‘You can’t fatten a pig on market day,’ as Lynton Crosby puts it. Wrong about so much, the Australian svengali of conservative politics, who was imported to help Michael Howard in 2005 and is now assisting Boris Johnson’s bid for London mayor, is surely right that elections are rarely won or lost in the four weeks leading up to polling day. Instead, it’s the policies and messages, ideas and organisation which are invested in over a much longer term which ultimately determine the outcome of elections.

Nearly three years ago, in the wake of the last general election, the first warnings over the return of ‘southern discomfort’ – Labour’s difficulty during the 1980s and early 1990s in winning the support and trust of voters in southern England – were sounded. Today, with only two years until the prime minister must call a general election, Labour’s position in the south remains in peril, as we highlight in our cover story this month.

Recall the electoral landscape of three years ago. Over one-third of the party’s national loss of seats took place in the south, and Labour only narrowly managed to remain ahead of the Liberal Democrats in the popular vote here. In the south-east Labour did indeed slump to third place, polling under 25 per cent of the vote. Twenty of the party’s 47 nationwide losses occurred in the region.

The local elections since 2005 offer little by way of evidence that the picture is improving. After two sets of elections, Labour now only controls two councils south-east of a line from Bristol to the Wash; in London it has overall control of less than a third of the capital’s boroughs. Nearly half the councils in the south-east have no Labour councillors. And this month, even Ken Livingstone – despite his strong record of achievement and independent profile – appears to be locked in a tight race for re-election as London mayor.

Does any of this matter? Yes, which is why we ask readers from other parts of the country to indulge our decision to feature the politics of London and the south for the second consecutive issue. As Giles Radice recalls on page 12, easing Labour’s southern discomfort was a critical step in the party’s long march back to power. When he first publicly identified the party’s southern malaise in 1992, Radice wrote of Labour suffering ‘a crippling political weakness’ in which the south-east had become ‘one huge Tory safe seat’. Labour held only 10 of the 177 southern seats outside of London and only three in the south-east (as opposed to 80 in 1974).

Today, the south – in which we include not simply Greater London and the south-east, but the south-west and eastern regions, too – is home to 42 per cent of the seats on the British mainland. The south-east, with 13 per cent of the seats, is the country’s largest region and returns 19 Labour MPs to parliament. Nearly half of Labour’s 50 most vulnerable seats – those oft-discussed ‘super marginals’ – are in the south

And it is in the seat-rich south that the Tories had begun to recover even before David Cameron’s election as leader. In 2005, many of the Tories’ gains were not the result of inadvertent assistance from the Liberal Democrats; instead, especially in London and around the M25, there was simply direct switching from Labour to Conservative.

But it would be a mistake, as John Denham correctly argued last year, to regard the south as ‘inherently hostile territory’ for Labour and to believe that the party can only win here ‘at the expense of losing our soul’. Issues such as inequality and social mobility have just as much resonance in the south as elsewhere in the country.

Nonetheless, Labour also needs to craft an appeal which shows it understands the kind of southern voters who, ultimately, will decide the outcome of the next election. As last year’s deputy leadership contest showed, some in the party seem to believe that Labour simply has to renew its appeal to its disaffected traditional supporters. Important though that task is, it cannot be undertaken in isolation from a strategy which also seeks to appeal to voters in southern marginal seats. Thus the party needs the kind of broad-based message – which underlines the party’s commitment to tackling crime and anti-social behaviour, improving and reforming public services, and addressing the social and economic pressures which accompany mass migration – which can rebuild the winning New Labour coalitions of 1997 and 2001.

It is not that other issues are unimportant, but it is vital for Labour to remember the lesson of the 1980s: staying connected with the concerns of all voters, not simply those whom the party had habitually relied upon for support. In 1992, for instance, Labour’s manifesto devoted more pages to homelessness than paragraphs to home ownership. There is a danger, in some of the party’s current discourse, that this kind of approach is gaining favour again. If it does, it will come at a heavy price: the loss of marginal seats not just in the south, but throughout the country, and with it the return of a Tory government. Labour has a choice to make and not much time in which to make it.