Basingstoke & Deane councillor, Andrew McCormick, responds to Adam Gray's recent article on why Labour doesn't win in certain southern seats.
As someone who was born in the town, grew up in the town, and having spent the past 9 years as a Labour councillor in the town, I'd like to set the record straight.
Adam Gray opines on Basingstoke when it appears the closest he's got is looking out of the train window. It’s painfully easy these days to over-analyse Labour’s success in the North and lack of it in the South.
I have a simpler explanation for why our support fell away: resources. Here in Basingstoke, we have a Conservative Association with over 400 members that turns over £75k a year. Our CLP has barely half the members and a third of the money.
In 2010, Labour did best where it was most active and had the highest contact rates. This was especially true in London and Scotland, where our votes increased. A quick glance at London's membership reveals huge CLPs like Holborn and St Pancras with over 1,000 members. Such resources would give us a Labour MP and majority control of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council. The same is also true of the more successful parts of the South, e.g. Slough.
I was privileged to be a part of the hugely successful 1997 General Election campaign in Reading which returned two Labour MPs - the first time Reading had elected a Labour MP since the 1960's. This success was down to hard work on the doorstep, with many thousands of contacts and over a million leaflets dropped in both constituencies during the campaign.
I was also privileged to be part of the 2001 General Election campaign in Basingstoke. Working closely with the PPC, Jon Hartley, we caned the constituency, and thought we might have won it. As I recall, we were ahead until the last ballot box (which I think was from rural Silchester). We lost by just 890 votes. I still feel the pain to this day.
Since then, we saw our membership decline by over 60%. This was mirrored across the nation, and had numerous implications. Not only did we lose activists, we lost new candidates, and the existing ones who were councillors became older and less energised. At parliamentary level, the number and quality of candidates suffered as well. Our 2010 parliamentary candidate wouldn't have made the 2005 shortlist.
Losing activists meant we lost council seats. In 2004 we defended 7 seats and lost 3 councillors. Reading didn't lose any. This was down to resources. We had the same issues, like Iraq, and a crackpot anti-EU vote to contend with. The national mood was so toxic that anyone mounting an effective campaign against us won. In 2003 I won my seat with 62% of the vote. In 2004 my running-mate lost. We did not have the foot soldiers to take our message to the electorate and counteract the propaganda from the media and other political parties.
To minimise any future losses we concentrated on our safest seats and campaigned on local issues. But even that couldn’t prevent us losing another seat in a by-election on 21 December 2006 and a further two in all-out elections in 2008, Labour’s worst results for 40 years. We lost seats where the Tories concentrated their considerable resources, backed by the national mood. 2009 saw our worst results in 80 years: we held onto just one county seat, whereas in 2005, boosted by a General Election turnout, we won two and came close in another two.
Where we maintained the dialogue with our electorate, we kept seats. Those seats we pulled out of saw our vote fall away dramatically. In 2010, we held all our council seats, but suffered our worst parliamentary result since 1931. Analysis of the votes showed two-thirds of our votes were in the six council seats we actively campaigned in, with just 3500 votes in the other ten.
There is a danger to pulling out of seats and breaking off the voter dialogue: it's very hard to come back. Now the national mood is with us again, the opportunities we have in 2011 are tremendous. Even though our membership is up 30% on last year, our resources are nowhere near enough to do justice to the potential. A good result for us in 2011 would be to win three seats. But with the Lib Dems trailing at 10% in the polls, we should be wiping them out.
That is why the work of Third Place First is so important. We must fight back on as wide a front as possible. We need to take the message out to the voters, wherever they are, and not be afraid to do it, even with a shoestring campaign and a team of one.
I don’t buy this idea that Labour isn’t “for” the South. After 1997, the local Tories had to win votes back when many of their “traditional” voters had lost jobs or were threatened with repossession in the appalling Major Government of the 1990’s. Tony Blair gave them a better alternative. We have to give them something better to vote for than the coalition cuts, with relentless campaigning on the doorstep, in the letter box, in the local press, and in the blogosphere.
Councillor Andrew McCormick has been a Labour councillor on Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council since 2002.
Andrew, thanks for the comment. With respect, it's too easy to blame "resources" and I'm not entirely sure you are setting the record straight: what you wrote and what I wrote aren't contradictory.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, we can presumably agree that had the 2001 (and possibly 1997, though probably not) election been fought on 2010 boundaries - that is, shorn further of some of the outlying rural wards, it too would have been a Labour gain?
