Perhaps the issue is that the South is just more culturally conservative?

I doubt if Labour will ever be trusted in the South again.

2

…because the people in the North are more credulous you mean?

I would suggest not reading leaflets published by policy wonks and engaging with real people might be the way forward.

@ 3

No, doubt if it’s a ‘people’ thing, Labour have nothing to offer the South by way of policy.

@ 4

Spot on.

A lot , but by no means all of the people in the south east are just sheep. If you put a house brick up for election with a blue ribbon on it they will vote for it. Just look at Boris Johnston. A more stupid person you could not find.

Don

In reality Labour is never going to “win” in the South of England (well, perhaps never is too strong a term… Scotland used to be full of Tory seats once upon a time after all!), but that needn’t necessarily be a huge cause for concern. If there is a “natural” Tory majority in the home counties and other shires, it will to some extent be offset by a “natural” non-Tory majority in more urban areas, the North more generally, and of course Scotland and Wales.

The issue for Labour is how to make “wasted” votes in the south count, so I suppose the belated conversion to electoral reform should be welcomed.

It seems to me that an overly strong emphasis on sectional interests, or particular issues, is a distraction from the vital job at hand: Labour have to de-toxify their brand after the damage inflicted by the worst aspects of New Labour, and they have to come up with a coherent, progressive vision of what kind of society they want to see without scaring the horses.

That’s not going to be an easy task, but it isn’t outwith the ken of man either. Whether Ed Miliband and his shadow cabinet have the politcal vision to articulate a radical alternative to the Big Society and the Coalition government is open to debate.

6 sally

Whilst I have some sympathy for your view, marooned as I am in the deepest, darkest blue recesses of the Tory shires, the same might also be said of those areas of my homeland in Scotland, not forgetting wales and large areas of the industrial North, where Labour votes used to be weighed rather than counted.

For all the good it did us….!

@7

Agree.

On the vision and the articulation of it. Its very early days at the moment. I hope they manage it for the sake of providing an effective opposition (something the Tories failed to do) and in terms of getting people re-engaged with politics after New Labour, the expenses scandal and the Lib Dems U turn circus. Trust needs to be rebuilt and people, individuals need to be talked to and engaged with. This needs to be done at grassroots level and to a degree articulate with policy too. Labour is far more effective as a grassroots movement than an artificial neo-liberal construct.

9

Yeah…, artificial neo-liberal construct just about sums New Labour up!

My description would probably have been less polite tho.

Many of the non sheep who live in the south east have pinned their hopes on the Lie Dems. It allows then not to vote for the brownshirts, but stops them from having to vote for those, oh so nasty Labour people.

Trouble is, the Lie Dems have now shown themselves to be fraudsters of the worst kind.

11

So, let’s see..where does that leave me?

I’d never vote Tory, and I’d never vote for New Labour. I have voted for the LD’s in the (faint) hope of keeping the Tory out. Now, I’m unlikely to vote LD again so any vote in my constituency would be effectively wasted.

Of course, under PR there would be a point, and at least the southern Left of centre vote might actually mean something. shame the Labour party hadn’t woken up to that one a tad sooner eh?

12 Labour had the chance to “wake up to that” 13 years ago, and go for electoral reform. There was quite a lot of goodwill between Libdems adn Labour then. A long term coalition would have been a real possibility. But the only thing that mattered to Labour was having a monopoly of power even if it would end with a Tory return to power. But they have screwed that one up and now the Libdems are doing business with the Tories. It’s all the Labour Party’s fault….

1 Richard, The statement that the southerners are culturally conservative implies taht Northerners are natural radicals. You’ve never lived in the north have you?

I think this may be mistargeted. I think the issue for Labour is not how to win in the south, but how to ensure they have the momentum in the middle. If you look at the Midlands, large areas turned blue at the last election, including several old mining areas. In contrast though most urban seats remained red, albeit with reduced majorities.

At the next election the key question will be what happens to these seats – can Labour win back the rural seats (which will be proportianetly more numerous by then) or will whatever held them urban seats (perhaps a distrust of the Conservatives) have faded? Rather than consider how to win seats in areas where Labour only win if they are doing very well, the focus should be on what happened in the Midlands (and also Lancashire and part of Yorkshire).

I would suggest that Labour, if it wants to win in the south, needs to expunge its party of anyone involved in Brown’s horrendous inner circle before setting a new course.

I say this for two reason. One is that under brown Labour simply did nothing for the South even when it thought it was doing so. It was that out of touch.

The classic example was of course the decision to temporarilly raise the bar on stamp duty for homes costing less than £120,000. The aspirational home owning nature of that policy seems utterly in tune with what normally wins elections in the South.

But it was seen in the south, including me, as another subsidy for the north. After all, £120k buys half a garage in London, and perhaps at best a double garage in the Home Counties.

