The following is the text of a speech delivered by John Denham MP to a Southern Comfort conference held in Kent at the weekend.
It’s good to be here in Gillingham, with Paul Clark and Andrew Smith, at the launch of a Southern Comfort network in Kent.
Southern Comfort, and its predecessor, Third Place First, played a crucial role in the 1990s. Taking us from just 10 seats across eastern, south western and south eastern England in 1992 to 40 in Labour’s landslide victory just 5 years later. It couldn’t have been done without the work of Labour members on the ground. Labour members who knew the hopes, the fears and aspirations of southern voters. Who spoke about our lives and those of our friends and neighbours as we live them in this part of the country. Labour supporters who made sure that Labour wasn’t something you watched on television but a force for good, a force for change in our communities.
The hard news of course, is that we’ve got to do it all over again. I have no doubt that every single constituency in the three regions of southern England did better under Labour, than they would have done under any other party. We should never forget how we turned round the NHS, expanded university places, fixed the leaking roofs and outside toilets of village schools, or the businesses started and succesful,.
The wonderful campaign run by Hampshire mums to defend their Sure Start centres shows that Labour’s policies were popular well beyond the places that elected Labour MPs. Last week’s investment by BMW in Oxford builds on Labour’s success in attracting investment into modern manufacturing.
But we didn’t turn that into votes for Labour itself. When the global banking crisis hit; when life looked and was tougher; things got much harder for us.
Just 10 seats again across the same three regions.
As Labour showed a couple of months ago in Gravesham, we are on the way back. We gained more votes across southern England. Not yet enough, but a good enough start to give us confidence for the future.
And let’s be clear about our ambition.
Under Ed Miliband’s leadership Labour is setting out on the long journey to become a major party of southern England once again. Not just in the constituencies and councils which are most immediately in reach, but way beyond that.
Our aim is much more than winning a few marginal seats; settling for ever and a day to be a modestly performing third party in the South. But to be a major force for change.
Obviously Labour will not win everywhere straight away. But Ed Miliband knows that we won’t win even our immediate target seats unless voters across the south believe that Labour wants their support across southern England; to choose Labour to look after them in tough times; to lead local communities; to elect their MPs.
In recent month’s Ed has set out big challenges facing Britain.
The ‘squeezed middle’ - that large group of voters who feel that working hard, playing, by the rules, bringing up their children as best they can, no longer earns the fair deal it once did.
The fears that the British promise – that our children will do better than we did, just as our parents did better than their parents, and we have done better than our parents.
That sense of unfairness, those fears for the future, are being talked about across southern England. In almost every home; outside school gates. At work. The sudden loss of Pfizer was a chilling reminder that even in life sciences, one of the industries in which we thought we were world beaters, our hold on the future is not as tight as we would like.
The resentment of the squeezed middle, and the fears for the future are felt every bit as strongly here in southern England as anywhere else. In what have traditionally been the more prosperous and successful parts of the country, the tension between what people have come cto take for granted and what the future holds has never been greater. As Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice have shown, the aspirations are as high as ever, but anxiety and insecurity are high, too.
Our children, and our friends and neighbours children, find it the hardest to know how they will find a home of their own; more southern children go to university but face spiraling fees and a lifetime of debt.. George Osborne’s pursuit of cuts too far and too fast, dissected so clearly by Ed Balls on Thursday, not only threatens growth and jobs, but means we will have fewer police officers in the villages, towns, suburbs, and cities of southern England.
Families in the commuter towns have a cost of living 20% higher than the national average. And its every bit as important for us to say that as it is to know that there are communities in Britain – including some in southern England – with incomes 20% below the national average.
Faced with these challenges, Labour’s values and traditions put us in the best position to respond to southern voters’ fears and aspirations.
We know that markets create great wealth and opportunity but also insecurity and unfair rewards. That understanding gives Labour an advantage in setting out how government can shape strong private companies which pay our way in the world and offer more security at home. Neither the Tories nor the LibDems understand that – which is why the department I shadow – Vince Cable’s BIS – is so weak and hopeless in developing a serious plan for growth.
Our belief that we all do better in a society where we look out for each other, are in tune with voters who see public services being cut too far, too fast and who are being told to provide for themselves.
Earlier this week, Ed Miliband set out his belief that personal responsibility must be shown in every part of our society. Whether challenging boardroom pay which is not justified by results; or challenging those who could work but don’t.
These are Labour values. They will be recognised in every Labour area.
But they are not just Labour values. I believe they are values shared by the people in southern England too.
Because Labour has historically got less support in the south, even in the good years, a bit of a myth has developed.
