Speech from Caroline Flint MP to the Third Place First conference, Reading Civic Centre, Saturday 23 June, 2012

Thank you, Keith, Michael, Guildford and Reading Labour parties, Southern Front and LabourList for supporting today’s relaunch of the Third Place First Campaign.

Conference, Caroline Flint.  Former union shop-steward, Community union member, GMB member, proud to be a Progress member, and proud to have been a Labour party member for 33 years.

The party I love.  And the only party I have been a member of.

Like Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of our party, and our general secretary Iain McNicol, I’m proud to be here, supporting Progress and supporting Labour’s fightback in the south.

All credit to Ed Miliband’s leadership that Labour is united today, more outward-looking and more engaged with the issues that matter to voters, and making the running on the big concerns of the day.

And have you noticed –  our attacks are hitting home and it is sapping the confidence of the coalition as the public lose confidence in their performance as a government.

I want to thank Progress, today, because through your magazine, your website and your events across the country, you have done as much as anybody to give Labour party members the chance to debate the future of our party and the practical skills and advice to beat the Tories, Liberal Democrats and Greens.

In any political party there will always be people that don’t agree with each other.

That’s the nature of politics.

That’s the nature of the Labour party.

But the public –  the people who need a Labour government most of all –  will not forgive us if instead of focusing our fire on this Tory-led government, we turn in on ourselves.

The priority for all of us must be to get a Labour government in 2015 and Ed Miliband into 10 Downing Street.

That’s what I want to talk about today:  how Labour wins the next election, why the south is so important and why Labour must not have ‘no-go areas’.

Why the south matters

Most of you will know that earlier this year Ed and Harriet asked me to become the party’s regional champion for the south-east.

Not a role to be treated casually.

The south-east region has:

• the most seats,
• the largest number of voters,
• and the second lowest number of Labour MPs of any region.

So it’s not an easy task …

But it couldn’t be more important.

Because the south-east was critical to our victory in 1997, and epitomised that achievement.

It was the region where:

• We gained the most votes
• The Tories lost the most support
• And, outside London, where we gained the most MPs.

The south-east was a symbol of the breadth of new Labour’s reach –  the voice of the commuter belt, the new towns, the coastal towns being heard in Labour circles.

But in 2010 the south-east symbolised our retreat into the cities and heartlands, when less than one in six voters in the south-east supported us – our second worst general result ever.

Nearly all of the lessons from the south-east apply across the whole of the south.

It is, and always will be, the crucial battleground in any general election.

This year’s local elections were the first real signs of progress in the south – and we should take heart from them.

We strengthened our position on Labour councils like Hastings, Ipswich, Oxford, Slough and Stevenage.

We won control of eight more local authorities:

Some in places like Exeter, Plymouth and Southampton which already have a Labour MP, and which denied the Tories a working majority at the last election.

But many others, like here in Reading, are home to crucial marginal seats that make the difference between a Labour government and a Tory one.

Places like Great Yarmouth, Harlow, Norwich and Thurrock all now have Labour councils.

In 2015 we must make sure they have Labour MPs.

Elsewhere we took seats directly off the Tories in southern battlegrounds like Basildon, Crawley and Milton Keynes, and gains from the Lib Dems cost them their majority in Cambridge.

And even in Tory heartlands, in Eric Pickles’ and David Cameron’s constituencies, we showed that if we fight, we can win.

Labour’s fightback in the south has well and truly begun.

But there is still much more to do.

53 councils in the south have no Labour councillors at all.

Over five and a half million southern voters live in areas that do not have any representation from the Labour party at all.

Take Castle Point as an example.

We took control of Castle Point council in 1995, which was the springboard to winning the parliamentary seat in 1997.

We lost the seat in 2001, the council in 2003, and today we have no Labour councillors left in Castle Point.

For me, there are four things we have to do.

First, at the very least , we owe it to ourselves, to our party and most of all to the people we seek to serve to ensure that the public are able to vote Labour.

We cannot win seats if we do not stand candidates.

So, no by-election should go uncontested and no matter where you live, you should always be able to vote Labour.

Second, of course we want Labour-run councils.

But we need to focus on winning council seats in those crucial constituencies in the south where we might never control the council but need a bedrock of local Labour councillors.

A solitary Labour councillor, a foothold, giving voice, providing challenge, and breaking the blue monopoly in many shire districts.

We must remember this for next year’s county council elections.

Third, organisation matters.

It is no coincidence that our biggest gains were in places where we either have a Labour MP or we have already selected our candidate for the next general election.

The lessons from that are clear:

we must accelerate our selections so as to have as many candidates in place as soon as possible, give them, and our regional staff, the organisational support they need,

and get a toehold in Tory strongholds.

