The Labour party’s success at the last three elections has been built, as the Tories well know, on winning support way beyond what are seen as our traditional heartlands. We have successfully appealed to millions of voters without any history of voting Labour – and had to pinch ourselves when we won seats that had not returned a Labour MP for decades.
We won this support by convincing these voters we understood their ambitions for themselves and their families and persuading them that they could best be realised within the fairer and more prosperous country we were determined to build.
The electoral landscape at the next election means maintaining this broad support will be more important than ever. By the next General Election, there will be a net shift of 15 seats from urban areas to shire counties – a change from seats in traditional Labour areas to those considered in the past to be Tory heartlands. This reflects long-term changes in population and in aspirations, of more families wanting to move out of the big cities to towns and villages.
The last three elections show we have no need to be fearful of this change. But it does mean that even if next time we win every single seat in Scotland, Wales, London and the six old metropolitan areas, we will still be 36 MPs short of a majority. So we can forget the idea that the fourth term will rest solely on us winning back those urban seats which fell to the Lib-Dems last time. It won’t. Nor should we fool ourselves into thinking that convincing the stay-at-home Labour supporters to vote for us again will be enough. It won’t. They just don’t live in enough numbers in the areas where we lost ground in 2005
We have to do both, of course. They are vital to push us back up to the 40% share of the vote we want. But we also have to continue reaching out to those who perhaps never voted Labour before 1997. Just look at how our success in doing this has helped put and keep us in power.
In 1987, the South East (though not London), the South West and the East of England – which includes much of what might be called Middle England – elected just three Labour MPs from 197 seats. Ten years later, these three regions returned 59 Labour MPs.
Even after the disappointments of the last election, we still hold 44 seats.
If we turn our back on these voters and these areas, they will turn their backs on us. And the result will be defeat at the next election. For it is not just that the seats in these regions which are crucial to building a majority. It is also that their voters are typical of those who are dominant in the key marginals in every area.
These are constituencies – in the M25 corridor, Northamptonshire and around Bristol, Gloucester and Swindon, for example – where a high proportion of voters have mortgages and are in white collar or highly skilled manual jobs. Constituencies, too, where the Lib Dems are often weak and where just a small shift of votes away from us will see them fall to the Conservatives.
Two million voters switched from Conservative to Labour in 1997. Overwhelmingly, they have stayed with us in the two elections which followed. It is their votes which ensured we won. Without them next time, we have a mountain to climb to win a fourth term.