As a teenager, when I would tell people I was interested in politics they would invariably respond by saying something like: ‘Well, you could put up a monkey with a red rosette around here and it would get elected’. Of course, at the time we didn’t know that just a few years later we would discover that a monkey could actually get elected in the north-east without even wearing the red rosette.
Yet when Stuart Drummond, the aforementioned monkey, did win in Hartlepool no one even seemed to want to ask why local people would prefer a man dressed as a monkey to all three of the established political parties? Instead the result was cited as evidence that the whole idea of elected mayors was a government folly. But the real insight of elections like Hartlepool’s mayoral contest is what happens when you take a place which has hitherto experienced a rather stale and static political climate and offer people a genuine choice.
I’m no fan of elected mayors, nor am I an advocate of any particular alternative to our voting system, but I despair at the way British politics denies so many people a real say at election time by falsely dividing the country up into ‘heartlands’ and ‘marginals’. So much of the strategy of all three parties rests on taking huge swathes of the population for granted, and insults their intelligence by assuming they won’t vote any differently to the way their neighbours have voted for years.
No one would argue that culture and family history aren’t huge influences on voting behaviour, but equally no one would seriously claim that we aren’t living in anything other than a period of intense voter volatility. The Labour party still enjoys a significant electoral legacy from families whose parents grew up under Labour’s post-1945 hegemony, and from communities so harshly discarded by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, but that legacy has a natural time limit. The fundamental changes in British society over the last few decades: the decline of the old industrial economy, the spread and sharpening of aspiration, and the resulting obsolescence of class-based politics, mean no community can be taken for granted. All parties seem to understand this when it comes to crafting their message, yet none of them seem to remember it when it comes to seriously fighting areas outside of their natural comfort zones.
Many Labour activists happily accept this, still thinking of elections in terms of the 1992 ‘key seat’ contests. In many constituencies where Labour is a poor second or third we pay no real attention even to whom our parliamentary candidates are. But the constituency electorates of today bear little relation to what they were 16 years ago, and ‘key seats’ can too easily become self-fulfilling prophecies whereby some constituencies become key seats simply because two or more of the political parties regularly contest them.
Given the list of places that returned a Labour MP in 1997, and the proof that may come from the presidential election if Obama takes some of the so-called ‘red’ states, there seems no reason for us not to take parts of the country where Labour performs badly more seriously and, equally, for us to become more attuned to the threat that exists in our own core areas – not least from the BNP. The problem is that this would require a longer-term strategy that any of the parties currently feels able to meet, with the short-term priorities of an almost permanent rolling campaign cycle inevitably dictating where scarce resources can be deployed. At some point, however, there will be a real dividend for the party that challenges the current old assumptions – let’s hope that it’s Labour.