Can Labour learn from past successes in the South, asks Luke Akehurst.
Despite living in Hackney for the last dozen years, I was born a Man of Kent (east of the Medway) and grew up in the distinctly un-Labour milieu of Canterbury, with family roots in local politics in Gravesend (where two of my great-grandparents were Labour Mayors) and Dartford.
As such I grew up with a mild obsession with the complete absence of Labour MPs in my home county from 1979 to 1997. That fired both my political interest in electoral reform and in how we might make Labour more appealing to southern voters, something that was reinforced by stints as a parliamentary candidate in both Aldershot in Hampshire and Castle Point in South Essex.
The demographic changes that have reduced the number of constituencies in the North and increased the number in the South mean that winning in the South is not just a nice bonus associated with landslides, or a boost to the injured pride of southern Labourites like me, it’s essential to us ever winning power and doing anything for our heartlands. The people I represent as a councillor in deprived inner-city Hackney need a Labour party that can win Harlow, Hove and Hastings to produce the government they need.
Tony Blair proved that Labour can win seats across the south when we get the policies right, with eight seats in Kent in 1997 and 2001, and even more extraordinarily, seven in the far tighter 2005 election. This was helped by the fact that despite being educated in Edinburgh and representing a seat in County Durham, his image was one that seemed to chime with the self-image of southerners.
We currently risk a similar downward spiral to that we experienced in the post-1979 period in the South. With very few southern seats outside London (a city which is culturally completely sui generis and hence actually a negative association in the minds of voters in the wider South), and only a couple of those MPs in high-profile roles in the Party, we literally don’t speak as a Party with a southern accent. We risk not being alive to the economic and political concerns of the South so we don’t address them, we lose further ground, and the spiral continues.
Quite aside from it being unhealthy for a party that aspires to govern to be such a weak force in three entire regions of the country (South East, South West and Eastern) it is particularly damaging when these are the most economically vibrant and demographically growing regions. It’s exactly the rust belt vs. sun belt issue that has often scuppered the Democrats in the USA (though I accept climatic factors make the analogy between Margate and Miami Beach difficult to sustain).
To escape from this spiral we need to find a way to make sure Labour can win some seats and keep a voice in the “deep south” – Kent, Sussex, Essex – even in a year when we lose nationally.
Oxford East is obviously a fantastic current organisational model – victory by sheer hard graft as they had some of the highest canvassing contact levels in the UK – but may not easily translate to the North Kent seats as Oxford has a demographic mix they don’t, due to the presence of two universities, a settled BME population and a major car factory. In addition, the opposition in Oxford East was the Lib Dems whereas in all the Kent seats the politics is skewed a lot more to the right, with Tory opponents.
Go back prior to 1979 though and we didn’t always lose all our Kent seats when we were in opposition. Labour’s Sydney Irving held Dartford throughout the Eden, MacMillan and Home years. Rochester & Chatham was held in 1951 and 1955 and only lost in the 1959 landslide. Even more surprisingly Percy Wells and Terence Boston held Faversham (which then included Sittingbourne and Sheppey) for the entire period from 1945 to 1970.
A quick Google search tells you how we held this unlikely Labour bastion by margins of 562 in 1951, 59 in 1955, and with an against-the-tide increase to 253 in 1959 (won under the local slogan “Make it More than 59 in ’59”).
There’s an essay online called Faversham Labour Party 1918-1994 by Lawrence Black of London Guildhall University. The sub-heading is the give-away: “The Best-Organised Constituency in Britain” (a quote from Tony Benn in a 1964 by-election in the seat).
Here are some of the choice quotes:
• “it had a vibrant and entrenched Labour culture”
• “In 1964 with a membership of 5,629 Faversham was the third largest Labour Party in Britain”
• “approaching one in ten of the electors... were Labour members”
• “the Party maintained eight Labour halls”
• “gross income was around £25,000 [at 1960s prices!] in the early 1960s”
• A tote lottery was the “main source of income from which the Agent was paid”, raising £19,000 in 1957
• “150 members acted as ...tote collectors”
• The Annual August Fete was a “notable date in the local, as well as Labour calendar”, opened by national politicians and celebrities and attracting 16,000 visitors
• “the social aspect of politics” was “more than a means to garner political goodwill”, during WW2 it ensured the CLP “maintained its organisation and kept its powder dry”
• The CLP “Annual Dinner was a most glittering social occasion” which on one occasion was held in Margate because so many people wanted to hear Gaitskell speak there was no venue big enough in the constituency.