That was where Third Place First was so successful in the 1990s.

In areas where people had written Labour off –  said we could never win –  people like Keith Dibble, and many of you here today, refused to take no for an answer.

And ward by ward, street by street, door by door, we built the Labour party up, and created a springboard for our victory in 1997.

Fourth, we have to win votes from the Tories as well as from the Liberal Democrats.

In the south, where in more seats than not the Liberal Democrats are in second place to the Tories, you know better than anyone that if the Liberal Democrat vote collapses, and we don’t make inroads into the Tory vote, this will hurt, not help, Labour.

We have to continue to focus on those voters who supported Labour in 1997 but voted Conservative in 2010, and the post-97 generation who may never have voted Labour, but would have in the run up to 1997.

In the end, though, winning in the south is about more than narrow, tactical, electoral calculations.

Every radical, reforming Labour government has been the product of broad-based coalitions, with roots in every part of the country and all classes.

We must aspire to be the same.

As Harriet will say later on today, we must be a one nation party.

Unafraid to take our message to all corners of the country.

With no ‘no go areas’ for Labour.

And we can do so in the knowledge that the worries voters in the south are little different from those that trouble people in the north.

Before the local elections, I divided my time between campaigning at home in Yorkshire and in the south-east.

And what struck me most of all was how similar my doorstep conversations were here in Reading to those in Doncaster.

People in the south are no less affected by prices going up faster than wages.

No less angry about rip-off energy bills and rail fares.

No less worried about the chances of their children finding a job after finishing college.

No less concerned about nurses being laid off or waiting times going up.

And people in the south need to know about how Labour would deliver an economy that works for working people.

Being honest about the challenges – such as our shortcomings on immigration, which Ed confronted head-on yesterday.

How we’d improve the rewards for people who do the right thing.

That’s the message we must take to people in the south.

You know who I’m talking about.

People who see themselves as middle of the road, who don’t get angry about much, and complain less than most.

They don’t want government to run everything, but they do want government to make life a little easier and value their contribution.

Their instincts are progressive.

They want an NHS without the worry of endless waiting and an education system that raises standards across the board.

They believe in community, in fairness and in decent public services.

They’re aspirational and want the best for themselves and their family.

Above all, they want their children to have a better life than they did.

And they include many people who invest their life, and their energy in the success of a small business; the kind that form 98 per cent of the businesses across our southern towns and villages.

They, too, are part of society.  They worry too –  about issues like crime, welfare and immigration.

And they need to know that Labour believes there’s nothing progressive about leaving people to languish on benefits, or standing by while communities are terrorised by antisocial behaviour or ignoring whole sectors where British workers have become marginalised.

Labour must meet their aspirations –  that’s the promise –  and allay their anxieties – that’s the reassurance.

Because ultimately, it’s only with their support that we’re able to deliver on the things that matter to us, because they improve our society’s cohesion or its prosperity.

The minimum wage, civil partnerships, doubling overseas aid, lifting millions of children and pensioners out of poverty, statutory recognition for trade unions, the world’s first legally binding targets for cuts in CO2 emissions.

None of them would have been possible without the consent of millions of people who’d never voted Labour before 1997 and didn’t in 2010.

And the truth is this: if we can’t win in the south, we won’t be able to win anywhere – because the rest of the country is becoming more like the south.

All the things that people would normally associate with the south:

Professional and managerial jobs.

Private sector employment.

Jobs in the service sector.

Higher levels of graduates.

They’re all becoming more common across the country.

The winners in politics are those who mould the society taking shape, not those who try to wind the clock back to a world they remember, a world long gone.

Britain is changing fast.  And sometimes our politics hasn’t responded to it.

We knew in the 1980s that more people worked for high street banks than in shipbuilding;

By the 90s more people worked in Indian restaurants than in coal mines.

By the noughties, more people worked in UK tourism than in the car industry.

By 2010, 600,000 people worked in e-commerce.

By 2017 professionals and managers will make up almost half of all employees.

Graduates will be four in ten of the adult population.

Over a third of the population will be over 55.

Friends, Britain is changing –  and we must change with it.

Yes, Labour’s fightback has started – but in the south it has only just begun, and we will have to work hard to win.

In the 1990s, a small group of Labour Party members took Labour into the heart of seats others had written off as unwinnable –  and captured them, propelling us to victory in 1997.

Times may have changed, but our task is the same.

With the right policies,

And the right organisation,

And, above all, with the confidence and the will to win beyond our heartlands

We can rebuild the Labour party throughout the country and once again become a one nation party.

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Caroline Flint MP is shadow energy and climate change secretary