Stephen Bush takes the temperature in three battleground seats Labour and the Tories are targeting
‘IN 2015,’ Labour organiser Eleanor Brown tells me, ‘if we win here, we’ll know that we’ve taken back the country.’ ‘Here’ is Harlow, a satellite town just 45 minutes from London. A Labour fiefdom in the 1970s, it confirmed the rout in 1983 and stayed blue in the false dawn of 1992. It summed up the 2005 election: it was the site of a hard-fought and attritional victory for the popular local MP, Bill Rammell, part of the series of wins that completed Tony Blair’s hat-trick. And it was here that Gordon Brown met his Waterloo, as maverick Robert Halfon took the seat for the Conservatives in 2010.
For Labour, there is no route to No 10 that does not run through Harlow. As I boarded the train at Liverpool Street, I had expected to find a local party in good spirits, increasingly confident of victory, and to end the evening in an optimistic mood.
I was half right: for Labour in Harlow, as across the UK, 2012 was a year of advance after an inconclusive 2011. The party had taken back control of Harlow council having fallen short the year before, and at the end-of-year fundraising dinner the mood was high. But, later that night and back in London, I found that my expected optimistic mood had yet to arrive. I thought back to a line in the speech that Barnsley MP Dan Jarvis had given at the dinner. Extolling the CV of Harlow’s candidate, he had commented on the weaknesses of the government: ‘There’s nobody in [the government] like Suzy Stride.’ I often fret over good speeches and articles: they make me feel inadequate, but there was a deeper problem than my own insecurity at work here. I found myself wondering how many candidates like Suzy Stride Labour had in the country at large.
As a key seat in Labour’s fightback, Harlow selected early, with Stride emerging as the pick of a strong field. Her early selection, as one activist put it to me, has ‘given Labour a face’ in a constituency where the incumbent, a rare trade unionist among Tory backbenchers, has been the Conservative candidate since 2001 and has a high profile throughout the town. Halfon will be desperate to fight a so-called ‘hyper-local’ campaign; the presence of a keen campaigning Labour candidate will make that all the harder.
A week earlier I had spent the day in London at a campaign session that had attracted activists from across the city. Metropolitan Battersea felt like a world away from new town Harlow but they both had one important thing in common: they had ensured a Conservative government in 1992 and a Labour one in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
But, unlike Harlow, Battersea has – at the time of writing – yet to select a Labour candidate for 2015. The sitting MP, Jane Ellison, was selected in a primary in 2006. She is a friend of Battersea Park, a local school governor, and has spent the last five years living in Battersea, building up a formidable local presence.
Even in the battlegrounds where Labour has incumbency on its side, the Conservatives are well funded and well prepared. In Hampstead and Kilburn, where Glenda Jackson squeaked home just 42 votes ahead of her Conservative challenger in 2010, the party shares an organiser with the neighbouring constituency, in contrast to the embarrassment of riches enjoyed by the Conservative Association. The Conservative selection is well under way: by the time this magazine is in your hands, local Conservatives will have a new standard-bearer, well funded and well equipped to mount a new assault on the seat in 2015.
Doorknocking with the local party, I was struck by how deep Jackson’s reach into the constituency is. Even among those voters who had not been contacted for years – due to a combination of entryphones and social engagements – the former actress’ name was often raised in praise.
In a later phone canvass, I spoke to a woman of advancing years who told me that she would, of course, be happy to ‘vote for Glenda’. She will not be able to: 2010 was Jackson’s last campaign. The Conservatives will have a would-be successor in place long before Labour does.
Harlow and Hampstead and Kilburn are part of the Conservatives’ ‘40:40’ strategy. The idea is simple: to leverage the power of incumbency into 40 narrow holds, while picking up 40 new seats, largely at the expense of their disintegrating coalition partners. Tory strategists hope this will allow them to eke out a parliamentary majority despite a recessional economy and a flagging national brand. It means that neither type of seat will want for money or resources between now and May 2015.
It has been almost a decade since Labour could match the Conservatives on a financial basis in an electoral battle, and in that time that fact has lost some of its fear factor, as the party remembers how azure money failed to sink Labour in Hammersmith or Birmingham Edgbaston and forgets how it was blown away across the south and east of England. ‘40:40’ means that that the full might of the Tory machine is now targeted squarely on the seats where Labour defied the odds in 2010.
If you want to really understand just what Ashcroft money means, just visit the listings page of any political website. The Tories are recruiting and, by 2015, almost every Conservative Association will have a small, dedicated and well-paid staff. For both Battersea and Harlow constituency Labour parties, just funding one full-time organiser for the next three years is a battle in and of itself.
As I thought back on that Harlow fundraiser and my trips to Battersea and Hampstead, I found cause for optimism. In 2010, the reaction to the word ‘Labour’ on the doorstep was a slammed door, figuratively, and on occasion, literally. Even our own voters were not particularly happy to see us. Three years on, the poison has drained from the Labour brand. There is still opposition – one man living just off the Kilburn High Road appeared to dislike everyone involved with the Labour party, from Ed Miliband to his local councillors down – but the active hostility that characterised those last years in government is gone.
But while Labour might have won the benefit of the doubt in 2012, there is plenty of doubt to go around: from the small businessman who told me that benefits and immigration were too high or the ex-Liberal Democrat who described Labour as ‘all a bit blank’. People are willing to listen: but they are not yet convinced by what they are hearing. They will, of course, partly be convinced by the war in the air – the war waged by the Labour leadership nationally – but also by conversations with activists and their local candidates.
The Conservatives might be slipping in the air, but their money, their incumbency, and their well-funded and terrifyingly well-equipped machine could yet hand them an insurmountable advantage on the ground. On the ground, Labour appears, at times, to be caught in the late 1990s delusion of ‘standards, not structures’. Wherever I went, I met committed activists and hard-working councillors. I spoke to voters who wanted an alternative, and think it might be Labour. But if we do not put our all into our ground game; if we do not speed up our candidate selections; and do not give our all in raising money and recruiting staff, it will not matter what happens in Westminster. When will Labour next win, Michael Heseltine was asked as the party passed a decade of opposition in the 1980s. When it wants to, came his reply. That remains the case today. Labour will win the next election, if it wants to.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for ProgressOnline
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