Labour was all but annihilated in the south of England on 6th May. We now have a PLP dominated by the concerns of Scotland, Wales, London, and northern cities. Few speak for southern England. That means it is more important than ever that we elect a Leader who ‘gets’ the south, and can rebuild our support in southern towns and suburbs.
As the new analysis published by Liam Byrne here at Progress shows, seventy per cent of the 938,000 votes Labour lost on 6th May were in the east, south-east and south-west. Labour’s share of the vote in the south-east (outside London) halved to just 16 per cent. I’ll say it again, in case you thought it a typo: 16 per cent.
Across the entire southern-eastern sweep of England there are just 10 Labour MPs, sustained by a combined majority of just 57,500 – out of the 10 million votes cast. We lost our southern coastal towns: Brighton, Hastings and Dover, as well as the seats on the north Kent coast. In Southampton Itchin, John Denham’s majority is 192. In 1997, Labour had a 11,707 majority in Crawley. In 2010 Crawley has a Conservative majority of 5,928.
To understand Labour’s defeat in 2010, you have to understand why we lost the south. One reason is presentational. We had a Scottish prime minister and a Scottish chancellor of the exchequer, and a raft of cabinet ministers from the north of England, London and Wales. If you lived in the south, there was a sense that the government belonged to somewhere else. It spoke with a different accent.
Harold Wilson and Tony Blair managed to construct public personae which connected with English voters. Wilson had his tinned salmon, his HP sauce and his pipe. It was only in private that the hand-rolled havanas and VSOP brandy made an appearance. Blair had his jeans, his mug of tea, his rock music and his concern for the drivers of Mondeos. Gordon Brown just had his suits, his sense of ‘duty’ and a Presbyterianism entirely alien to voters in the south.
But the far more complex reason is policy-based. Skilled workers – the fabled C2s – deserted us because they felt the government was doing nothing for them. They were working harder, but not getting richer. They were told they were too affluent to deserve any help from the government, yet they felt ever more squeezed. The vortex issue into which all other issues, from housing to schools, from the NHS to transport, were sucked, was of course immigration. Immigration has transformed many communities in under a decade. In other places in the south, it was fear of change that made immigration a top-five issue. Either way, Mrs Duffy spoke for England far more convincingly on this issue than any Labour politician.
I want immigration to be a major issue in the Labour leadership debates, not least because the only two nominated candidates on the ballot paper, as things stand, are the sons of immigrants. As it happens, being brothers, they are sons of the same immigrants. Ralph Miliband fled from Nazi Europe with his father Samuel in 1940. On arriving in London as a refugee, he started a furniture removal business, went to the London School of Economics, and became a Marxist (swearing an oath of loyalty at Marx’s grave in Highgate). Like many student Marxists, he became active in the student union. Unlike most student Marxists, his university career was interrupted by service in the Royal Navy. One or other of his sons will probably be leader of the Labour party by the autumn, and quite possibly prime minister.
If Ralph had kept going, like thousands of other European Jews, and ended up in New York, Ed and David would be running to be president of the United States. The US media would love it – brothers in rivalry for the job of leader of the free world, just like the Kennedys. And in America, their ‘backstory’ – their father a penniless immigrant fleeing the Nazis – would be considered a priceless electoral asset. They would embody the American Dream.
There is no ‘British Dream.’ The achievements of immigrants to Britain in building new lives, creating successful businesses, and contributing to the wellbeing of the nation is not celebrated. One question for the leadership candidates might be: why not? After all, aspiration is a core British value: the desire for your children to do better than you did, to enjoy opportunities and experiences, as well as material security.
For Labour to reconstruct its appeal to the south won’t be easy. Who speaks for the south now that all the MPs are gone? Who in the shadow cabinet? In the 1990s, the Fabians did us a great service by publishing Southern Discomfort? a study into voters’ aspirations and attitudes in southern seats. It informed much of New Labour’s appeal. We also had ‘Operation Toehold’ which gave support to CLPs in areas without Labour representation (and which recruited a future general secretary Peter Watt). This is the kind of work we need to start again.
Labour must understand the needs of families on a combined household income of £50,000, who feel on the edge of disaster. It needs to speak to people who work in offices, who do not belong to unions, who have never been to Manchester, Newcastle or Scotland, and never will. As one MP put it at the Progress conference last Saturday, Labour needs to understand why people want a conservatory. Until we do, we will never win back the south.
