Rebuilding the Red Wall

How do the Tories understand their success in former Labour heartland seats? This is a genre of politics writing the left tend to give the body swerve, which is par the course for our wider political culture. But this is unfortunate, because they often reveal insights that the gatekeepers of the centre left, by accident and design are completely uninterested in. For example, of his increased majority in Mansfield in 2019 Ben Bradley wrote with more awareness about his constituency than anything I've seen the Labour right produce in the last decade. This niche genre of commentary therefore deserves keeping tabs on, and the latest setting out his thoughts is North West Durham's Richard Holden, who famously defeated Labour's Laura Pidcock.

In his piece for Conservative Home, Holden suggests Labour were able to keep the show on the road for decades in seats like his because of the strength of mass working class institutions that sustained a collectivist life in and out of the workplace, a shared religious culture that promoted a uniform social conservatism and was indelibly linked to Christian notions of fairness (and therefore provided trade unionism and its struggles the blessings of divine justice), and "a traditional Labour Party of the people that was both of and in touch with these communities." How did this state of affairs come apart? He lays the blame at New Labour who, he argued, provided little in return for loyal votes. He also points the finger at the "Britain hating far left under Jeremy Corbyn", a man so unpopular with the voters of NW Durham that in 2017 Labour improved its standing by six points and won over half the vote. But, apart from this silliness he also notes the importance of Labour's Brexit positioning, and the long-term legacy of the party returning lazy MPs who simply banked the vote.

Then comes the most interesting question: why does this Tory MP think so many working class seats turned to his party? Flattering his audience, he puts it down to the hard work of Tory activists. But there is something in this: activism ensures the Tories have a presence. It would be easy to overstate this. After all, Labour with its contact rate targets and obsession with heavily scripted, bureaucratised "conversations" regularly pounds the pavements. But, historically, the Tories have tended not to. It's harder to maintain the idea Tories forget about places like Durham when blue rosetted activists are out delivering leaflets, doorknocking, and getting their mugs in the local paper. A trick, as it happens, the Tories here in Stoke have spent the last decade pioneering and perfecting. Holden counsels his more sceptical readers that there are lots of former Labour voters in plenty of traditional no-go areas for the party, and so Tory activists should go out and find them. In other words, because the class cultures that sustained Labour for a century in Durham have melted away, everything everywhere is up for grabs.

A couple of insights don't make a theory, and there's a lot missing from Holden's account of Tory advances in Labour's former core constituencies. The first is how the Tories have managed to detoxify themselves for enough voters. Again, the experience of the Potteries is instructive. After four years of a Labour council that meekly passed on Tory cuts, let the officers do the running, copped the responsibility for an unpopular housing stock renewal scheme that left vast swathes of the city derelict, the building of two new office buildings, and egregiously wasted money by entering the Chelsea Flower Show twice, their replacement by a Indie/Tory alliance in 2015 saw the latter take on all the key outward facing portfolios. Namely regen and economic development, with the then deputy leader Abi Brown fronting up Stoke's City of Culture bid. These were not the Tories of old committed to butchering everything that moved, but leveraged the council's spending power to push their regen schemes (which, in many cases, had their roots in the previous Labour administration), getting new housing developments sorted out, and visibly sprucing the city up with money showered on heritage projects and parks. A lot of this was brought by cuts to services, but the calculation was most people weren't bothered about restricting library services or defunding alcohol and drug support, whereas they would notice new buildings springing up about the city centre and if the city's parks were tidied up and restored. Their reasoning was right, making the switch from Labour to the Tories (via UKIP in many cases) less painful when punters were voting with their Brexit feet. And now all three MPs are Tories, and the council is a majority Tory administration.

We've seen similar repeated on Teeside with the ridiculously huge vote won by Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley metro mayor. A stone's throw from Holden's seat, Houchen has earned serious respect by being a different kind of Tory. Not one who deindustrialises the land and calls it success, but one who nationalised the local airport and has tapped directly into the folk memory by promising to regenerate the dockside via the government's ludicrous freeport scheme. To the casual observer, the Tories are building and creating jobs, they're doing a politics that Labour should have done or be pushing to do. And because the only people who care about constituency and local authority boundaries are politics people and local government geeks, the example of someone like Houchen makes the switch from Labour to Tory that much easier in adjacent seats.

The other issue Holden is silent about is just who are voting for the Tories, but it's there, he instinctively knows who the Tory vote is. Starting off with a vignette about cake with a 50-something small business owner, and talking about traditional Labour voters, these are both figures standing in for and invoking older people. As Labour languishes in the polls with its new core support peeling off to smaller parties or electoral abstentionism (though not necessarily political abstentionism), the Tories have an electoral advantage because older people are much more likely to turn out. And this gives them a real edge in second order elections where this effect is exacerbated, as we saw.

It doesn't have to be this way. Labour can look at its former heartland seats and just accept the political consequences of demographic drift and seemingly competent local Tory officials, or actually start fighting back. Despite Holden's boasts about campaigning, the Tory infrastructure is still much smaller than Labour's, even after a year's worth of membership losses. The party needs to go back to its roots in places like Durham, Stoke, and elsewhere and rebuild itself as a community centred organisation. Hence why scrapping the community organising unit is as daft as it is wrong. Labour needs to rethink its laissez-faire attitude to local government and offer some leadership about what the party should be doing in the council chamber. Preston and Salford, Greater Manchester and Merseyside, the record of delivery in Wales, just as the Tories have been awarded for doing things so Labour has its own good story to tell, and particularly in Preston and Salford where local government and regeneration actively and visibly rebuilds communities and solidarities. Ignoring them is just about the most ridiculous thing the party can do. And it has to think about what the party got right in the last two elections, and particularly how the economic radicalism of 2017 was able to cut through and assemble a coalition the party then spent the next two years demobilising. How it adapts to these political realities is the litmus test for its seriousness about winning.

There are plenty of Tories who think their dominance is next to overweening, and it will continue to be unless Labour understand why it is and what we can do so our party, not the Tories, can be the masters of our destiny. And the initial step can be taken by listening to the strategy and tactics talk of the Conservatives themselves, thinking about them, and drawing up appropriate counter strategies.

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