporting Labour, with the results we have seen here in Medway and in various other parts of the country. Urban Strood is a classic case in Medway, now predominantly Conservative and with four or five of the six seats held by the Blues consistently since those wards came into being some three elections ago.
Walderslade, which incorporates Weeds Wood of all places, is now solidly Conservative, first with one of the two seats and this year adding the second as well. It is only the desertion of a large number of Liberal Democrat supporters that has let local Labour regain something of its former status as a decent-size opposition at the Lib Dems' expense, though still at under half the number of councillors that the Blue Team has.
Poverty and packing 'em in by the thousands are methods that are no longer anywhere near certain to work for Labour; so although the demographics are interesting, they probably aren't going to be anywhere near as useful to the Reds (or even the Yellows) in future as they would have been once upon a time!
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