Lawrence Black sees the seat’s marginality as driving its high membership because joining involved “a greater sense of purpose” than in safe seats. He cites safe seats that at the same time that Faversham had 5,629 members had the few hundred we might expect now.
But the people running this CLP were not complacent. They warned at their 1957 AGM that “complacency and apathy are constant dangers we have to face”.
It’s worth reading the whole of Black’s paper to see how the CLP was built up over decades, the important role of its full-time Agent, and the sad story of its decline in the 1980s by defections to the SDP and Militant infiltration, followed by re-gain by Derek Wyatt under the new guise of Sittingbourne & Sheppey.
I’m not suggesting everything from the Faversham lesson is translatable into the 21st century – the National Lottery has killed off local Totes, and TV has made it harder for Labour social clubs to thrive.
But it does provide a reference point for CLPs trying to work out how we can win in unlikely areas of the South on a sustained rather than a once-in-a-generation basis. And that recipe seems to be that you need a steady source of income; a full-time Organiser to run fundraising (paying for themselves), recruitment and campaigning; and that to have a big, campaigning membership you need to have a sense of purpose through exciting elections and fun social activity. There’s no reason why every CLP shouldn’t have an annual dinner. There’s no reason why every CLP shouldn’t have an Annual Fete, open to the public – in small town Southern England the WI and PTA hold fetes so why shouldn’t the Labour Party?
These activities won’t start out big but nor did Faversham’s. They built them up through decades of hard work.
All of this is entirely in line with Ed Miliband’s aspiration for Labour to be a real force in local communities. More social activities, open to the public, presents the Party with a human face, not as a bunch of election obsessives.
Sometimes having the audacity to aspire to your CLP playing a major role in the life of your community is the only spark that is needed.
But it also requires the Party nationally to realise that to build local parties capable of winning and holding marginal seats on a sustained basis, we have to understand that sustainable CLPs need to be more than election machines mobilised every four or five years. They need deep organic roots in communities and an internal political and social life that keeps them thriving between elections.
Luke Akehurst is a member of the Labour Party National Executive Committee and a Labour councillor in Hackney. He blogs at www.lukeakehurst.blogspot.com
Despite living in Hackney for the last dozen years, I was born a Man of Kent (east of the Medway) and grew up in the distinctly un-Labour milieu of Canterbury, with family roots in local politics in Gravesend (where two of my great-grandparents were Labour Mayors) and Dartford.
As such I grew up with a mild obsession with the complete absence of Labour MPs in my home county from 1979 to 1997. That fired both my political interest in electoral reform and in how we might make Labour more appealing to southern voters, something that was reinforced by stints as a parliamentary candidate in both Aldershot in Hampshire and Castle Point in South Essex.
The demographic changes that have reduced the number of constituencies in the North and increased the number in the South mean that winning in the South is not just a nice bonus associated with landslides, or a boost to the injured pride of southern Labourites like me, it’s essential to us ever winning power and doing anything for our heartlands. The people I represent as a councillor in deprived inner-city Hackney need a Labour party that can win Harlow, Hove and Hastings to produce the government they need.
Tony Blair proved that Labour can win seats across the south when we get the policies right, with eight seats in Kent in 1997 and 2001, and even more extraordinarily, seven in the far tighter 2005 election. This was helped by the fact that despite being educated in Edinburgh and representing a seat in County Durham, his image was one that seemed to chime with the self-image of southerners.
We currently risk a similar downward spiral to that we experienced in the post-1979 period in the South. With very few southern seats outside London (a city which is culturally completely sui generis and hence actually a negative association in the minds of voters in the wider South), and only a couple of those MPs in high-profile roles in the Party, we literally don’t speak as a Party with a southern accent. We risk not being alive to the economic and political concerns of the South so we don’t address them, we lose further ground, and the spiral continues.
