Hemel Hempstead isn’t that unique in Britain. It is a postwar new town with an identity crisis and declining infrastructure. It is probably the largest town in Hertfordshire and part of probably the largest district council in the county but one where the rural 40 per cent of wards often decide who controls the council. It has wards that are affluent and middle class and one ward that is in the top 25 per cent of the most deprived in England. It is a town of contrasts and a town and constituency that Labour can, should and must win to form a majority government.
The reality is though that it is also a town that, as a result the dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the latter stages of the Labour government and scares and spin from the Tories over the future of Hemel Hempstead hospital, has steadily turned against Labour. The last two local elections demonstrated this with devastating effect, with all but one of Labour’s district councillors (me!) losing their seat in 2007 (Dacorum, of which Hemel is a part, is an all-out council with all 51 councillors elected once every four years), even though we gained one from the Tories and all of Labour’s county councillors losing in 2009. In 2010’s general election Labour slumped to third narrowly behind the Liberal Democrats but 13,000 behind the Tories. This in a seat we won in 1997 and 2001 and lost by only 499 votes in 2005, and a council we controlled from 1995 to 1999 with a small but working majority.
Yet locally the Tories keep shooting themselves in the foot. On Dacorum borough council (the district council that includes Hemel Hempstead) they have spent £2 million failing to privatise the entire back-office of the council, bulldozed the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion promising a replacement which nearly 10 years later has still failed to appear; had four regeneration strategies for Hemel Hempstead town centre none of which have got off the starting blocks; have presided over a housing waiting list that has more than doubled to over 6,000; and having spent the best part of the last two years and £1.5 million selling housing stock transfer to the council’s 10,500+ tenants have now ditched the idea to go with retention under a financial arrangement they called ‘a millstone around the council’s neck’ when Labour proposed it.
So why has Labour declined so rapidly and what can we do about it?
In part the seeds of this decline may well have been sown when we were in control of Dacorum borough council. Excited (understandably) and motivated by being in control of the council for the first time in 20 years we were dedicated to getting things done and at the time, as a relatively well off council, we had the means to deliver an ambitious programme. However, we never stopped to ask ‘How did we win?’; ‘Who were the voters that switched to us?’ or ‘What do we need to do stay in control?’ We slipped in to assuming the public would value the things we were doing as much as we did and we never considered how midterm blues would affect us. We never sought to use our success to build a new relationship with the voters that put us there and, encouraged by eastern regional office and the national party, by making our primary focus the parliamentary seat, we took our eyes off the foundation that delivered it in the first place.
Often it can seem easier to point to an ageing membership; a failure to recruit new members and the disappearance of the activist base; or an inward-looking local party that has found it easier to bemoan the national political mood and the biased local press and to remove itself from the hostility found on the doorstep to the Iraq war or MPs’ expenses. To one extent or another all of these have contributed, but at the heart it has been a failure to win the message battle. Just as the Tory-led government has won the blame game over the deficit, at least for now, we failed to combat the Tory rhetoric over the big local issues and the party’s national messages at the time seemed blatantly irrelevant to Hemel Hempstead.
The NHS reorganisation the Labour government devised was required and has delivered a better health service, but in counties like Hertfordshire with no major cities and, in relative terms, small towns it has meant the downgrading and apparent closure of local general hospitals. For Hemel Hempstead this came at a time when other public services were also relocating to Watford which seemed to have a magnetic pull towards north London. Even our FE college all but pulled out and moved most courses to Watford (something it has now thankfully at least partly reversed). Hemel, it seemed, was being deserted and the Conservatives leapt on it. ‘Never forget Labour is closing our hospital’ became Mike Penning and the Tories’ repetitive refrain, picked up and echoed by the Liberal Democrats and even long-time Labour activists who were also hospital campaigners and who then found their campaign hijacked to serve the Tory cause. It was also a refrain that Labour couldn’t find a response to and, despite evidently not being the case, it became the accepted truth.
At the same time Dacorum, with its council housing predominantly built by the Commission for the new towns, was also the housing authority with the biggest negative housing subsidy in the UK and so when Labour amended the housing subsidy system and created the national pooling of housing rent account surpluses Dacorum’s tenants were immediately paying rent that was being siphoned off to prop up ‘profligate labour council’s in the north’ as the local Tories ranted. When that figure rapidly increased to £18.5 million a year the achievements of the Labour government were drowned out by disgusted of Leverstock Green.
So Labour presenting policies for the big cities, painted by the Tories as a party focused on its self-interest, rapidly became perceived as a party that didn’t understand or care about Hemel Hempstead. At the same time the national and regional party devised a strategy of consolidation for parliamentary elections that dropped Hemel Hempstead from its radar and any interest in our issues faded even faster. This obsession with the only election that matters being the general election has really harmed the party in seats like Hemel Hempstead. We are reliant on our local government base for activists, for profile and for impact; for showing what Labour means and what Labour can do.
Neglecting the local government base outside of the big cities and so called flagship councils is just as damaging to our ambitions for a future Labour government as anything else. Devising policies and campaign messages that just don’t translate to areas like Hemel Hempstead and don’t address the issues and concerns that exist here will not demonstrate that Labour really understands the problems of the ‘squeezed middle’ and win the seats in the east and south-east of England that we need to form a government. To win in Hemel Hempstead we must be the party that is seen to truly understand, care about and act on the worries of the ‘squeezed middle’.
