One of the accusations made against Labour by its political opponents is that it is an urban party, interested only in trendy townies and the industrial heartlands, understanding little and caring less about the traditions and ways of life of rural folk. While the claim itself is little more than knockabout abuse, it is fair to examine the scope of New Labour’s electoral appeal over the last 10 years and whether there is any truth to the notion that a rural-urban divide runs through the political geography of the recent era.
At a parliamentary level, the scope of Labour’s victory in 1997 certainly brought victory in many seats that could properly be described as rural, even though the map of much of the country still resembled a sea of blue surrounding some very large and small islands of red. Outside the southern half of England, however, these patterns have never prevailed in such a uniform way. Indeed, rural Scotland and Wales have long been almost as hostile to the Conservatives as urban areas, and many of the most traditionally Labour constituencies in those countries are dominated by small towns and villages.
Various estimates have been made of how many Labour constituencies could be described as ‘rural’, ranging as high as 180. While some (like Newark, North West Norfolk, Forest of Dean, and The Wrekin) experienced adverse swings and proved impossible to defend in 2001 and 2005, there remain dozens of Labour seats which are dominated, at least in acreage, by relatively sparsely populated territory.
Most, however, include at least one settlement of more than 20,000 electors, and it is a well-founded assumption that they usually provide the concentrations of Labour support which make such seats winnable. It is clearly true that Labour tends to have higher levels of support in urban areas than rural, although even that is not universally true (for example rural Labour Wansdyke surrounding Liberal Democrat-Tory Bath), nor that such patterns are of very long standing.
Such distinctions are, though, of limited political usefulness, for any sectional strategy to discount rural areas as marginal and electorally hostile would be unsustainable, even if it were desirable. The diversity which has arisen from the relative decline of agricultural employment, as well as the dependence of many urban-dwellers on the leisure opportunities afforded by the countryside, make the politics, economies and interests of each more inter-dependent than ever.