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Making sure Labour’s story is right for the south

September 5, 2012 10:38 am

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In 1997 Labour made major breakthroughs in the three southern regions, holding many of those seats until the 2010 election.

Today, we have the same number of MPs as in 1992  (with more seats to contest). Despite good local election results in 2012, Labour representation in key local authorities lags behind where we were three years before the 1997 election.

Labour clearly faces particular electoral challenges in the southern regions.  In part it’s because the demography and geography of the south throws up few ‘safe’ Labour seats which we can win by appealing to only one part of our potential electorate. Key southern seats tend to have more swing voters, so if things are running against us we do particularly badly. (By the same token the relative resilience of Labour’s middle class vote suggests an as yet untapped potential in the southern regions).

Across the south, Labour success relies on our ability to mobilise the broadest coalition of voters, not the targeting of a particular section. That can only be done with a broad and values based appeal that unites many different types of voter.

But doesn’t Labour’s poor performance simply suggest southern voters are actually significantly more right wing, with more deeply conservative values. It may be counter-intuitive, but despite the myth of the ‘southern voter’ – holding a distinct view of the world that needs a special and particular appeal; better off, more aspirational, and generally more right wing – there’s not a lot of evidence that southern voters are very different to those elsewhere.

On the major value issues, southern voters feel pretty much the same about taxation, the role of the state, migration, rights and responsibilities and the rest. There are few signs they are keener on breaking up the NHS, cutting the police or selling off forests.

The problem is not the voters or their values; it is too often how the Labour Party has come across. In brief, southern voters too often don’t assume we stand for them (in the way that very similar voters would in other parts of the country. Too often, the Labour Party simply does not exist as a real presence in their communities.

It’s for these reasons that Ed Miliband has asked Iain McNicol and me to lead a time-limited southern task force. In letter to CLPs and elected representatives sent in August we set out the aims.

  • Making sure Labour’s story is right for the south. We can be confident that Labour values are in tune with many southern voters. But not all see us as ‘their’ party, part and parcel of the life of southern England. So we will look at the best ways of making sure Labour is seen as standing up for the people in the south.
  • Making sure we use our resources as effectively as possible, bearing in mind that we have relatively few current MPs and Labour Councillors to support our candidates in key seats and councils.
  • Making sure we present our case as effectively as possible in all parts of the local, national and social media.

The taskforce will meet in early September to plan our work, but we hope it will include a session at the Labour conference, and a series of consultation events in October and November. We will report to Ed Miliband before Christmas.

If there are particular issues you feel we should address, or proposals you wish to make, please send a brief note to Malcolm_Powers@labour.org.uk

John Denham is the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen

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  • ColinAdkins

    John, I guess you are saying that the south is not homogeneous as people would have us believe. When I worked for MSF, albeit many years ago, I often mentioned that there was more manufacturing jobs in the SE than many regions in the Midlands and the North. The issue is not so much as changing our message but re-formulating this to address the needs of southern voters. Policies such as an industrial policy which the last Labour government did not do preferring to listen to people who talked of a post-industrial economic policy (‘Living on Air’) and investment in science and innovation which the last Labour government had a more than commendable record has as much resonance in the south as it does in the north. I feared Labour associated industrial policy with ‘picking winners’. I would say I prefer this to policy being determined by losers. Colin

  • Alexwilliamz

    Aspirational is not a right wing concept. It is left wing, it is just that its been twisted to mean winner takes all. The Labour movement is all about aspiration, but the aspiration is collective rather than simply individual. The idea that one or two people can ‘aspire’ to rise out of their initial position, seems adequate for right wingers to leave the inequality in place. The Labour message is one of aspiration for all, that everyone should be helped to pull themselves out of poverty and lack of opportunity, not just slinging a couple of rope ladders over the side to provide an escape route for the few.

  • jaime taurosangastre candelas

    For John Denham,

    I don’t profess to have any deep insights into the nuances, but from the perspective of a Cambridgeshire safe tory seat:

    The local Labour Party is completely invisible.  In 9 years, I have not had a single Labour leaflet through the letter box for any form of election.  I get multiple tory, Lib Dem and UKIP leaflets.  And yet, the constituency continually polls between 11,000-15,000 votes for Labour in the GEs.  That sounds to me like a solid base of support that is woefully untapped.

    Labour needs to say something on immigration.  We have in the harvesting season about 5,000 eastern Europeans living among us, most of whom are paid cash in hand and not enough to bother the tax authorities, most of whom are itinerant, and some of whom leave their wives and children to be educated and cared for by the NHS year around.  There are great seasonal spikes in all sorts of local data:  benefits claims, NHS admissions, education, social services, and of course crime, anything from unlicensed and uninsured cars and vans with eastern european number plates to illegal alcohol stills (one blew up in a Peterborough industrial estate last year, causing a big fire and three deaths).  There was a brutal murder of a young woman with the body left on the Queen’s Sandringham estate – it seems that was the spillover between a gang struggle from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.  Knife violence is endemic:  we see this in the A&E departments across the region.  This is true throughout the Fens (where the majority of British-grown vegetables come from), from Cambridgeshire almost as far north as South Yorkshire.  Local people permanently talk about this, and yet Labour never says anything.  What are local people expected to think?  ”Labour does not care” seems to be a reasonable assumption.

    I’m not going to get into any emailing of your assistant to make the same points***:  you think that is how blogs work?  Ideally you’d read this yourself and respond, but if not then your assistant should be monitoring the comments and will pick up any comments.  If that doesn’t happen, well it will confirm my suspicion that Westminster politicians think they can put out an article and people will come running to them.  You have to work for support, so earn it, in a way that the local CLP in my constituency appears to not even think is necessary.  11,000-15,000 Labour voters in every GE since 1983, and very few of them actively engaged by the CLP.

    ***Particularly a “brief note” – that puts the onus on making a precise and concise argument on the author. You want your suppliers of information to do the work of your assistant as well? What arrogance, and a completely uninviting invitation. No thanks. Take what I say above, or leave it.

  • New Alliance

    The Labour Party to make real inroads into the south, will need to become less centralised, internal as well as externally. It has lead to big mistakes such as selling the country’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices and increasing the unfair council tax while in office of 41%.
    While LibDems are rightly campaigning for the replacement of this unfair tax with local income tax!
    If you want to make progress in the south we need proportional representation as the election system. Rather have a Liberal as a MP than a Tory !!

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