Copeland is one of five Cumbria seats won (held or gained) by a Conservative candidate in 2019 out of a total of six covering the county. The bulk of this seat is in the Lake District, together with a large proportion of its population.
The sole forerunner to the constituency was the abolished constituency of Whitehaven. Copeland consistently returned Labour Party candidates since its creation in 1983 until the by-election of 23 February 2017, when Trudy Harrison gained it for the Conservatives. Prior to that (save for the landslide in 1931 when part of the parliamentary Labour Party remained in government with the Conservative Party under Ramsay MacDonald), the last Conservative elected for the area was in 1924.
The 2015 result gave the seat the 31st most marginal majority of Labour's 232 seats by percentage of majority.[3]
Boundariesedit
Map of current boundaries
Following the renaming of the Whitehaven constituency as Copeland, Jack Cunningham, who had previously been the member for Whitehaven, stood for and won the Copeland seat. Its boundaries remained unchanged, being coterminous with the local government district of Copeland.
The four new wards thus extend the constituency beyond the district of Copeland. They include the town of Keswick, which has a larger electorate than the other three new and sparsely populated wards, despite their extensive area.[4] The new wards are in the Lake District, like much of Copeland district. The inclusion of Keswick in the constituency was the main topic in public consultations regarding the changes.
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^"STATEMENT OF PERSONS NOMINATED AND NOTICE OF POLL" (PDF). www.copeland.gov.uk. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 November 2019. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
^"Copeland parliamentary constituency - Election 2019". Retrieved 16 December 2019.
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^Glaze, Ben (19 January 2017). "Labour unveils Gill Troughton as its candidate for the tricky Copeland by-election". The Daily Mirror. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
^"Local NHS worker selected as UKIP candidate for the Copeland by-election". ukip.org. 20 January 2017. Archived from the original on 24 January 2017. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
^"Green Party announces anti-nuclear Copeland by-election candidate". Green Party. 24 January 2017. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
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