St Neots constituency long overdue

Published: 11:15 AM October 5, 2011 Updated: 4:21 PM November 1, 2020

THANK you for inviting comments concerning the proposed creation of a St Neots Parliamentary constituency, although I fear there will be influential forces against this change.

I fervently hope the change does come about to give our town its rightful place along with Huntingdon and others and is not seemingly totally suppressed by the local district bureaucrats.

When I came to St Neots in 1965 – 46 years ago – from South Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire, I was so pleased to find a town more or less self-contained with its own magistrates’ court, cinema, swimming pool, register office of birth marriages and deaths, urban and rural district councils, jobcentre and own telephone code (in spite of having a modern exchange), most of which have since been transferred to Huntingdon.

It was so belittling when friends said they thought I lived in St Neots and not Huntingdon, and others thought we were a suburb of that town.

I mentioned these transfers as they occurred to a local historian, who said that the municipal thinking of the Tudor and Stuart times still existed in the minds of the bureaucrats, who considered St Neots as the breeding ground for providing the labourers to support the gentry of Huntingdon –a county town and birthplace of Oliver Cromwell etc.

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A Cambridge University historian once explained that St Neots was always considered to be Royalist and the start of the route to Oxford, especially as Eaton Ford, Eaton Socon and Wyboston were in the borough of Bedford, but of course the two former ones are now firmly in Cambridgeshire.

I repeat my hope that the boundary commission sticks to its guns, and St Neots gains its overwhelmingly correct status ready for the next general election in the next few years.