Oxford East is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament by Anneliese Dodds of the Labour Party, who also serves as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. The constituency covers the eastern and southern parts of Oxford in Oxfordshire. It borders Oxford West and Abingdon to the west and Henley to the north, east and south. The seat, created in 1983, includes Oxford city centre and the majority of the Oxford colleges, Cowley and adjoining parts of the city including a broad area of mid-to-low rise council-built housing, Blackbird Leys, which has kept varying amounts of social housing. A large percentage of the seat's electorate consists of students from Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities. Part of the seat with a high proportion of private housing is archetypal bourgeois/leafy Headington which is mainly a mixture of student tenants and relatively high-income families, while the seat also includes the similarly prosperous areas of Grandpont and New Hinksey in the south of the city. At the end of 2010 unemployment claimant count was 2.3%, 45th of the 84 South East constituencies and close to the mean of 2.45%.
History
From 1885 until 1983 the vast bulk of the area of the seat, as it has variously been drawn since 1983, was in the abolished Oxford constituency, historically Liberal then for some decades Conservative, and which then alternated with the Labour Party, who took that seat in the late 1960s and late 1970s. For the first four years Oxford East was served by Conservative Steven Norris. He was defeated by Labour candidate Andrew Smith who held the seat for the next 30 years before retiring. The Conservative share of the vote fell to a low to date, of 16.7%, in 2005, a year when the seat became an emphatic Labour–Liberal Democrat contest, and the votes for Andrew Smith were 963 more than the "Lib Dem" candidate: a majority of 2.3% of the votes. Smith held the seat in 2015; it was the 80th-safest of Labour's 232 seats won that year by percentage of majority. On his retirement the localLabour party selected Anneliese Dodds. At election she took 23,284 votes, broadly in line with many of Smith's results. In 2015 and 2017 the runner-up became a Conservative as before the last two general elections. The Green Party's candidate has stood in all eight contests since the party was branded as such, once retaining its deposit, in 2015, with almost 12% of the vote. Ousted ex-MP Norris won the largest runner-up's share of the vote to date during the 1987 general election, which was in general a drubbing for the Liberal party who had a candidates' pact with Social Democratic Party candidates and a fallout among the SDP's Gang of Four. Turnout has ranged between 78.9% in 1987 and 55.8% in 2001.