It doesn’t buy a pokey two bedroom house with a postage stamp garden. (Typically called a “starter home” which most professional 30 years olds can only dream of)

I fear the people who screwed up labour in this way are the same people who now talk of reconnecting to the core vote.

I fear this because they seem oblivious to evidence in exactly the same way. (That evidence being that the 2010 election showed swings to Labour in its heartland – even as the country swang violently against – suggesting the core vote stayed strong)

So lets hope Labour’s leadership now judge the likes of Diamon on his record – and so ignore him.

14 – No I haven’t. But nor would I suggest that the North is a hotbed of radicalism. Indeed I suspect that the North is more socially conservative than the South in some respects. However, the conservatism of the South is perhaps more tied in with pro-Monarchy C Of E traditional Toryism.

@11 & @12

“So, let’s see… where does that leave me?”

It’s not just marooned leftists in the South of England who have no electoral option, you know. I live in Bootle ward, which (I think) had the dubious honour of being Labour’s safest seat…

Obviously I’d never vote for New Labour or the Tories; and as Sally points out, the third party are “fraudsters of the worst kind”. But no-one else bothers standing in safe seats – no-one I’d consider voting for, anyway (UKIP, anyone?).

So I, like so many others in the country, have the “option” to vote for the least worst party, spoil my ballot paper in protest, or just stay at home and drink myself into oblivion…

I would suggest to Messrs Diamond and Radice (who sat for a Durham seat, so why that makes him an expert on the “south” I’ve no idea) that there is one simple question that distinguishes the North from the South.

It’s this: Do you think your taxes represent value for money? Because of course in the affluent parts of the south-east in particular they don’t – in the sense that there are geographical transfer payments.

Labour doesn’t have to ‘win’ the South, just as the tories never had to ‘win’ central Manchester. These nonsense memes do more harm than good.

What Labour needs to work out first, is how to win back the C2/DEs in places like Thurrock, Medway, Brighton, Reading and across the Midlands. We’re not talking about a lot of people either.

As the OP rightly points out, esoteric westminster wonk rubbish like AV or abstractions like ‘the role of the state’ are not going to get the plumber who spends his day battling the traffic of the SE all excited.

I wouldn’t say Oxford E is the best place to look either. Bradshaw did very well in Exeter and Clarke almost hung on in Norwich. All uni towns. Southampton is the place to look.

The other side of the coin is how labour lost so badly in places like Dartford. Move Dartford 200 miles north and you would have been weighing the Labour vote.

Of course the tories have the opposite problem encapsulated by not winning a single seat in Edinburgh, the wealthiest town outside of the SE.

Personally, of all the Labour pamphlets on ‘what went wrong’, I find Chris Bryant’s (of all people) the most compelling.

“it is worth remembering that the candidate who devoted most resources to community organising actually lost, despite having the backing of the media, most MPs and the most money.”

Who was it?

[21] Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest I suppose. In an earlier thread I suggested AV would’ve saved him.

You all seem to be regulars like a golf club I have voted labour all my life, I have voted Liberal in the Mayoral debate here in London I was born in the North went to College in Kent and all from a widowed Mum,living on saving who has and never, will claim from the state,for what she is not owed,I will never vote Labour again,the country is a mess,I will not vot Lib,or Tory,the powers that be are all in it for their own being,we invite half of the world to share my taxes and send the rest out,yes the NHS and Child Benefit,you all need to realise we are all working to complete nothingness…

20

“Of course the tories have the opposite problem encapsulated by not winning a single seat in Edinburgh, the wealthiest town outside of the SE.”

The reasons the Tories didn’t win a single seat in Edinburgh (my home town as it happens) have more to do with the fact that the Tories became an endangered species in Scotland due to the excesses of the Thatcher era. Edinburgh (or even Scotland as a whole) contains plenty of people who are on the centre-right, but when the Tories wandered off into the Thatcherite wide blue yonder, Scottish Tories voted with their feet and either defected or stayed at home.

The biggest danger to the Union isn’t the SNP, it is the fact that Unionist parties like the Tories (and even to some extent New Labour) are increasingly viewed as anti-communitarian, metropolitan, authoritarian and “anti-Scottish” in the sense of being profoundly out of step with the values most Scots hold dearest.

It’s a lesson New Labour should have learned and didn’t.

Agree with other posters that Labour cannot ever ‘win the south’ in aggregate (assuming we exclude London, which the paper does). Even in 1997 the Tories won nearly twice as many seats in the three SE regions outside London. Moreover, the type of seats Labour can win in the south are no

The paper also makes the typical southern hack mistake of assuming ‘the Midlands’ can be lumped in with the south. The Midlands is a separate region with different demographics and historically very different patterns of electoral behaviour, which are not converging with the south at anywhere near the rate the paper suggests. In fact recent ward by elections in the West Midlands area suggest many voters there are turning away from the coalition already.

Sorry, unfinished sentence. Should have read “Moreover, the type of seats Labour can win in the south are not typical of the demographics of the south as a whole”