The tide of history is against Tories hoping to rebuild in the north, says Lewis Baston

Labour has been agonising over its ‘southern discomfort’ for over 20 years. Some Conservatives, such as David Skelton, have only just started to think seriously about their northern wastelands, although the problem is every bit as serious for their party. While Labour has always been vulnerable to losing most of its seats in a bad election in the south, the northern Conservatives have been on a downward trajectory for decades.

The scale of the Tories’ northern problem is apparent even from some very basic statistics. In 2010 the Conservatives won 43 seats in the three northern regions of England. While this was progress from the depths of the previous three elections (17 northern Tories in 1997 and 2001, and 19 in 2005), it was, in historical terms, a very poor result for the party. Astonishingly, there were more Tories elected from northern seats in the Labour landslides of 1966 (45 northern Tories) and even 1945 (44 northern Tories). If the party had won as many northern MPs in 2010 as it did in past modest-sized Conservative victories such as in 1955 and 1970, it would have won an overall majority.

Another problem is that, other than the rural seats of North and East Yorkshire and Cheshire suburbia, there are hardly any safe Conservative seats in the north. If there were a fairly small pro-Labour swing in the north, the Conservatives could lose 13 of their 43 seats. There is also a lack of authentically northern Conservative leaders, except for William Hague (Eric Pickles having left Bradford for suburban Essex). In elections Labour is winning, the Tories now get nearly wiped out, while previously they could still command a critical mass of MPs.

The pattern varies a little in each of the three northern regions. The Tories can keep their heads above water in an even year in Yorkshire and the Humber because there are a number of winnable marginals and the party’s underperformance has not got significantly worse over the decades. While the cities have slipped away, as they have elsewhere, suburbs like Pudsey and multi-ethnic towns like Dewsbury can still elect Conservative MPs.

The Tories have not deteriorated much in the north-east, because there is little room for things to get worse – other than in the elections of the 1930s, it has been a Labour stronghold for 90 years. The only postwar Tory leader to have made much progress was Harold Macmillan, who relocated from Stockton to Bromley in 1945 but whose 1959 landslide saw 10 Tories elected from the north-east, including MPs for Newcastle East and Hartlepool.

The real disaster has been in the north-west. For much of the 20th century the region went with the national winner, but since the rise of Harold Wilson the Tories have prevailed (and then by a whisker) in the region in only one election – 1983. While decline started in the 1960s, Thatcherism inflicted two additional heavy blows on the northern Tories – the poll tax and the attack on the liberal professions who had previously been a source of strength in respectable northern suburbs. The Conservative share of north-west seats in 2010, 29.3 per cent, was worse than in any pre-1997 election.

The Conservatives have been weakening across the region in local government, particularly in the five northern metropolitan counties (Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear and West Yorkshire). At their recent peak in 2008-10 they controlled two northern metropolitan councils – Bury and North Tyneside. In 1978-79, after a much shorter period of Labour government, 13 out of the 29 councils were Tory including Leeds, Bradford and Oldham. The cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield had one solitary Tory councillor between them in 2008, compared to 127 representatives in 1978.

The Conservative party at its most successful has had a broader appeal than the affluent south-east, which has always been its electoral heartland. Until recently it has incorporated powerful, and specifically regional, political tendencies and interests. Joseph Chamberlain brought his Liberal Unionist machine across in 1886 and the Tories completely dominated the West Midlands until 1924. The infusion of a new set of Liberals in the 1920s and 1930s helped the Conservatives in West Yorkshire and Lancashire, while on Merseyside the legacy of the formidable Archibald Salvidge kept the Orange vote locked down until 1964. There has hardly been any balance to the dominance of southern England and the City of London in the Conservative power structure for decades. If Skelton and his allies are serious about reversing Tory decline in the north they are undertaking a difficult project, with perhaps unexpectedly radical implications.

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

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Photo: florriebassingbourn