I concur with you, for what it's worth, that had Labour won in 2001, while by now it would almost certainly be Tory again, it would not be to the tune of 15,000.
But where you and I part company is the - frankly complacent, and entirely convenient - excuse that somehow if you'd had more members, or a few more councillors, a few thousand more leaflets, Basingstoke would be some socialist nirvana. Utter nonsense.
Reading is more strongly Labour than Basingstoke because towns like Reading are atypical of the south east. Just as Luton and Slough are atypical of the south east: seats with large minority communities; seats with fairly large student populations; seats with larger than typical proportions of university-educated professional middle-classes.
In short, Reading is not Basingstoke and members are not a determinant of Labour success: Putney had a Labour MP without any Labour councillors; plenty of seats went Labour in 1997 with virtually no work done in them - Basingstoke included.
Of course parties grow and retract depending on the national fortunes of the parties - again, that's not an argument about resources and again it's not contradicting anything I wrote. It's blindingly obvious.
But if Labour is for the south, as you claim, why - even in 1997 - did Labour only win a fraction of seats in the region? Why is trade unionism even more of an irrelevance in the south than it is elsewhere in the country? WHy do souther seats have much smaller memberships than those in London or the north? Why doesn't Labour have a stronger local government base even after a decade of Labour national government? Nothing to do with resources.
With respect, it's not yourself you need to convince about this - it's the voters who stuck with over 150 Tory MPs at the nadir of the party's fortunes. Saying Labour needs an alternative to Tory cuts is easy. What is your alternative? That's where your article should have started, not ended.
Adam, all those questions are in the wrong order.
ReplyDeleteLabour only wins a fraction of seats in the south because trade unions are weak. Southern memberships aren't notably smaller than in the north - plenty of strong Labour seats had fewer than 200 members on the figures given out at conference and Labour has a weak local government base BECAUSE of a decade of local government - it's called a protest vote.
With respect, if you're trying to convince the voters who stuck with 150 Tory MPs at the nadir of the party's fortunes, you're wasting your time. Because they're Tories and will be unless David Cameron is caught in a compromising position with a farmyard animal. Probably even then.
Concentrate on the seats we can win, even (I'd argue especially) if they aren't entirely typical of the south-east. Our task isn't to win the majority of the seats in the most Tory region of the country, it's to win enough seats to win a majority. Winning seats we missed in 1997 would be a nice bonus, but they're a very very minor part of the picture.
This is not to say I buy Andrew's argument entirely - we had lots of resources in terms of members in Cambridge, and we still got destroyed in 2010, although not always for the same reasons as elsewhere in the south. But his argument makes more sense than your claim that we should concentrate our attention on the voters who've always voted Tory, even in their darkest days.
I think the points made are very important
ReplyDeletenot least the need to stand everywhere
The resources point is correct, but the reality is we are unlikely to address this unless we have a fairy godmother
The Tories are dying out
the Lib Dems have gone in with the Tories and now voted to privatise the NHS
I think a lot is about "profile"
ie newsletters, blogs, local press, radio
and the use of lots of front organisations
anyone for a Basingstoke Patients association
In the next elections we will be spoilt for issues - its picking the key ones and plucking away
It may even be worth standing independendts agsinst Council leaders, decapitation policy works better from an indy in Tory areas
Keep fighting
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I'm not sure this is a totally fair depiction of what happened in Basingstoke. I watched from nearby as Basingstoke CLP members refused to support their Parliamentary candidate, and refused to offer her an agent.
ReplyDeleteThe Basingstoke members worked hard for Labour
ReplyDeleteas evidenced by the votes which returned all the councillors up for re-election and the near-misses in two other wards.
In terms of Parliamentary candidates, the only effect across the country was that incumbents fared better. When you look at the results for Basingstoke and Reading East, both candidates came third with similar percentages of the votes, both were very different candidates, both had members working hard to win.
What went wrong in those seats was the resources available to the Tories, who outspent and outworked Labour across the region, no doubt with a bit of financial help from people like Lord Ashcroft. That is the other side of the coin in the resources argument.
Frankly we need to question the motives of people who post derogartory comments about the members of a CLP and their parliamentary candidate, such comments are counterproductive we have no way of knowing if they are true, and there's little that can be learned from them in any case.