We have conservatorys in the north too you know!
As someone who grew up in the heart of Surrey, I do not believe the Labour party needs a leader who will pander to the ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ consumerist attitudes of some wealthier workers with a bit more disposable income to spend on lifestyle choices like a flash new conservatory. It’s a bit demeaning to characterise us all in this way.
Wealth and jobs are far too concentrated in the South East. Many people in the SE are prepared for their taxes help regenerate other areas of the country instead of overheating the SE economy and putting more and more demand on its infrastructure.
The party needs at its head someone with the leadership skills to articulate the vision of a fairer society in opposition to the consumerist materialism of recent decades.
Get real. Labour lost the election because it failed to demonstrate that it had something to offer average working people with incomes of between £15,000 and £20,000, who are often better off on benefits. Yes, they resent working to scrape a living. Yes, Labour did a lot for the very poorest, and we mustn’t forget that, but we failed to show that we care, not about those on £50K household income who are near the top of the ladder, but those on £30K who are on the second rung of the ladder. We were far too afraid of upsetting those who have the privilege of being a non-dom, those who have the privilege of paying 10% capital gains tax, those cash hungry consultants who charged fees at 40% to milk our public services, those who have a suite of buy-to-let properties but are unwilling to offer their tenants the normal degree of security which is accepted throughout the Western world. Finally we decided that the globalisation of wages was good and we listened to business when they called for cheap east European labour, even though we knew that would mean ordinary people suffering wage cuts. And some in our Party say that we should be concerned about White working class people who are concerned about east European immigrants taking their council houses and jobs – a bogey man of our creation. Perhaps some in the Party will now say some political parties in pre WW2 Germany were right to have been concerned about Germans who thought Jews taking their houses and jobs?
Thank you Trixie(well apart from the last sentence) & Timbo
After reading Pauls recomendations I lost the will to live
My first reaction is – “so you know what it feels like!” it does not matter where the leader or PM represents it is what he is going to do for the people of this country and the country.
The north has always felt that government was elsewhere….. it is time for someone with roots both camps like Harold Wilson like Tony Blair … aspirational and inspirational with conections to the north and the south knowing how ordinary people live and work and play.
Do the milibrands know anything about “us up north?”
why not just vote tory?
It’s all very well understanding why people might want a conservatory but we are plainly not about to see the kind of economic boom that existed from the mid-90s. Chances are, most people who might want a conservatory aren’t going to get it – the current government is promising an Age of Austerity, and unfortunately this is something they will succeed in delivering…
I am actually quite worried at the way the Duffy effect seems to have hypnotised many of our leadership candidates into thinking talking about immigration is the key to Labour’s future.
Actually we won Rochdale, notwithstanding Mrs Duffy, and did well in many areas where one might have thought communal tensions would be high, and we saw off the BNP in Barking and Stoke. In some of the Council estates here in Reading core Labour voters were queueing at the polling stations. But except in very urbanised areas the core is not enough to win the Parliamentary seats we need to regain a majority.
So yes we need to speak to, loosely, office workers in the south of England, and to project a vision of collective values which responds to their aspirations and their fears. That will include quality and reliable public services, it will include safety nets against disaster, and it must include principles of mutual respect and fairness.
What we have seen already of this ConDem government shows none of that is on offer from them, so we have a pretty open field on which to build.
I’d agree with Pete Ruhemann’s objective and balanced assessment of our propspects.
Why not vote Tory, ah I did, for the first time in 48 years I did not vote Labour, I’m sick of Tony Bloody Blair, and most of you lot on here are new Labour.
I just had the best laugh even my Labour party asked me to come back to fight the welfare reforms, they put the dam thing into power, now they are saying they did not mean for it to go that far, but it did, fight it, nope I’m a Tory now.
From the Poor Law to the Poll Tax then on to Green Belt Policy and Housing Policy , the North has always sufered from having solutions to problems percieved in the South East imposed on the whole country. As long as all our MP’s are based in London and come under the influence of capitalism (that is thinking the Capital is the same as the rest of the country) we in the North will have to tolarate a National Media that reports the South East as being the whole country, we have to comiserate with their bad weather, suffer solutions to their congestion and have the London Evening Standard reported as a National Newspaper.
fter all that diatribe – all I am saying is different strokes.pinwheel