Apologies at the start if this post is more than a little geeky…
One of my hobbies is collecting books about past election results: old Times Guides to the Commons, back issues of Waller’s Almanac, that kind of thing.
Usually this is just out of historical interest but my most recent purchase had a few insights in it that were unexpectedly resonant today. The book I found was ‘The British Voter: An Atlas and Survey since 1885′ by Michael Kinnear. It was published in the late 1960s, so covers the period 1885-1966. It’s basically a set of dozens of maps of election results, with commentary and analysis. It starts with the raw results for each general election then tries to show patterns with maps showing swing, the seats most won by each party in different periods (ie safe and marginal seats), patterns of employment in mines and agriculture, religious affiliation et cetera. It particularly focuses on the 1920s when the current Labour vs Tory major party model took shape. Labour activists will be interested in the map that shows in which year each CLP was set up – and amused that often any delay was because MPs ‘had good reason to believe that the establishment of [CLPs] in their constituencies would weaken their personal hold.’
You might think a book that starts in 1885, stops in 1966 and focuses on the 1920s would be wholly irrelevant. But it isn’t.
Firstly, it tells us why this week’s by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth is so hard fought between Labour and the Lib Dems. By looking at these maps you can see that OE&S includes areas once in Colne Valley – a seat which went Liberal in 1966 and had ‘a long Liberal tradition’ and sat in an area (East Lancs and West Yorks) where the Liberals held on to the vote in textile districts until 1924, comparatively late. We will have done very well if we hold such a seat.
While telling us about areas where Liberalism was strong or endured, the maps also tell us about why there are parallels between their current plight – a dire seven per cent poll rating – and their original collapse after 1918. Basically we’ve been here before. In 1886 Liberal Unionists helped prop up a Tory government and were eventually absorbed by them. After 1918 Lloyd George’s coalition Liberals were the junior partner to the Tories pushing through massive cuts and it split the party and drove radical voters into the arms of Labour. In 1923-4 the Liberals held the balance of power in a hung parliament, brought down the first Labour government and were virtually eliminated in a Tory landslide. Kinnear comments that the other two parties realised they were ‘undependable allies’ and stopped offering them electoral deals. In 1931 the Liberals backed a coalition national government, dominated by the Tories, helped push through massive cuts, split again and were reduced to a tiny rump, the pro-Tory wing living on as Tory auxiliaries under the ‘National Liberal’ banner until Kinnear’s 1966 map.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see a pattern whereby in 2010-2015 the Lib Dems, having followed their ancestors in propping up a Tory-dominated coalition and pushing through huge cuts, also follow them in splitting in two, being wiped out, and the pro-Tory wing being absorbed by the Tories. What bets on Nick Clegg one day running as ‘National Liberal & Conservative’ or ‘Coalition Liberal’ or ‘Constitutionalist’ (Churchill’s 1924 halfway house label as he moved from Liberal to Tory)?
But there’s a warning here in these old maps for Labour too. It’s that the demographic trends in Britain are against a party based on Scotland, Wales, the north and urban and industrial areas. Even in 1966 Kinnear shows how the north was being more and more outnumbered in the Commons by the south. That trend has accelerated. In Kinnear’s inter-war maps Hackney has five MPs, Tower Hamlets seven, Newham six, Glasgow 16, Liverpool 11, Manchester and Salford 13 – a total of 58. Now they have a total of just 24.
This is why Tony Blair’s grand strategy with New Labour in the 1990s and Ed Miliband’s reaching out to the ‘squeezed middle’ are essential. We have to reach out to what look like counterintuitive groups of Labour voters and constituencies to form a majority because, even added to the traditional marginal seats that feature in Kinnear’s maps and those of today, our core areas are now so much smaller in population that they cannot form a winning coalition. The seats we held in the 1997 to 2010 period (even in the relatively tight 2005 result) which never feature in Kinnear’s maps, not even in the 1945 landslide one, are essential to winning again: for example, Hove, Hastings, the two Blackpools, South Dorset, Thanet South. And we have to win 1945-style batches of seats in areas like North Kent just to get a 2005-style narrow victory.
And while the book shows us that Labour reaches parts of the country the pre-1918 Liberals were relatively weak in (Liverpool, Birmingham, London, Glasgow) – Labour is actually better at winning prosperous suburban seats in a good year than the 19th century Liberals were – it also shows that we have never reached some parts of the rural south and south west that were once winnable for the Liberals, and have lost the rural strength we once had in Norfolk (seven Labour seats in 1945). Some thinking about how we can overcome our urban image and recreate a radical tradition in rural areas is long – 110 years – overdue.
And we learn of what happened in Labour’s early days when local parties experimented with extremism: in the 1920s ‘the Borough Labour Party in Bethnal Green was controlled by Communists … [this] helped make Bethnal Green the last stronghold of Liberalism in London’; ‘the relatively slow growth of [CLPs] in London was probably mainly caused by the penetration of several London borough parties by Communists’; ‘a further explanation of Liberal strength in industrial districts is that some Labour candidates were on the extreme left of their party; in constituencies which nominated them, many Labour supporters may have felt the Liberal candidate expressed their views more closely.’
If you want a copy there are three left on Amazon… better hurry.
Good recommendation Luke – there’s now only two copies left on Amazon.
There was a second edition published in 1979 which included additional maps covering the 1970s elections. Quite true to point out that the degree to which British political geography has remained stable over the years is truly remarkable.
The Liberal Party was not destroyed at the 1924 General Election because it bought down the Labour Government. In fact it can easily be argued that it was MacDonald more so than Asquith who brought down the 1924 Labour Government. They were destroyed because they put Labour into power, and because Baldwin quietly dropped his protectionist stance which had cost him the 1923 General Election.
I’m not sure it’s a failure to reach rural areas that is the problem. It seems to me that the bigger issue is that we aren’t reaching small towns. There are very few constituencies that don’t have at least one settlement of 10-20,000 people, so strong performances here would have wide and deep effects. Plus they’re increasingly economically marginal, as their home-grown industries die off or become limited to businesses employing 50 people or fewer and more and more of the population commute to larger settlements. More and more of them are falling down the prosperity ladder and being divided between the have-nots and the have-because-they-work-elsewheres. Add in the high cost of transport and you’ve surely got a perfect testing ground for a squeezed middle message, plus an opportunity for Labour to engage with its communitarian roots. I’d also quibble that we didn’t hold Blackpool South only in the 1997 to 2010 period – we held it reasonably comfortably this time – and neither Thanet South nor South Dorset are in Labour top 100 targets by swing needed. So they aren’t that crucial.
The east end had more constituencies because it was so densely populated; a family in each room. This reminds me of Neil Kinnock picturing the trade unionist speaking to the worker who has a colour TV his own car and a microwave oven, “Frank, let me take you away from all this.” The problem in the last election is that we generated the new overcrowded poverty by concentrating on the immigrant population and their rights of equality, without remembering that once people have been removed from suffering they no longer need us. We are either victims of our own success or need to concentrate on a wider constituency than just the poor.