Warwickshire isn’t exactly the first of the 35 county councils up for election on 2 May that would spring to the mind of many a Labour activist. Bridging the gap between rural Oxfordshire and the industrial cities of Coventry and Birmingham, the county covers over 2,000 square kilometres ranging from the principal towns of Nuneaton and Rugby, through the spa town of Leamington, past the famous Stratford upon Avon and out to the rolling countryside of the Cotswolds in the south west. There are no cities within the county and to the south-east lies David Cameron’s Witney constituency. Even within the one district of Stratford upon Avon there are some 80 villages and hamlets, and only four towns. It is easy to see therefore why a political party like Labour might forestall any and all campaigning for this county come May. But it lies at the heart of country, and represents a microcosm of the electoral battles that will play out in two years time. If Ed Miliband’s One Nation is to mean anything at all, it has to start resonating in counties like Warwickshire.
Four years ago the Labour party sank to a set of truly disgraceful results. As a foretaste of the annihilation to come the following year, the party was wiped out from power in all county halls, bar Durham, with historically Labour counties such as Lancashire and Derbyshire tumbling from the Labour fold. The party lost 291 seats, which may not seem too disastrous at first glance, but a mere 178 Labour county councillors were returned – out of the 2,193 up for election.
The upside from that nadir is that the party simply can’t do any worse than four years ago. But with an uncertain national polling lead and many of these county seats taking place well outside the comfort zone for the Labour party, optimism should be twinned with a renewed determination to show that Labour can fight in the shires as well as its heartlands.
This is what One Nation Labour is all about, is it not? A unifying call, a clear statement of intent that the Labour party can represent the south as well as the north, the countryside as well as the urban centres – cloaking that timeless Conservative phrase in the Labour ideals of being for the many, not the few. The clear implication is that Labour can represent all aspects of our nation. The danger will be the recognition that the charge isn’t necessarily true. But these elections represent a clear opportunity for redress.
Over the sunny Easter weekend, amid the obligatory family duties, I duly volunteered to distribute leaflets for a neighbouring ward in Stratford upon Avon. The parliamentary seat of Stratford on Avon has been Conservative since electoral records began, and the local council is stubbornly blue whilst seats flicker intermittently between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. When the Labour party talks nationally about having ‘much to do’ they could look no further than this town, and thousands like it. While these rural, relatively affluent towns are never going to be island garrisons for Labour in a sea of blue on the electoral map, support for Labour does reside. It is just historically the party has never bothered to focus upon it. However, with the county council elections the party, frankly, has to.
The Labour party that day in rural Warwickshire consisted of two party activists leafleting a ward of some 6,000 voters. The Labour candidate, Jason Fojtik, is a local man who joined the party after the 2010 general election. Standing in his home ward of Stratford Avenue and New Town he has succeeded in turning a seat where the party scored a dismal six per cent in 2009 into a genuine four-way marginal, with the local independents adding to the fray. He, quite rightly, dismisses the charge that he should not bother and politely refuses the many requests the party put to activists like him the breadth of the country to only focus on Labour’s urban centres.
What will matter when the results start rolling in is not precisely how many hundreds of Labour councillors there are, though naturally, of course, that is an important prerequisite, but where the votes are concentrated. Piling up super-majorities in northern fortresses may well cheer the party faithful, and signal a nostalgic return to the ‘good old days’, but for One Nation to make the transition from slogan to reality, the party simply has to do better in the shires and the south.
The myth that it cannot be done has to be tackled head on. In November of last year, Stratford on Avon district council received its first Labour councillor for almost a decade. The people of Shipston upon Stour, a small market town 10 miles from Stratford upon Avon, elected a Labour councillor. Councillor Jeff Kenner was elected because of his vocal support for a local supermarket to be built in the town, and a party that in 2008 had secured just three per cent now sends a Labour representative to council.
So, on election night for sure, look to the county councils that will almost certainly return to the Labour fold. Celebrate as the party picks itself up off the floor from the 2009 debacle as hundreds of new Labour county councillors are swept to office. But look too to Warwickshire. Did Labour win seats? Has the party won outright control? The county either contains, or is surrounded by, the marginals that the party needs to win come 2015: North Warwickshire, Tory majority 52; Nuneaton, Tory majority 2,069; and Warwick and Leamington, Tory majority 3,513, to name but a few.