Quite aside from it being unhealthy for a party that aspires to govern to be such a weak force in three entire regions of the country (South East, South West and Eastern) it is particularly damaging when these are the most economically vibrant and demographically growing regions. It’s exactly the rust belt vs. sun belt issue that has often scuppered the Democrats in the USA (though I accept climatic factors make the analogy between Margate and Miami Beach difficult to sustain).
To escape from this spiral we need to find a way to make sure Labour can win some seats and keep a voice in the “deep south” – Kent, Sussex, Essex – even in a year when we lose nationally.
Oxford East is obviously a fantastic current organisational model – victory by sheer hard graft as they had some of the highest canvassing contact levels in the UK – but may not easily translate to the North Kent seats as Oxford has a demographic mix they don’t, due to the presence of two universities, a settled BME population and a major car factory. In addition, the opposition in Oxford East was the Lib Dems whereas in all the Kent seats the politics is skewed a lot more to the right, with Tory opponents.
Go back prior to 1979 though and we didn’t always lose all our Kent seats when we were in opposition. Labour’s Sydney Irving held Dartford throughout the Eden, MacMillan and Home years. Rochester & Chatham was held in 1951 and 1955 and only lost in the 1959 landslide. Even more surprisingly Percy Wells and Terence Boston held Faversham (which then included Sittingbourne and Sheppey) for the entire period from 1945 to 1970.
A quick Google search tells you how we held this unlikely Labour bastion by margins of 562 in 1951, 59 in 1955, and with an against-the-tide increase to 253 in 1959 (won under the local slogan “Make it More than 59 in ’59”).
There’s an essay online called Faversham Labour Party 1918-1994 by Lawrence Black of London Guildhall University. The sub-heading is the give-away: “The Best-Organised Constituency in Britain” (a quote from Tony Benn in a 1964 by-election in the seat).
Here are some of the choice quotes:
• “it had a vibrant and entrenched Labour culture”
• “In 1964 with a membership of 5,629 Faversham was the third largest Labour Party in Britain”
• “approaching one in ten of the electors... were Labour members”
• “the Party maintained eight Labour halls”
• “gross income was around £25,000 [at 1960s prices!] in the early 1960s”
• A tote lottery was the “main source of income from which the Agent was paid”, raising £19,000 in 1957
• “150 members acted as ...tote collectors”
• The Annual August Fete was a “notable date in the local, as well as Labour calendar”, opened by national politicians and celebrities and attracting 16,000 visitors
• “the social aspect of politics” was “more than a means to garner political goodwill”, during WW2 it ensured the CLP “maintained its organisation and kept its powder dry”
• The CLP “Annual Dinner was a most glittering social occasion” which on one occasion was held in Margate because so many people wanted to hear Gaitskell speak there was no venue big enough in the constituency.
Lawrence Black sees the seat’s marginality as driving its high membership because joining involved “a greater sense of purpose” than in safe seats. He cites safe seats that at the same time that Faversham had 5,629 members had the few hundred we might expect now.
But the people running this CLP were not complacent. They warned at their 1957 AGM that “complacency and apathy are constant dangers we have to face”.
It’s worth reading the whole of Black’s paper to see how the CLP was built up over decades, the important role of its full-time Agent, and the sad story of its decline in the 1980s by defections to the SDP and Militant infiltration, followed by re-gain by Derek Wyatt under the new guise of Sittingbourne & Sheppey.
I’m not suggesting everything from the Faversham lesson is translatable into the 21st century – the National Lottery has killed off local Totes, and TV has made it harder for Labour social clubs to thrive.
But it does provide a reference point for CLPs trying to work out how we can win in unlikely areas of the South on a sustained rather than a once-in-a-generation basis. And that recipe seems to be that you need a steady source of income; a full-time Organiser to run fundraising (paying for themselves), recruitment and campaigning; and that to have a big, campaigning membership you need to have a sense of purpose through exciting elections and fun social activity. There’s no reason why every CLP shouldn’t have an annual dinner. There’s no reason why every CLP shouldn’t have an Annual Fete, open to the public – in small town Southern England the WI and PTA hold fetes so why shouldn’t the Labour Party?
