‘You have to realise how much people elsewhere do not like London.’ The admonishment from a frontbencher during the general election campaign explains some of the findings in Lewis Baston’s report ‘Is southern discomfort spreading?’.
Although we are rightly proud of our electoral record in London, as Baston shows, there is something of a political gap opening between the capital and its Midlands hinterland.
Many people in the towns of the south Midlands are incomers who moved out to Northampton, Milton Keynes, Stevenage and elsewhere to get away from London.
Some moved out of council flats on inner city estates blighted by high unemployment, crime and dysfunction to take a house with a garden, a job and prospects in a new town. Or they opted for long distance commuting to give their kids an easier life than they would experience in the big cities.
Either way it was an emphatic statement about lifestyle and aspiration. And either way the personal also became political – Labour was something people left behind.
The party has had a struggle to prove itself in these areas, which is what New Labour was all about, nailing memories of loony leftism, and aligning the party with the hard-working, socially responsible community ethic. Now the New Labour era is over, it is back to business as usual, and Lewis Baston’s perceptive study sets out what that looks like.
Southern Discomfort charted, controversially at the time, the gulf that had opened between Labour and voters in the south east. Bastion finds that the fault–line has shifted. Labour’s position in London and parts of the south east has improved, although in the latter case it is from an abysmally low base.
Instead, he argues, the discomfort with Labour has spread more widely through south Midlands towns with two major characteristics:
- These are places that escaped the cliff edge of economic recession, but have also not seen the economic improvements people might have wished. House price and wage inflation have been lower than in the big cities. There is a sense that socialism is for the metropolitan elite.
- They are also places that have not seen the social change of the big cities, especially London: Baston confirms the overlap of ethnic diversity and propensity to vote Labour, although other studies have found that the link is weaker than in the past.
Baston observes that the changes pose threats and opportunities for Labour – provided the party knows how to take advantage of the latter. And although his pamphlet stops at that point, there are some important tests coming up.
One is next year’s London mayoral election – a vital test of our new leader’s electoral appeal. We need to go into that with a “One Nation” message – the inclusive slogan that was one of Miliband’s few positives. In appealing to the mobile, edgy London electorate, we must not accentuate the political gulf between London and rest of country, and box ourselves into the capital.
But before that is the matter of the leadership. We need to ensure our new leader can straddle the aspirations of both the metropolitans and the Midlanders and that our party has the policies to match. Voters on the new fault–line of discomfort with Labour will not be impressed if we knock on their doors with a politics they thought they had left behind.
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Sally Keeble is a former minister and former member of the Treasury select committee. She tweets @Sally_Keeble
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I absolutely agree that Labour needs to have an appeal beyond London if we are ever to get back into government. But just as people elsewhere don’t like London, it increasingly seems to me (as a Londoner) that London doesn’t much like people elsewhere, as much of the rest of the country (outside other big metropolitan areas) seems to us, to be becoming increasingly intolerant and pessimistic.
It is understandable that immigration is less of an issue in the capital, which has always had a huge amount of racial diversity and a large foreign population. Recent immigrants from Eastern Europe haven’t fundamentally changed the nature of a city of 8 million people, whereas they can completely change the character of a much smaller town.
But what this means is that it is increasingly difficult for a political party to have a message that appeals to both London and the rest of the country. Rhetoric which continually suggests that immigration is a huge problem, implies to people like me who are the children of immigrants, that our presence in this country is some kind of mistake. No wonder that BME voters (and the many white people who see value in multi-culturalism) tend to opt for a party which is perceived to have a “softer” line on immigration.
What I wonder is how Labour manages to square this circle – of how to reconcile two groups of people who are currently drifting further and further apart.
Your response does indeed present a real challenge. One problem for some people concerned about immigration is that the ‘EU free movement’ policy seems a random, anarchic process that lacks additional resource allocations and has an absence of consultation. Some people feel insulted by the demand to “trust us”, as “they make a contribution”, “because I tell you it is he case”. Immigration is not a planned process as it would be as part of a ‘socialist planned programme’ or ‘points allocation’ system, but is the consequence of ten of thousands of random individual decisions of (mostly East European) citizens about which the local population’s view plays no part. Where it becomes rational, visible and justifiable as with recent refugees from Syria then more people see the basis and become more comfortable with addressing the consequences. But if people are told someone or people (not particularly specified) or the ‘market economy in general’ benefits they are less trusting, especially when the numbers seem large and lack of an obvious employment/employment/housing subsidy rationale.
In short it is the ‘EU free movement’ that has failed and in my opinion should be replaced with rational basis and for the foreseeable future should only be made up of refugee immigrants, rather than the seekers of market advantage. Clearly the EU has got it so very wrong to date.
Somebody at Prospect appears to be abusing their powers, by deleting other posts, without any explanation or obvious justification, relating to the article: Is ‘southern discomfort’ becoming Midlands misery?
If the post does not breach any of the stated rules then why is this individual resorting to such Stalinist behaviour? It may be that they disagree with the post but are incapable of addressing the issues raised but censorship is not the answer!
Would the censor care to offer an explanation or justification for their current behaviour, when apparently deleting posts on a whim?
I wonder if this is being picked up on Twitter yet?
My post has now been deleted more than 13 times by Prospect, despite observing all the site rules regarding posts! What is going on with this organisation, when debate can be suppressed, unless it conforms to the prejudices of the censor? You expect such behaviour from Fox News but is this now the new editorial policy at Prospect?
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