Britain as a whole is becoming more like the south. Labour needs to understand the challenge this presents to it, argues Caroline Flint.

In October 1992, in the wake of Labour’s fourth successive election defeat, Giles Radice identified the problem of ‘southern discomfort’ and argued that the party could not win without doing better in the south. He was right. In 1997, over three million people voted Labour in the south outside London. By 2010, when we slumped to our second-worst defeat since the first world war, nearly half of those people did not vote for us again, and we were left with just 10 MPs out of a total of 197 across the south and east of England. Despite victories in places like Harlow, Norwich and Thurrock in this year’s local elections, over five and half million people in these regions still have no representation from the Labour party on either their local council or in parliament.

If Radice was right in 1992, the problem is even more urgent 20 years later. Today there are over two million more people living in the south of England compared to when he penned his original pamphlet. There are over a million more people in the south compared to the 2001 election alone. Outside London, the south-east, east and south-west are the fastest growing regions in the country – and yet these are the areas where we are at our weakest. It is simply not sustainable for us to remain so.

There are two possible explanations for why we fare less well in the south. Either people in the south care about different things and vote on different issues, or the make-up of the south is somehow different to other parts of the country.

According to the first view, there exists a distinctive southern vote, different to voters in the rest of the country: more materialistic, more individualistic, more aspirational. But in all my years of conversations with voters at home in Doncaster and voters in the south, it has always been the same issues that come up, wherever you are in the country. 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 or university. And aspiration has never been the property of people in the south. Parents in my constituency in south Yorkshire are just as ambitious for their children as are parents in the leafy home counties. Both want their children to do better than they did.

If living in the south does not give people a fundamentally different outlook on life, that means we have to look at how the south itself differs from other parts of the country. Here there are differences Labour has to understand. Seats in the south tend to have higher levels of home ownership, a bigger middle class, more people going to university, fewer people on benefits, greater numbers in professional and managerial occupations, higher levels of private sector employment, lower levels of trade union membership, and a shorter and shallower tradition of voting Labour. The most interesting thing about many of these characteristics is that they are becoming more common across the rest of the country. As a result, addressing the underlying causes of Labour’s southern discomfort is not just a priority for the south, but for the whole country. Four issues demand our attention.

First, it is true that the south does not feature in the Labour party’s folklore in the same way as our industrial heartlands or the Welsh valleys. With fewer MPs and councillors, our organisational infrastructure is weaker. As a result our vote is less resilient, and there are more swing voters in the south. That is why it is so important we accelerate our selection of candidates in the south, contest every by-election, fight every council seat and ensure that wherever you live you can vote Labour. But across the country, the number of people who identify with a political party is not just low, but falling. Just five per cent of the electorate say they identify strongly with the Labour party, compared to 24 per cent who say they have no allegiance at all. Floating voters decide elections. All politicians naturally want to be popular within their own parties, but in the end what matters most to Labour party members is the election of a Labour government.

Second, middle-class voters now make up a majority of the electorate. By the end of this decade nearly half of people in employment will be in professional or managerial positions, up from just over a third in 1997. The idea, then, that Labour can win with a core vote strategy, focused on convincing disgruntled working-class voters to return to the fold, just does not stack up. Of course, no one can deny that at the last election we lost significant support in our heartlands and among traditional Labour voters. But we have to be honest, too, that the days of winning by turning out our core vote, if it ever existed, are now gone. What it means to be working class is changing too. More people work in Indian restaurants than in coalmines. Today’s working class is more likely to be female and to be working part-time in the service sector.

Third, decent public services are in the DNA of the Labour party, and the failure of the Conservatives to win over public sector workers in sufficient numbers was one of the reasons they failed to secure an outright majority at the last election. According to research published by Policy Exchange earlier this year, in households where both adults work in the public sector the Conservatives trail by 32 per cent. In households where there is at least one public sector worker they trail by 18 per cent. But in households where all workers are in the private sector they lead by nine per cent. Private sector employment already accounts for nearly 80 per cent of people in work, and with the contraction of the public sector in coming years this proportion is only likely to increase. At the next election, people must know that Labour stands for decent public services and a strong private sector creating jobs and supporting growth in our economy.

Fourth, at the last election the fall in our support among people of working age – half of all those who vote – was twice what it was for all other age groups. The right to work is at the heart of what Labour has always stood for. Labour was founded by working people, for working people. For us, unemployment is not just bad economics, but morally wrong. To win in 2015 we have to win back working people. As Ed Miliband has said, ‘the hard truth is that we still have a system where reward for work is not high enough, where benefits are too easy to come by for those who abuse the system and don’t work for those who do the right thing.’ So while we campaign against the injustices of the government’s welfare reforms, we must also speak to the experience of many people in poor quality, low-paid work, with limited power or control in the workplace or over their career.

Every successful political project both shapes and reflects its era. Clement Attlee understood the national mood better than Winston Churchill did in 1945. Harold Macmillan ‘got’ the 1950s. Harold Wilson tapped into the swinging sixties and the possibilities of technological advancement in a way that Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath never could. Big money and big hair defined the 1980s and Thatcherism. New Labour was the perfect embodiment of the confident optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Britain in 2012 is a place of contradictions. It is more middle class than it used to be, but being middle class feels more uncertain, more insecure and less comfortable than it did before. Britain is a more tolerant, open, relaxed, diverse country, but attitudes to welfare, immigration and crime have hardened. Britain is more fun and we are more connected than ever, but more people live alone, suffer from depression and anxiety, and feel less attached to each other. Britain is more outward-looking and forward-thinking, but people believe the countryside, our history, our monarchy and the NHS are the best things about living here. To win in 2015 Labour has to understand how Britain is changing – but to see where Britain is going, Labour should look to the south.

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