This is perhaps the key lesson of Hemel Hempstead. The ‘squeezed middle’ aren’t just the relatively well off middle class with a big mortgage and a new cramp on their lifestyle. They are increasingly our core vote; ordinary working families and aspirant children of the seventies who now fear for their children’s future; families across the income scale from the low paid to middle incomes. This is the real coalition; the coalition that put Labour into power in 1997 and who we lost touch with as we stumbled and then crumbled in Hemel Hempstead.
As Labour nationally tries to regain the trust of this group it must not forget that we lost that trust because we didn’t listen closely enough to towns like Hemel Hempstead outside the historical Labour heartlands. We failed to recognise this developing group, that we were and are also part of, and failed to build a relationship that enabled us to learn, to renew and maintain a mutual support.
It is in towns like Hemel Hempstead where the ‘squeezed middle’ really need a champion, they are not well off, they are and will find life as tough under this government as ordinary working families anywhere, and Labour can and must reach out to them. National and local campaigns must inform and complement each other in these towns in the east and south-east of England as much as anywhere. Hertfordshire constituencies like Hemel Hempstead, Watford and Stevenage are just as vital to a future Labour government as seats in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or even Sheffield and we must never forget that again.
Keith makes some very valid points and I support the campaign for 3rd place seats. I worked for Tony McWalter the previous Labour MP in 2003/4 and have in common with Keith that we both contested NE Bedfordshire for Labour me in 2001 and he in 2005 and it too has now slipped to a third place seat. Tony McWalter the last Labour MP for Hemel, in my view was one of the finest, most thoughful and independent minded MP’s yet produced. (Indeed Ayfer Orhan the last candidate was one of the finest and hard working you could ever find). Tony faced a nasty campaign from the Tories and even had smear stories published against him the national press, which were withdrawn after legal action. Tony won in 1997 with 25k votes and held it again in 2001. At that time the battle front for the general election was Hertfordshire. At that time we held St Albans, Watford, Welwyn Garden City, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage and put up a strong fight in the other Hertfordshire constituencies. But if the election front can be seen as northernly march then 2005 was when we lost that ground fully with Stevenage the last domino to fall last year. The Tories considered Hemel Hempstead to the an architypal town and ran workshops at their conferences on ‘how to win Hemel’. Recognising the mix of prosperous and poor, middle and working classes together. They knew that to win the country they needed to be winning places like Hemel. That lesson is true for us too now. Ironically when you look at the results even last time the Tories still polled less votes than Labour did in 1997 (they got 24,721 and in 1997 we got 25,175). When they won it in 2005, they did so by increasing their vote by around 1500 votes to win by just 499. Now that majority is 13,000. The Labour vote collapsed and in part leaked to the Tories but then also went to the Lib Dems. If we could only have held it in 2005. At that time it was fury over the Iraq war and upset about the hospital. Ironic really because Tony had opposed the war and asked some of the toughest prime ministerial questions on the topic and voted in the first ballot against the war. I saw old Labour supporters deserting the party in protest against the war, refusing the campaign and organise for us and others to vote for us. I tried to explain and appeal to people to say it is not Labour you are hurting, think about it, it is Tony and Hemel who will suffer and suffer they do now with Mike Penning as their MP. The other issues was with Health, long needed reforms to health care and cancer care were planned. A new cancer hospital was promised for the county and region. But instead of pressing ahead with the reforms there was dithering. Communities were divided and the change was drawn out. some hospitals would close to pay for and consolidate services elsewhere and there was much sense in it, but the argument was never won and then there seemed to be political meddling, it seemed to us, promising services for Weylwn to save the Minister there. Hemel seemed to be getting a raw deal and thats what people thought and as Keith points out all the rubbish things that even the Tory council did seemed to end up on our doorstep. The Government did seem to care about Hemel and the people knew it, the irony again was that the best fighter they could ever have would be Tony McWalter. Elsewhere in Hertfordshire as Labour lost ground they seemed to desert the county and people seemed to know it and deserted Labour further, perhaps just to the Lib Dems and but some to the Tories too. If we give up in trying to win then people will stop belieiving that we can. Want to win the next election? Then we need to win places like Hemel. We need to start our own workshops, take heart from the fact that the Tories at their high still can’t match us. In Hemel it will be about winning back the lost vote, we lost that ground they didn’t win it all. But the big lesson is that to truly win we need to move the battleground for the next election back to the south to places like Hertfordshire and Hemel Hempstead and Stevenage.
We have 76,000 people in my town, we have 15,000 severely disabled including me who has Paraplegia. My wife was born with Spina Bifida but worked all her life. The simple fact is Labour a so called socialist party has attacked me and every disabled person, they keep saying we must reduce the disabled numbers from 2.5 million, but these are people who have worked paid a NI stamp, we have eight million disabled people who are born with disabilities and never worked, these will now be placed onto JSA because labour under Brown stopped income support. So whats the difference between new labour Newer labour and the Tories, one will cut hard the other says it will cut just as hard but slower, which means the disabled are going to suffer the poor will suffer. Some socialism