That southerners are more selfish, less bothered about their neighbours, more relaxed about excessive bankers bonuses, less concerned about decent public services.
It’s not true. We know it’s no true because it’s our friends and neighbours we are talking about.
And the extensive polling done after the last election by organisations like YouGov shows that Southern voters’ attitudes on issues like taxation, the role of government, responsibility and fairness are not markedly different to voters in parts of the country where Labour gets much more support.
People who buy the myth sometimes assume that Labour in the south needs to be fundamentally different to Labour elsewhere. Not only will that not work – voters aren’t stupid and if they think we are saying one thing in one place and something different somewhere else they will be on to us in a flash. But we would be chasing a myth.
We have no difficulty in finding people who share our values. Was there any more support for selling off the forests in the south than elsewhere? Is there any more enthusiasm for breaking up the NHS? Or any more support for letting rapists off lightly?
Our challenge and our promise is to win the confidence of southern voters that Labour is the party they can trust to reflect the values they hold.
Our ambition is to establish a new Labour tradition in communities that have voted Labour for a long time or perhaps never. A Labour tradition where people not only sometimes vote Labour, but feel that Labour is as much their party as it is the party of the industrial heartlands.
We’ve always drawn strength from places with a Labour history. In Kent it may be a generation or more since anyone went down a mine or worked in a naval dockyard; it may be two generations since the ambitious families of London industrial workers moved to start a new life in the new towns around the capital. But those families, their traditions, their sense that people like us at least sometimes vote Labour has given as bedrock on which to build.
But we are no longer going to let ourselves be limited by the idea that its only those communities where Labour has the values to win. That we can only win where many people say they are working class, not the middle class that most southern voters fell they are.
There will be no ‘no go areas’ for Labour.
The Tory led Government with its Lib Dem supporters is creating a large group of Lib Dem voters, former Labour voters, and disillusioned Conservatives who want a voice. To be honest, many of them are pretty alienated from all politicians at the moment; but in the coming years they will listen to a Labour Party of people like them, a Labour Party which speaks like them.
We’ll defend our record where it should be defended. As Ed Balls made very clear this week, we’re not going to say that Labour was the architect of all Britain’s economic difficulties, just because the Tory led Government and some commentators say we should. It is not true. We will acknowledge that mistakes were made in banking regulation. We did come late to developing an active policy to develop the key industries which we enable us to compete in the global economy. But we will give no quarter in saying that this government is making the economy worse than it needs to be and is dismantling the mechanisms that were shaping a modern and competitive economy.
We did stem the huge number of unjustified asylum seekers who were coming into Kent when we came to power, but we did underestimate the scale and impact of Polish migration and were too late to introduce a points based migration system
We’ll be honest about how people came to see us as Ed Miliband did this week ‘a party founded by hard working people was seen however unfairly as the party relaxed about those ripping off our society – bankers at one end shirking financial duties and causing the financial crisis, and at the other end those on benefits abusing the system’ we cannot be relaxed about this; we must and will be a party that rewards contribution, not worklessness. A party of the grafters.
We’ll ensure that both our welfare and business policies reflect the fairness and responsibility southern voters want.
We’ll speak for the south. The south east and eastern regions make some of the largest tax contributions to the country as a whole, but have some of the lowest spending per head. We will never forget the importance of making sure that southern taxpayers get a fair deal for their taxes; to be sure that they get the security and services they pay for; that it’s not all money going to someone else.
We’ll challenge the idea that everything is so great here that there’s nothing for government to do. We stood with the Federation of Small Business when they complained that George Osborne wouldn’t give the same support to small businesses in the South East that other regions were getting. We’ve expressed the widespread anger that the land and assets of Regional Development Agencies, built up with taxpayers money, are to be flogged off in a firesale, rather than transferred to of southern councils and businesses in the Local Economic Partnerships to create jobs for local people. The closure of Pfizers matters as much to us as the loss of jobs in the steel works in Scunthorpe.
As this Parliament goes on, with its wrecking of higher education, its shambolic and wasteful disorganisation of the NHS, it’s u-turns on sentencing and its sluggish growth, we will of course set out how our values will shape the policies which will make the British promise to the rising generation real again.
And this is something we must do together here in the South. We can only do it if the Labour Party in the south is out there, listening as a well as talking, making sure that Labour Part as a whole speaks the language of the south; that what we promise rings true and speak to things southern voters care about. No one can do this for us.
We’re the ones who live here.
We've done it before. We will do it again.
Rt Hon John Denham MP is the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen and a member of the shadow cabinet.
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