I come from Southampton. I was very surprised, and pleased, by Labour’s success in defending control of the city council in the 2016 elections. Many Southampton wards are marginal, and the city’s voters can sometimes get brutal with parties that displease them. It is a tribute to the strength of Labour loyalties and the hard work of councillors and campaigners that Labour was once again entrusted with the keys to the city. Labour has only won the wards of Freemantle and Swaythling twice on the current boundaries – in 2012 and 2016. To general astonishment, Portswood, the ward containing the university, voted Labour for the first time since 1981. It was a triumph but there was a sting in the tail. Sholing ward, a historically Labour area on the south east edge of the city, ejected its last Labour councillor from office; it is a very ordinary part of working class and lower middle class urban England whose voters have bled away from Labour to Ukip and the Tories. Here, in microcosm, is the trend. Labour has lost the workaday suburb and gained the liberal student and academic hinterland of the university. The trouble is, there is a limit to the number of MPs one can elect with that formula, and Labour was nearing that limit already in 2015.
Labour’s performance in the 2016 local elections is paradoxical. The party leadership has adopted a revivalist, traditionalist approach to campaigning. The old time traditions – demonstrations, protest, the appeal to values of solidarity and community – have come back into fashion. And yet, the first national test of the new-old style politics has produced an unexpected result. The areas in which Labour’s strength has been ebbing in recent years, and in the long term over a period of decades, are unimpressed. The big swings to the Conservatives since 2012 in the smaller working class towns of the Midlands and North – Carlisle, Nuneaton, Cannock Chase – are testament to the lack of pull the traditional appeal has in these areas in the 2010s.
The lifestyles and attitudes that caused Labour such ‘southern discomfort’ in the 1980s and in 1992 are spreading outwards into the more distant parts of the south and into the Midlands, particularly towns such as Tamworth and Cannock, and undermined Labour’s performance in the Midlands in 2015. The 2016 local elections provided a certain amount of southern comfort for Labour, but another dose of Midlands misery. In Tamworth, for instance – a Labour seat from 1996 to 2010 (and 1974-79) – Labour’s performance in local elections in 2010-15 was unconvincing and got worse in 2016 with the loss of two seats to the Conservatives and two to Ukip. The thesis I outlined last September about the outward ripples of London in the south of England, and the ‘south’ into the Midlands, is supported by the pattern of the 2016 elections.
By contrast, the best Labour results were in some of the most modern bits of England, in London and its hinterland. Swindon, Milton Keynes, Reading and Crawley, and the leafy London suburbs, are what used to be regarded as classic New Labour territory, but now seem oddly fond of New Old Labour.
It may be tempting to regard voting for a traditional-looking Labour party as a metropolitan hipster indulgence, like Edwardian-style facial hair or vinyl records. But this would be a bit facile, because there are deeper trends. The 2014 local elections showed a similar pattern, with Labour’s performance being strongest in London and the urban bits of its hinterland. Southern towns are starting to resemble London, as working people on modest earnings are forced outward by London’s escalating cost of living, commuting in on public transport and worried about the quality of public services. Back in the 1980s the New Towns were bastions of the skilled white working class, but some of them such as Crawley and Milton Keynes are rapidly becoming as diverse as any other type of urban environment. Economic uncertainties and leadership worries drove many of these voters back to the Conservatives in the 2015 but these people are not ‘Tories’ in any meaningful sense.
As the 2012 and 2014 elections showed, support for a party in local elections is not an infallible guide to general election performance. As a Liberal Democrat could have told one at any stage in the last few decades, people frequently vote for parties in local elections which they do not remotely want to run a national government. Even in 2015, there was a gap in a number of marginal seats between Labour’s share of the vote in local and national elections on the same day. Even in areas of relatively strong performance, Labour should not pick up the Lib Dems’ disastrous 2010-15 comfort blanket of boasting that ‘where we work, we win’ only to be cruelly exposed at the polls at the general election.
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Lewis Baston is a contributing editor to Progress and senior research fellow at Democratic Audit. He tweets @LewisBaston
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Lewis Baston, you said: “As a Liberal Democrat could have told one at any stage in the last few decades, people frequently vote for parties in local elections which they do not remotely want to run a national government.”
Well, I’m a Lib Dem and you’re exactly right.
Sometimes, there’s no other option but to wrap your local party in a comfort blanket, because that’s the only way to keep people motivated to fight on. But, where you have a choice, that comfort blanket is deadly. For you, come the next election, when the Tories are finished going through every detail of Corbyn and McDonnell’s back catalogue, it will be deadly.
Why do I care?
Partly, because the Tories will use an unelectable Labour party to scare our voters into supporting them. Partly, because I shudder at the thought of 14-19 more years of Tory government.
But also because, you labour moderates and we Lib Dems have a lot in common, and I think we should start to recognise that.
Lewis is correct and if you want a real friend but outsider telling you what it is than Andrew Rawnsley does it in the Observer on his comment analysis of this election. .JC ” is the only leader of the opposition to lose council seats in the first electoral test in more than half a century.” In sum there is no compromise with Andrew he tells it like Progress should: ‘ Labour lost seats in Scotland, Wales and England, Moreover and what a political writer he is, Labour offered a more left wing Dr Corbyn magical portion to the Scots ” and they spat it out”