Part of the One Nation ideal is for Labour to take to difficult political terrain and win. Much of what will occur on 2 May will be on solidly Conservative ground. The scale of the task facing Labour should be evident by the electoral map – but if Labour does well in Warwickshire, it bodes well come 2015.
—————————————————————————————
David Talbot is a political consultant, tweets @_davetalbot and writes the weekly The Week Ahead column on Progress
—————————————————————————————
I have had to ‘lend’ my [Labour] vote on 2 May councillor’s election in Cornwall to the Libdem. (There is no Labour candidate in sight). I wrote the Libdems saying my vote was a ‘loan vote’. She was happy to receive it, as Tories normally clean up. ( I feel a Vote is to be used [or be fined]). The local Libdem election ‘flyer’ was followed-up by a written note from Paddy A, and that swung my decision in Libdem favour as his message was spot-on. And the Tory message was, as usual, pisspoor anyway. The letter from PA, and its accurate reportage on current council spendthrifts had me thinking ‘why waste a vote?’.
To give up without even having tried is quite sad. We, as a Nation, didn’t survive thus far being afraid of failure. And propagating the myth that we Brits are different doesn’t wash with me.
If you haven’t got a ticket, you can’t win a Race @ Cheltenham – or anywhere..
This piece is inaccurate in several respects, and the strategic insights are not good.
Firstly, your description of Warwickshire bears little to no relationship to reality. Yes, there’s rolling countryside in the south, but that’s not where the population is. A decent swathe of the county is a former coal-mining area and most of the county lives in urban centres like Leamington, Rugby and Nuneaton with long-standing Labour votes. There’s no way the Labour Party would ‘forestall any and all campaigning for this county come May’ – it was NOC from 1993 to 2009 and from 1993 to 2005 we were the largest party. We aren’t going to take control next week, but it’s not impossible that we could become the largest party on the council. I have to presume you’re aware of this, so I’d question why you’d want to create a misleading impression for less informed readers.
Secondly, the Labour Party does not have to concentrate on the likes of Stratford upon Avon. It has to concentrate upon the likes of Bulkington, on the outskirts of Nuneaton. We got hammered in local government in the closing years of the last government, and we need to recover the ground we lost before we can seriously hope to expand into entirely new territory. Let’s not walk before we can run. Particularly since describing Stratford Avenue and New Town as a four-way marginal looks to be pushing it even judging from 2012 results – though I’d be very pleased if activism since then leads to me being proved wrong.
Labour should care about people in areas it doesn’t win (and by and large, I think we’ve been doing a reasonably good job of doing that – the campaign against the abolition of the AWB is a good example, though we need to do more about questions like rural housing.) But to actually have an impact, we need to take power, and the way we do that is by winning marginals like the ones you list at the end of your article (which are overwhelmingly urban, and hence a lot more like the areas you say we shouldn’t overconcentrate on than they are like Stratford upon Avon, still less its rural hinterland). When we’re sweeping all before us, as we were in the early 1990s, it’s good to try to get some footholds in districts like Stratford (although even there, our better prospects are small towns like Southam, not villages or comparatively well-off centres like Stratford upon Avon itself.)
The rest of the time, I’m afraid CLPs in those areas will just have to do it themselves. Because Labour does need to do well in the shires and the south, but in needs to do well in the bits of the shires and the south that are actually winnable.
Thanks for your cheery response, Edward.
I did of course note the “principal towns” of Nuneaton and Rugby and if anything your observations rather prove my point. The “long-standing” Labour votes in the areas you identify have been on the decline for years. Labour lost Warwick and Leamington, and only holds 8 seats on the local council, Rugby has a 6,000 Conservative majority, with 10 Labour seats on the council, and Nuneaton – despite historically solidly Labour, and an awful lot of resource targeted in 2010 – was still lost.
So, much to do and a test for Ed Miliband’s (ambitious) claim to lead a One Nation Labour party. Seemingly you know as well as I do that in the southern tip of the County Labour are not going to predominate, but equally that doesn’t mean the party shouldn’t bother. That is exactly the kind of attitude that has allowed the Labour party to wither and die in vast swathes of the country, particularly the south, south east and east of England, where the mantra ‘nobody votes Labour round here’ has become the maxim.
Southam hasn’t elected a Labour representative since 2002. Shipston on Stour, a town of 5,000 just outside Stratford upon Avon, has elected a Labour councillor – just last November, in fact. I offered that example very deliberately.
