Labour’s horror-show relationship with the south continues

Here we are again. The Southern Discomfort series, begun in the early 1990s, is now joining Halloween and Friday the 13^th as a long-running horror franchise. Policy Network’s Southern Discomfort Again revisited the problem in 2010, and followed up with a 2015 update this summer. The depressing similarity between the overall outcomes of the 1992 and 2015 elections is an opportunity for a look at what has changed electorally between the two and to pick out some long-term trends. Are Labour’s electoral chances going south? And is the balance of power in parliament moving south?

One obvious difference between 1992 and 2015 is the replacement of Scotland sending 49 Labour members of parliament out of 72 to Westminster with one absolutely dominated by the Scottish National party, and one solitary Labour MP in a delegation of 59 Scottish representatives. The Scottish collapse means that Labour’s performance in England, relative to 1992, is a little bit better than the swing of just over 0.5 per cent implied by the national figure. The swing in England between 1992 and 2015 is around 1.2 per cent towards Labour.

Labour’s relative improvement in England has been concentrated in three regions – London and the north-west, and, secondarily – and surprisingly perhaps – the south-east. But Labour’s position relative to the Conservatives in the south in terms of seats has become slightly worse since 1992, following the creation of new Conservative seats in boundary reviews and Tory gains from the Liberal Democrats in the south-west. Within the south-east, the pattern – unfortunately for Labour – is for the areas with an unusual pro-Conservative swing to be predominantly in seats where Labour has historically been able to win seats in a good year – Kent, Hertfordshire and Essex.

On the other side of the balance there are a number of seats across the ‘wider south’ of the south-east, south-west and the east, where Labour has consolidated its position, such as in Slough, Hove, Bristol West, Bristol East, Luton, albeit outside London the number of these seats is small when set against the total for the wider south.

The obvious, overwhelming, determinant of whether Labour has gone backwards or forwards relative to the Tories since 1992 is the degree of urbanisation. The more metropolitan an area, the chances are the better the Labour result. Pure region is becoming secondary to the metropolitan dimension, and some parts of the south-east in particular are becoming more metropolitan – places such as Reading, Slough and Milton Keynes; ‘London’ is spilling out into the south.

There are some indicators which suggest that the lifestyles associated with the ‘south’ are spreading across the wider south. Allow me to introduce the ‘car indicator’. This is simply the difference between the proportion of households with more than one car and the proportion with none. Households with more than one car will tend to be affluent, and have more privatised patterns of work and consumption.

The south-east has always, unsurprisingly, been the region with the largest positive balance on the car indicator, with the other two southern regions in second and third place. But the interesting feature is the change since 2001: the smallest increase has been in the south-east, with the other two southern regions closing the gap from a spread of 5.1 points to 2.4.

The indicator and its components are also interesting when applied to smaller areas. There are 44 local authorities in England and Wales where the proportion of no-car households rose between 2001 and 2011: 31 London boroughs, and 13 mostly urban authorities in the south – Brighton and Hove, Cambridge, Oxford, Portsmouth, Bristol, Reading, Luton, Bournemouth, Slough, Crawley, Watford, Broxbourne and Woking. It is not a bad match with most of the better Labour performances over time.

The boundary change process will resume in 2016, based on the electorate numbers at the end of 2015 and the rules from 2011 that reduce the number of seats from 650 to 600 and require all but four constituencies to be within a rigid, narrow margin around the average size. The size rule does not make much difference as such in the regional allocation, other than by cutting Welsh representation in dramatic fashion. Most of the relative change between English regions is on a similar scale to past boundary reviews, arising from shifts in population since 2000. The southern proportion of seats will rise by a similar amount to previous boundary reviews and will be almost a third in 2020. In 1974 – the last but one time Labour won a majority – it was just a quarter. Thirty-one more MPs will represent the south than in 1974, and the chamber will be down to 600 in size.

If the current rules remain in force, boundary reviews will take place every parliament, with the probable result that the proportion of the southern MPs will drift up each election. There may be more variability caused by the problems of maintaining a complete electoral register under the new individual registration system, which will probably work against the most urban areas. However, the strongest projected trend in population is for the growth of London, so one can still expect its representation to rise as well as the south’s.

Other than in the – admittedly electorally important Essex and north Kent marginals – the Labour party’s position, although not good in 1992, has not got worse in direct comparison with the general election that year. The south is also changing, from its London core outwards, becoming more ethnically diverse and, in its urban areas, more liberal and metropolitan. There is a wave of change that is making Luton more like Brent and Exeter more like Oxford. The growth of the south holds some threats for Labour, as well as some opportunities – as long as the party knows how to make the best of them.

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Lewis Baston is a contributing editor to Progress and senior research fellow at Democratic Audit

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Photo: Karen Roe