Denham fires stark warning about attracting southern voters

John Denham, who as head of Labour’s Southern Taskforce is charged with finding out how the Party can better appeal in the south, has warned that Labour is “not on the agenda for most southern voters”.

According to the Huffington Post, the MP for Southampton Itchen said: “Look at the way in which the country is changing socially and economically, it is becoming more like the South and less like the North,” he said. “We have got to do better because otherwise we will do worse.”

“Our difficultly is that outside the target seats most voters don’t think about voting Labour and most voters don’t even think we are talking them when we think we are talking about them.”

“It’s not as bad as the Tories in the North of England because actually relatively few people in the South say ‘I would never vote Labour at all … but it’s the sense of ‘Labour isn’t really talking about me, people like me, I don’t identify, they don’t really understand my life’.”

This is an interesting intervention from Denham, who remains a close ally of Ed Miliband. While this is within his remit as part of the Southern Taskforce, it probably a bit more frank than most would have expected – but this is arguably good news. It would be worse if the person put in charge of telling the Labour leader how to attract certain voters simply reported that everything was going fine if they didn’t really believe this.

John Denham is telling some home truths and it is exactly because of Denham’s loyalty that we should sit up and pay attention to him.