So, now even the Tories recognise what the rest of the country has long known: they’re an English rump, almost extinct in metropolitan areas, and Conservative voters are, quite literally, dying out. In its recent The Case for Change report, Cchange, the thinktank set up by the Tory ‘modernisers’, offers a devastating analysis of the party’s current prospects.
Over the past ten years, admits Cchange, 509 opinion polls have been published. The Tory party has led in only five of them – all published during the week of the fuel protests. Moreover, apart from that period, Tory support has only risen above 34 percent three times in the last decade.
Opinion polls have also proved themselves to be a relatively accurate guide to general election results: overestimating by one percent the Tories’ standing during the 1992-7 parliament and underestimating it by 0.8 percent during the last parliament. Even more worryingly for Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservatives’ average poll ratings for the two years since Labour’s re-election is lower than the period 1992-7 and 1997-2001.
The consequences of this dramatic decline in support are outlined by The Case for Change. The Tory party’s share
of seats in metropolitan areas dropped from 46 percent in 1983 to 38 percent in 1992 and is now just nine percent.
In Britain’s ten largest cities, there are only thirteen Tory MPs out of a possible 130. Some of the UK’s biggest cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff – have no Tory MPs. The Tories have also become what Cchange terms ‘an English rump’, with only one seat in Scotland and none in Wales at all.
The 2001 general election was, admit the Tory modernisers, actually even worse than it appeared for the party. The one percent rise in Conservative support nationally was concentrated in seats the party already held: it rose by only 0.17 percent in Labour constituencies and fell by 0.15 percent in those held by the Lib Dems. Key groups of voters – ABs, C1s, 25 to 34 year-olds, ethnic minority voters and mortgage holders – swung even further against the Tories, as did voters in marginal Labour and Lib Dem seats.
Cchange concedes that the low turnout in 2001 helped the Tories. Polls of non-voters suggest they would have voted 53 percent Labour and only nineteen percent Tory. ‘The higher the turnout, the worse we do,’ says The Case for Change.
Sustaining the Tories from total electoral collapse in 2001 and a fall below 30 percent in the polls now is
the party’s relatively high support – 42 percent – amongst the over-65s. While this age group has the advantage, from the Tory party’s viewpoint, of turning out to vote in higher numbers than younger voters, it’s hardly the electorate of the future. Amongst the young – eighteen to 34 year-olds – the Tories are currently in third place, having slipped 0.2 percent behind the Lib Dems since 2001 – and 30 percent adrift of Labour.
Cchange argues that the Tory decline set in long before 1997 as the party failed to respond to a shift in voters’ concerns about the most important issues affecting the country – away from defence, the unions and inflation and towards crime, health and education. On all these issues, Labour established a strong lead. At the same time, the Tories admit they ‘forfeited credibility on tax’ and came to be seen as the ‘nasty party’.
Today, The Case for Change sees the Tories still in dire straits. Voters are less interested in tax cuts; the party still trails Labour on the key issues; and most voters still see the Tories as ‘the same party as they were under John Major’: divided, out of touch and untrustworthy. Constituencies where the Tories did break through in 2001 – like Romford – are dismissed by Cchange as ‘not typical’ and ‘like the Conservative party core, not like Britain’. Neither liked by Britain nor like Britain. Cchange, at least, are one group of Tories who understand their country.