I’ve written up a general scorecard of Labour’s results nationwide for LabourList. In it I highlight the regional disparity in Labour’s results: 

‘My take is that this was about as good as we could hope for in the north, Midlands and Wales. Indeed in some mets we took every seat being contested and could not physically have done better. It was particularly good to see heavy gains in two areas of concentrated parliamentary marginals, Lancashire and the east Midlands. 

In the southeast, southwest and east there were a few bright spots (gaining Gravesham and Ipswich, good hauls of seats in Exeter, Luton, Thanet, Forest of Dean, Stroud, Waveney) but also some areas like Dartford where the Tories consolidated their general election gains, and many areas where the organisational weakness of our CLPs meant we fielded too few candidates or were unable to campaign visibly enough to present a credible anti-Tory alternative even though the Liberal Democrats had left a vacuum.’ 

This is of course not a new phenomenon. Labour has never been as strong in the southern regions outside London as elsewhere because of the less-industrialised and less urban nature of those regions in the period when the party was first developing, and the obvious disparity in levels of wealth and deprivation between south and north. There is also a cultural element at play in that seats whose socio-economic characteristics would make them good territory for Labour if they were in the north see a far worse performance than their northern counterparts. 

There was a particularly acute absence of Labour representation in the south in the 1980s and 1990s analysed in Giles Radice’s Fabian pamphlet Southern Discomfort. Under Tony Blair this was dramatically reversed but in the 2010 general election we went back to square one, with only 10 MPs across the three regions. 

We can’t ignore the south and try to win as a regional party of the North because at every boundary review the south gets more of the seats in the House of Commons because of long-term population movement. While only four per cent of the current PLP represent seats in these regions, 16 of the 68 seats (24 per cent) we need for a majority on the current boundaries are located there, as are 15 of the 50 next targets after that (30 per cent). 

So how did we do in these crucial areas? 

In the key areas where we have either winnable parliamentary seats or winnable councils (not always the same thing as boundaries differ between the two) we made patchy progress. 

•        Labour took control in Gravesham direct from the Tories with eight gains.
•        Waveney went No Overall Control after eight Labour gains.
•        There were six gains in South Gloucestershire where the Kingswood   parliamentary seat is.
•        Thanet went No Overall Control with six Labour gains.
•        There were five gains in each of Bedford, Plymouth and Medway.
•        Ipswich was gained from No Overall Control by Labour with five gains.
•        There were four gains in each of Bristol, Dover, Exeter, Slough, Stroud.

Disappointment came in Dartford with a net three losses, and with no net gains in Great Yarmouth, Milton Keynes and Portsmouth. In Brighton and Hove we gained five seats from the Tories but lost seats to the Greens, ending up back where we started. 

Outside of these marginal areas there were some early fruits of the intensive organisational work done to increase the number of candidates fielded. Labour got toeholds back on councils where we had been unrepresented: Aylesbury Vale, Broadland, Central Beds, Chelmsford, Forest Heath, Guildford, Mid Suffolk, South Hams, Tonbridge and Malling, Torbay, Torridge, Tunbridge Wells, Vale of White Horse and Winchester.  

There was more dramatic progress in some areas where Labour had broken through or nearly broken through in 1997 but faded before 2010: nine gains in King’s Lynn and West Norfolk where there was a big local issue about a new incinerator, another nine in Forest of Dean, five gains in Wycombe, four in Cambridge, four in Welwyn Hatfield. 

Total gains in south were 169. So my verdict would be some progress in the south but not enough. 

There’s a bit of a myth developing that last Thursday’s council elections did not see Labour progress against the Tories. This is because gains from the Liberal Democrats by the Tories in rural areas which are not general election battlegrounds for Labour offset the Tories’ losses to us. Of the 837 Labour gains nationally, 415 were from the Conservatives, ie almost exactly half. 

The problem is not that we didn’t make progress versus the Tories but that we only did so consistently in the Midlands and north. 

To seal the deal we need to make more consistent progress across the south, continuing the squeeze on the Liberal Democrats as in most of the south the Liberal Democrat vote is an anti-Tory one, tackling the local challenge from the Greens in Brighton and Norwich, and trying to take votes direct from the Tories as the clusters of marginals in Essex and Kent are essentially two party fights. Of these opponents, simple maths dictates the Tories are the priority because they hold the vast majority of the seats we need to take and a vote taken off the lead party and added to us reduces the majority in that seat by two, whereas a vote squeezed from third-placed Liberal Democrats only reduces it by one. 

Ed Miliband and the shadow cabinet as a whole, along with Labour’s electoral machine, need a big focus on the south. Organisationally we need to throw staff into these regions to rebuild dead or dormant parties and recruit a new generation of members and campaigners. Politically Ed has to win the trust of southern swing voters who are pragmatists, not idealists. They want to know what he is offering them as aspirational, hard working families. He needs to develop a policy agenda that addresses deep seated southern concerns about overpriced housing, immigration, tax and the spending of it on welfare, crime and antisocial behaviour, and, in commuter areas, transport. Labour needs to tune in culturally to the south. Swing voters in Kent and Essex don’t consider themselves traditionally Labour so Blue Labour’s nostalgia for a Labour heritage they were never part of will unfortunately leave them cold (that’s not to say it doesn’t have policy aspects that might appeal to them). They don’t consider themselves progressive so they will be equally unmoved by appeals to create a ‘progressive majority’. They just want to know which party will enable them to stay prosperous and give their kids a better life. And having taken a gamble on Labour for 13 years and feeling badly let down by the economic crash, it will take a lot of rebuilding of trust for them to even give Labour a hearing again. A building block of that trust has to be gaining more councillors and councils in future years so we can show by example what positives Labour brings when in power locally.

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