So well yes, I am not suggesting that Labour needs to sweep all the Shires and the south – and I don’t think I even inferred that in my article above – it does need to start showing that it can compete and indeed win in terrain that it is distinctly unfamiliar with. The party only holds 10 out of a possible 197 seats in the south outside of London. That has to change and securing footholds in the County Councils next Thursday is a pretty good place to start.
The Labour votes declined in those seats over the course of the last government, but they did that everywhere. The long-term trend is much less simple.
In Warwick & Leamington the swing against us was pretty high, particularly as the boundary changes in 2010 weren’t favourable, but 1997 was the first time we’d ever taken the seat and the long-term trend is positive. South Leamington is as strongly Labour as ever, north Leamington is a lot less Conservative than it was back when my bad was growing up there (Lib Dem in local elections, but it’s fairly clear James Plaskitt got some of them to vote tactically for him and that can be repeated again) and Warwick is a swing area – we didn’t get any councillors elected there in 2011, but if we’d done a few percent better we’d have got six from nine. That’s a vastly better starting point than we have anywhere in Stratford.
Rugby is not going to be an easy seat to take back, but there are a couple of bits where we’ve maintained a strong based throughout the last decade (New Bilton, Benn) and in 2012 we were fairly comfortable in less strong Labour areas like Brownsover. Ten seats is a third of those in the town, and there are other wards where we narrowly missed out. Unless a lot of local Lib Dems back us in the general election we don’t look to be on course to win as of yet, but that’s at least partly because of the rural bits of the seat. From a tactical standpoint, the better places to concentrate limited resources are the villages around the northern edge of Rugby (not that we’re ever likely to win them, but we can get close) and Bulkington in Nuneaton & Bedworth, which is part of the seat. Regardless of whether we are going to win it next time, Rugby is the sort of place that is winnable for us under the right circumstances now and on our present shoe-string budget it therefore has to have a higher organisational priority than the rural bits of the south of the county.
As for Nuneaton, the description of it as ‘historically strongly Labour’ does not appear to entirely mesh with reality. It was one of those seats we only narrowly regained in 1992, and before then Les Huckfield did a rat-run from there to try and get selected in Sedgefield because he thought he was doomed otherwise (as the seat lost much more strongly Labour Bedworth). It’s generally been somewhere where Labour has an advantage in an even year, yes, but the west end of the town has historically been strongly Conservative. I don’t think it’s going to need a great deal of external help to turn Labour in 2015 – if it does, we’re not going to win nationally – but the Tories did dreadfully there in 2012 and it’s the most target-rich area for us in the county this year.
So I think you’re overstating the decline. But even if we accept the point, I’d argue that arresting the decline is a greater immediate priority than attempting to reduce our margins in areas where victory is not ordinarily a serious prospect.
I’m not saying Labour Party members shouldn’t bother. I’m all in favour of us standing candidates even where we can’t win (I’m a paper candidate elsewhere in the country this year myself) but I do think we need to be honest about the prospects. I think anybody agreeing to put themselves forward as a candidate in a unwinnable division should be thanked by the regional director, invited to a training day to make sure they know how to canvass and write copy and that otherwise that should be the end of the party’s involvement as an organisational body.
It’s good that everybody gets the chance to vote Labour, but come polling day we should only be doing work in divisions where we have a reasonable chance of victory, because getting ten votes closer in a safe Tory division is just a number, but ten votes in a marginal division could make all the difference. This isn’t a moral judgement about where Labour should and shouldn’t be, it’s an organisational judgement relying upon the assumption that our resources are not infinite.
The victory in Shipston upon Stour was very impressive (and does show that by-elections can constitute an exception where it’s worth putting in effort you otherwise wouldn’t.) On the other hand, I note the outgoing Tory district councillor endorsed our incumbent, so there may have been some one-off factors at work…
I just don’t agree that we need to start winning and competing in territory we’re distinctly unfamiliar with. Look at the areas we were competitive in in the mid 1990s – that was a much broader extent than we’re close to managing now, but it was still primarily based upon wards and divisions in large towns or small towns with a fair measure of deprivation and it primarily based upon seats where we won in 1997. We were competitive in a supermajority of the country in the mid 1990s. Neither seat distribution nor demographics have changed quickly enough for us to need to also compete where we weren’t close then.
We need a lot more than 10 out of 197 seats in the south next time, but most of our best targets are urban seats which we’re already eminently familiar with. We should look to improve there before we turn our attention to pastures new.