Labour has an opportunity to become a party of the shires. But the gains will only accrue over the long term, says John Curtice

Labour has long been keenly aware, indeed agonised over, its ‘southern discomfort’. Thanks to Giles Radice, in the 1990s the party’s relative weakness in the southern half of Britain came to be regarded as symbolic of the party’s perceived need to broaden its appeal if it were ever to become a party of government again. More recently, in collaboration with Patrick Diamond, the former Labour MP has revisited the idea to exemplify the task that now faces Labour in the wake of its catastrophic defeat in last year’s general election.

Yet Labour’s electoral support is not only characterised by a north-south divide; it is marked by an urban-rural one too. The party’s vote is much weaker in Britain’s rural hinterlands than it is in the country’s urban centres. In 2010, for example, the party won on average just 18 per cent of the vote in the 150 or so most rural constituencies (as measured by the number of persons per hectare). In contrast, Labour’s vote averaged no less than 41 per cent in the 100 or so most urban. The party is a long way behind the Liberal Democrats in much of rural Britain, let alone the Conservatives.

As a result, just 18 of the country’s most rural seats elected a Labour MP in 2010 – and all bar one of those were in Scotland, Wales or the far north of England where the party’s regional strength (and the Conservatives’ weakness) means the party can still sometimes overcome its relative rural weakness. Across a whole swath of rural southern England, from Norfolk to Cornwall, there is not a single Labour MP in sight.

This urban-rural gap can only partly be accounted for by demographics. Contrary to what you might think, on average constituencies in rural Britain are no more middle class than their more urban counterparts. After all, professional white-collar jobs are often located in cities, from which many a rural seat is more than a comfortable commute away. Rural seats tend to contain their fair share of public sector workers too; teachers, doctors and nurses are needed everywhere.

However, some aspects of the rural social environment are typically less conducive to Labour voting. Voters in rural areas are little more than half as likely as those in the most urban environments to live in social housing. Self-employment is more common in rural areas too. People are relatively self-reliant, less likely to be dependent on collective forms of provision, and such a way of living often makes voters less likely to respond positively to a Labour tune.

Yet Labour has not always been so bereft in rural Britain. Even when the party was losing nationally in the 1950s, it was still able to win relatively rural seats in such apparently unpromising counties as Norfolk and Cornwall. But from the mid-1950s through to the mid-1980s, Labour increasingly lost ground in rural Britain. Between 1955 and 1983, Labour’s portion of the combined Labour-Conservative vote share fell by 12 points more in rural areas than it did across Britain as a whole, with the drop sharpest of all in rural seats in the south of England. In contrast, in the most urban parts of the country, Labour’s share rose by 10 points as compared with the position nationally.

Subsequently, Labour’s rural weakness has simply become more or less a permanent part of Britain’s electoral landscape, one that, despite its aspiration to widen the party’s social base, the creation of New Labour did little to reverse. Indeed, it was far from clear that ‘middle England’ encompassed ‘rural England’ rather than the country’s suburban landscape, in which by this time many of the crucial marginal seats were located.  Moreover, once in power New Labour soon found itself at loggerheads with many in the countryside thanks to its attempts to ban hunting with dogs. In 2001 the party actually appeared to lose yet more ground in many a rural seat, though this particular loss was soon reversed four years later.

Indeed, in some places, recreating the party’s former rural base is likely to be well-nigh an impossible task. It should not be forgotten that many of Britain’s mining communities that once provided Labour with some of its most stalwart support were located in relatively isolated villages. Those communities are, of course, now largely no more.

Nevertheless, Labour today may have its best opportunity in a generation to reverse some of its rural decline. One problem that has beset the party in many rural seats is that once it fell behind the Liberals, and subsequently the Liberal Democrats, locally – as happened in many cases following the Liberal surge in 1974 – the Labour vote was mercilessly squeezed as former supporters were persuaded to vote tactically for the local Liberal candidate in the hope of defeating the local Conservative. And once the party’s vote was squeezed, so often also was much of what was left of its organisational base.

But now, not only are the Liberal Democrats actually in coalition with the Conservatives, but many of their former supporters have become deeply disenchanted by their party’s decision to sign up to the Conservatives’ approach to tackling the deficit and to increase rather than abolish university tuition fees. The Liberal Democrats’ poll standing is weaker now than at any time since the row over the merger between the Liberals and the SDP in the late 1980s, while their performance in the English local elections last spring was worse than at any previous round of local elections since the 1970s.

Nationally, Labour has clearly been the principal beneficiary of that disenchantment. But a key question that now faces the party is whether it can particularly exploit this disenchantment in those many rural seats where the party currently lies in third. It will need to remind rural voters that, however personally attractive their local Liberal Democrat candidate, or even MP, might be, their party has propped up a Conservative-led government, which is the very antithesis of what politically many of them ever wanted to see. In many cases it will be a question of issuing a warm welcome ‘back home’ to former Labour voters who had come to despair of the party’s ability ever to mount a serious challenge locally.

However, the rewards from such an endeavour will be long term rather than short term. Regaining second place in rural Britain will not help Labour gain power in 2015. Indeed, it could even make it more difficult for Labour to win more seats than the Conservatives, as a weakened Liberal Democrat challenge enables Conservatives in rural seats to survive. Regaining second place would only be but the first stage in a long-term process of enabling Labour to present itself as a party of the shires as well as of the cities. And unfortunately for most politicians the long term is rather too far away. It remains to be seen whether Labour’s current leadership decide that such a project is worthwhile.

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John Curtice is professor of politics at Strathclyde University

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Photo: Ewan Rayment