These activities won’t start out big but nor did Faversham’s. They built them up through decades of hard work.
All of this is entirely in line with Ed Miliband’s aspiration for Labour to be a real force in local communities. More social activities, open to the public, presents the Party with a human face, not as a bunch of election obsessives.
Sometimes having the audacity to aspire to your CLP playing a major role in the life of your community is the only spark that is needed.
But it also requires the Party nationally to realise that to build local parties capable of winning and holding marginal seats on a sustained basis, we have to understand that sustainable CLPs need to be more than election machines mobilised every four or five years. They need deep organic roots in communities and an internal political and social life that keeps them thriving between elections.
Luke Akehurst is a member of the Labour Party National Executive Committee and a Labour councillor in Hackney. He blogs at www.lukeakehurst.blogspot.com
"We currently risk a similar downward spiral to that we experienced in the post-1979 period in the South. With very few southern seats outside London (a city which is culturally completely sui generis and hence actually a negative association in the minds of voters in the wider South)"
ReplyDeleteQuite true. And yet with your earlier comments you reveal the very reason why Labour (excepting the circumstances under Blair) will not and cannot appeal to the type of constituencies you describe
"it’s essential to us ever winning power and doing anything for our heartlands. The people I represent as a councillor in deprived inner-city Hackney need a Labour party that can win Harlow, Hove and Hastings to produce the government they need"
I guess that producing a government that Hackney needs is not so high up on the agenda for Harlow voters as producing a government that Harlow needs. Now you may well think they need the same thing, but by putting it in the way you do, you betray an attitude that certain types of voters are seen as ballot box fodder to elect a government which serves a totally different group of voters. That accounted for your hammering in the Hemels and Harlows in the 1980s and again now (Hove and Hastings actually have remained among your better areas in the South, but for somewhat differeing reasons from each other, neither are typical of the kind of white van man' seats like those in North Kent/South Essex.
To cut a long story short, the agenda of Hackney and its ilk is not (as perhaps reflected in the result of the AV referendum)is not something which is going to win very widespread support in most of the rest of the country (and not just the south for that matter)
But Pete, that depends what you think the "Hackney" agenda is. A pro-foxhunting, rural Conservative might couch his desire for a majority Tory government about "needing the Harlows of the world" in similar terms.
ReplyDeleteWe can put this in even more local terms. Take my patch, Putney. To serve the people of Roehampton and other "core Labour" groups in the constituency we need to win the middle class votes of central Putney and Southfields.
The "agenda" of Roehampton is different to the agenda of Putney - it's, for example, about local working class sons and daughters being able to remain close to the community they grew up in rather than being forced miles away because the council's sold off too much council housing. The answer is build more council housing: something that's not going to top any poll of priorities for the middle-class families living down the bottom of the hill.
But it can be if it's couched in issues of the council allowing thousands of luxury penthouse tower blocks to be built, transforming the character of Putney rather than addressing local housing need. And if you want evidence that this is a message that resonates, I refer you to the 13.7% swing we just worked hard to earn in Thamesfield.
What Luke is arguing is not that we want to win seats like Harlow (and Harlow's a strange case anyway) as a trojan horse to implement a programme focussed on immigrants, benefit recipients and the very poorest - it's that implementing an agenda that wins Labour Harlow is not opposed to one that benefits Hackney.
After all, a pro-growth, cut crime and build more affordable housing agenda is going to benefit both communities - indeed, the build affordable housing agenda is how Harlow came into existence (in its current shape) in the first place. If Labour can bring itself to recognise that living within our means is a value of Labour families - born of necessity, and rout the liberal luvvies whose values have so decimated working class communities, it could develop an awesome platform.
The difference between Luke and I is that I don't think Ed Miliband has the first clue about that agenda, wouldn't believe in it if he did, would be too weak to take on the vested interests in the party (because he belongs to too many of them) and and looks/sounds too much like an imbecile to ever win the peoples' trust to even be given the chance.