For most of our history, we have been strong in urban areas and former industrial regions but weak in most of rural England. Because of the less urban nature of the south that translates into a particular weakness in the south-west, south-east and the east of England. In the last two, there have been periods of Labour competitiveness in 1945, 1966 and between 1997 and 2005) but the overall picture has been one of Tory dominance. In the rural south-west, we have often not even been the second party in the region. The nature of its economy meant that Labour never completely overcame the Liberal tradition in the region, and the Liberal, and later Lib Dem, resurgence was both earliest and strongest there.
The 2010 general election result makes it quite hard for Labour to claim to be a national party. In the south-west we got only 15.4 per cent of the vote, in the south-east 16.2 per cent, and in the east of England 19.6 per cent. We were third in each case.
Our first past the post electoral system makes this situation even more polarised. There are now only 10 Labour MPs across those three regions, compared to 23 Lib Dems and a massive 163 Tories. Nationally 208 Labour candidates finished third, mainly in those regions.
The building blocks for nationwide recovery are not there, either. There are 101 councils without a single Labour councillor. The most recent published figures showed that 258 CLPs had fewer than 200 members.
Obviously, all first past the post elections are won and lost in a band of marginal seats. But the campaign in these seats is affected by the regional context. Thirteen of the seats Labour must gain to form a majority are in the three southern regions, as are 16 of the next 50 targets. If the surrounding seats in the region have very little Labour activity and no Labour councillors, it reinforces the idea that Labour is culturally alien to the south. It also means there are no active parties to support the campaign in the key seats.
The ‘50 state strategy’ of the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, in America wasn’t about abandoning targeting. The Obama campaign targeted resources into key states ruthlessly. But it was about there being a Democrat effort in every state to tie down the Republicans, uncover unexpected additional target states, raise money and build organisational capacity that could then support key states.
In Britain Labour needs a 633-seat strategy in the early years of this parliament to create the same momentum and build a nationwide renaissance of CLPs’ campaigning capacity. We need to win seats on every council we possibly can to prove we are a truly national party again.
There is a proven model for doing this. In 1995 Tony Blair initiated ‘Operation Toehold’. It involved full-time party organisers from London, where there were no local elections, being seconded to CLPs in the rural south and south-west where there were no Labour councillors. Their objective was to create campaigning CLPs where there had been none, field candidates in as many places as possible, and get at least one Labour councillor elected on every authority. It was a great success and directly led to Labour winning unlikely parliamentary seats like South Dorset, as well as national headlines about our ability to win in unexpected places. This time we should involve urban Labour MPs in twinning with rural areas too.
Labour needs to use the Liberal Democrats’ realignment through the coalition to occupy the centre-left territory they have vacated. We need to exploit the fact that voters in Lib Dem versus Tory seats no longer have a meaningful political choice presented to them. We need to get over the cultural cringe that says there are no-go areas for us, where we don’t run council candidates and have only paper candidates in general elections.
With a boundary review and possibly a new electoral system coming, the list of marginal seats is being thrown up in the air. By getting stuck in to areas that are not in Labour’s comfort zone, but where there is an anti-Tory tradition that has been let down by the Liberal Democrats, we might just create the kind of unexpected long-shot gains that were so pleasing in 1997 – or lay the groundwork for gaining those seats over several elections in the manner so often perfected by the Lib Dems.
Could not agree more Luke – and I speak as someone who benefited from the key seat strategy in 1997. If we do not win back the south then we will never be a national party again.
Agree – we should be going out and building support in the regions for the May 2011 elections and May 2012.
I think the coalition government will do a lot of work for us as people who are anti Tory will I hope turn to Labour. But we must have the structures in place so that new members arent put off by the sense of defeastism and often administrative incomptence that in too many cases occurs in Labour parties in more rural areas. We need new members to be welcomed and to feel that they are joining an active movement and be inspired that we can win outside of the big cities.
Agree with you completely Luke. Couple of things to add. You hit the nail on the head when you say that huge areas of the south having no Lab councillors suggests we’re not serious about the region. We need to rebuild and that does mean that the campaign planners need to recognise that local parties in unwinnable parliamentary seats need to campaign to get councillors. So the constant demands to go to target Westminster seats has to stop – we need a “1 day here, 1 day there” strategy. The other issue is the strategy on the LDs. I think the message may finally have got through at national level but those of us in the south have been telling party campaign managers for a decade at least that the LDs needed to be targeted too – and we were ignored. Worse than that, most campaign managers thought tactical voting for LDs was a good thing. But 200 seats with thousands of tactical voters switching to the LDs adds up to a massive loss in national vote share. The polls make us look weaker and so even more people vote tactically. That is also partly why we got a 1983 vote share but 1987 seat share – tactical voting in the shires and suburbs. I really hope for the next election the campaign managers do something rarely done before and ask CLPs Labour target seats what they think. We might have something useful to say. That’s why I hope Deb Gardiner gets onto the NEC – we need the voice of non-Labour seats to be heard too.