Welcome to Southern Front. This website and blog is a home for debate and discussion about why Labour has lost the support of so many voters in Southern England (outside of London), and what is needed to win those voters back.
In 1997, Labour's landslide victory saw the election of 59 Labour MPs in constituencies in the South of England; at the 2010 general election just ten of those constituencies returned Labour MPs. In Southampton, home to two of Labour’s southern MPs, fewer than 3,000 additional Conservative votes in the city would have seen Alan Whitehead & John Denham join the ranks of Labour’s southern dispossessed. Across the South as a whole, Labour failed to win 187 of the region’s 197 seats, and has no MPs whatsoever in 19 English counties.
The situation is even bleaker when one considers the extent to which Labour’s decline in the South has been mirrored by its local government base. Labour controls just five southern councils; our 600 councillors represent less than one in ten of all those elected south of the Midlands. In Kent, England’s largest county and until 2010, the home of 8 Labour MPs, we have 94 of the county’s 724 councillors. The picture is no better in Surrey, where there are only 5 Labour councillors elected across the entire county. A similar picture exists elsewhere across the South. Indeed, Labour is entirely unrepresented on 71 councils in the political south, who combined provide local services to a population of nearly 8 million voters.
Consideration of this problem is not new. Following Labour’s 1992 general election defeat, the Fabian Society published Southern Discomfort, a pamphlet by Giles Radice, then the Labour MP for Durham. Radice’s pamphlet sought to explain why Labour had failed to make the breakthrough in southern marginal seats necessary for the election of a Labour government. Following the party’s defeat in May 2010, Radice revisited the problem when he co-authored with Patrick Diamond Southern Discomfort Again. The pamphlet sought to “address the crippling weakness that Labour faces in Southern England following the 2010 defeat”.
Commendable though Radice’s efforts have been, tackling Labour’s “crippling weakness” in the south requires more attention than a pamphlet every twenty years. Indeed, had Labour in Government paid more attention to the problems it was facing in the South, we might still be in Government. Two thirds of the seats we lost in May were in Southern and Midlands constituencies. 70% of the 940,000 votes Labour lost between 2005 and 2010 were in constituencies in the political south. This website will be a forum for Labour at all levels of our party to discuss and debate a path back to electoral success in the South. The party’s future success depends on it.
In 1997, Labour's landslide victory saw the election of 59 Labour MPs in constituencies in the South of England; at the 2010 general election just ten of those constituencies returned Labour MPs. In Southampton, home to two of Labour’s southern MPs, fewer than 3,000 additional Conservative votes in the city would have seen Alan Whitehead & John Denham join the ranks of Labour’s southern dispossessed. Across the South as a whole, Labour failed to win 187 of the region’s 197 seats, and has no MPs whatsoever in 19 English counties.
The situation is even bleaker when one considers the extent to which Labour’s decline in the South has been mirrored by its local government base. Labour controls just five southern councils; our 600 councillors represent less than one in ten of all those elected south of the Midlands. In Kent, England’s largest county and until 2010, the home of 8 Labour MPs, we have 94 of the county’s 724 councillors. The picture is no better in Surrey, where there are only 5 Labour councillors elected across the entire county. A similar picture exists elsewhere across the South. Indeed, Labour is entirely unrepresented on 71 councils in the political south, who combined provide local services to a population of nearly 8 million voters.
Consideration of this problem is not new. Following Labour’s 1992 general election defeat, the Fabian Society published Southern Discomfort, a pamphlet by Giles Radice, then the Labour MP for Durham. Radice’s pamphlet sought to explain why Labour had failed to make the breakthrough in southern marginal seats necessary for the election of a Labour government. Following the party’s defeat in May 2010, Radice revisited the problem when he co-authored with Patrick Diamond Southern Discomfort Again. The pamphlet sought to “address the crippling weakness that Labour faces in Southern England following the 2010 defeat”.
Commendable though Radice’s efforts have been, tackling Labour’s “crippling weakness” in the south requires more attention than a pamphlet every twenty years. Indeed, had Labour in Government paid more attention to the problems it was facing in the South, we might still be in Government. Two thirds of the seats we lost in May were in Southern and Midlands constituencies. 70% of the 940,000 votes Labour lost between 2005 and 2010 were in constituencies in the political south. This website will be a forum for Labour at all levels of our party to discuss and debate a path back to electoral success in the South. The party’s future success depends on it.
Stuart King, Southern Front
The South has always been as marginal to Labour as Scotland has become to the Conservatives. A broken First Past the Post electoral system means that hundreds of thousands of Labour votes are simply discounted. Many southern constituencies have such an in-built Tory majority that it is simply not worth voting. The answer is Proportional Representation.
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