Earlier this month I launched Southern Front, a website that is a home for debate and discussion about why Labour lost the support of so many voters in Southern England, and what is needed to win those voters back.
Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 returned 59 Labour MPs in constituencies in the Political South – the three regions of the south-east, south-west and east of England. Last year just 10 hung on. Across the south as a whole, Labour failed to win 187 of the region’s 197 seats, and has no MPs whatsoever in 19 English counties. Seventy per cent of the 940,000 votes Labour lost between 2005 and 2010 were in southern and midlands constituencies.
The situation is even bleaker when one considers the extent to which Labour’s decline in the South has been mirrored by its local government base. Labour controls just five southern councils; our fewer than 700 councillors represent less than one in ten of all those elected in the south. In Kent, England’s largest county and until 2010, the home of eight Labour MPs, we have just 94 of the county’s 724 councillors. Labour is unrepresented on 70 councils in the south, which combined provide local services to a population of over seven million voters. In great swathes of the south, there is no Labour voice whatsoever speaking out against the cuts.
Last year, Giles Radice revisited his 1992 pamphlet on Labour’s Southern Discomfort when he co-authored with Patrick Diamond Southern Discomfort Again. They sought to ‘address the crippling weakness that Labour faces in Southern England following the 2010 defeat’. But updating a pamphlet after defeat isn’t enough.
Most of the seats in which Labour trailed home in third place last year but which we won in 1997 are in the south. Seats like St Albans, Watford, Norfolk North-West, Reading East and Cambridge. Eighteen of the 70 seats we need to win to put Ed Miliband into Downing Street are in the south. Labour needs the south, but at last year’s election the south showed it no longer needed Labour.
I’ve founded Southern Front because I don’t see a path back to power that doesn’t run through the south. I don’t think Labour ‘gets’ the south – but I also don’t think that it’s that hard to understand this growing region of Britain. Labour should be able to compete in normal, fairly affluent southern towns just as it does in affluent northern towns like Saddleworth, as we showed a week ago. There is a huge debate to be had. New and old ideas need to be rethought. Tough truths told. No ‘no-go areas’ for Labour must again be our mantra – but this time we must really mean it: in tough times for us as well as good. I want Labour to open a new Southern Front against the Conservatives.
Absolutely true. So often I think we fail to couch our Labour values in language that makes sense to people in these areas. Why is it that hard working people on low to middle incomes in these areas don’t connect with what we say? Why when they hear us talk about “working families” they so often think, “Yeah, but they don’t mean people like me”? Too often the things we say sound “a bit public sector”. They only seem to make sense in the context of big employers- the NHS, or large manufacturers. Self-employed tradespeople, retail workers, salespeople who depend on commission… we have to learn to speak a language that makes them understand we’re on their side.
I think Labour fundamentally ignored the South throughout its years in office, and that will need to change for us to win government again. There was, and still is regrettably, much ignorance in our party, particularly in northern and city Labour areas, about the extent to which depravation affects working people in suburban and rural England, as well as the cities. My friend is from the Isle of Wight, where the Labour Party central offices insisted that they send out leaflets last year about the fox hunting ban (because, of course, that’s all rural folk care about). Yet, the Isle of Wight has some of the lowest jobs growth and highest housing costs in the country. We could not connect with that. My hometown of Havant, outside of Portsmouth has a massive level of depravation, yet it is in the middle of a Tory safe seat. When I once mentioned that much of Labour’s renovation money in government was targetted at the North at an event, I was heckled. In fact, someone exclaimed “that’s because you got it all in the 80s”, something that is totally untrue. To win back the South, we need to recognise the vast layers of depravation. Only by tackling that can we tack into the concerns around crime, welfare and immigration that lost us this crucial part of the electoral map.