THIS proved to be a Little Britains election. To a more striking extent than ever before, not only the regions but sub-regions and even neighbouring constituencies behaved more independently from each other than previously. Over the next few weeks, party strategists will focus on the details of particular seats and will ask themselves whether the small fortunes that they directed at the supposedly floating voters in apparently marginal constituencies were worth it. The troubling truth that they are destined to discover is that perhaps they were not.
A few examples illustrate this patchwork of a polling day. Labour had to defend two adjacent seats in Enfield, North London. In one of them, Stephen Twigg, who enjoyed a majority of 5,546 in Enfield Southgate four years ago, lost his job after an 8.7 per cent swing against him. In Enfield North, Joan Ryan, who started off with a more perilous 2,291 vote margin from 2001, was re-elected with 0.6 per cent swing against her. Elsewhere in the nation, Labour managed not just to hold but to increase its majority in its two most marginal seats — Dumfries & Galloway and Dorset South — but was thrown out of much more comfortable territory such as Hornsey & Wood Green (2001 majority: 10,614) and Manchester Withington (2001 majority: 11,524); both to the Liberal Democrats. And formerly safe Labour seats fell to party dissidents for reasons as diverse as the intervention in Iraq (Bethnal Green & Bow) and all-women shortlists in Wales (Blaenau Gwent). It was like an election fought in not one but a series of quite different countries.
Which in a sense it was. A number of Little Britains can be identified within the bigger one. Scotland, for example, saw the protest vote against Labour settle not on the SNP but the Liberal Democrats (which when you remember that Labour and the Lib Dems are actually coalition partners in the Scottish Parliament is a very odd phenomenon). In Wales the Labour Party largely held off the Plaid Cymru threat but lost two seats to the Conservatives — one of which, Monmouth, is regarded as “very English”, the other, Preseli Pembrokeshire, as “very rural”. Not a lot of logic here either then.
But the serious Little Britains occurred in England. The Labour showing in London and its surroundings was dire. This was because of a combination of middle-class left-of-centre voters here being more willing to defect to the Lib Dems than anywhere else, the extraordinary surge for the hard-left Respect in the East End and some genuine Labour-to-Tory conversions, probably motivated by council tax levels and broader economic anxieties. If the whole of the nation had behaved like parts of London, then Mr Blair would have been lucky to have avoided a hung Parliament. Fortunately, in terms of image, for this most metropolitan of Prime Ministers, it did not.
The rest of the South East was rather more patchy. The Labour vote did not slump as heavily as it did in the North London belt and the Liberal Democrats did not make the gains from the Conservatives that they might have expected. The Tories made some headway but failed, by narrow margins, to seize three seats in Kent that they had hopes for: Medway, Sittingbourne and Sheppey & Thanet South, the latter probably being the only place in Britain where the intervention of the UK Independence Party saved the Labour candidate’s electoral bacon. Nor did they snatch Hastings & Rye or Hove. If they had won these sorts of constituencies, then Mr Blair’s majority would have been reduced to a squeamishly small level. In a similar vein, the East of England saw a swing to the Conservatives, but Labour’s losses were not of an intensity to destabilise them truly.
Then again, if the South had behaved like the North, Mr Blair would have romped home with a margin closer to (possibly exceeding) a hundred. Labour did suffer some spectacular losses to the Lib Dems in Leeds and Manchester and were run close in Durham and Newcastle, but on the whole their discomfort was confined to university towns full of white affluent electors. The much-prophesied disaster for Labour in towns beginning with B (Blackburn, Bolton, Bradford) where there were allegedly large pools of working-class Muslims who were livid about Iraq did not materialise on the scale predicted (it may have played a part in the Labour defeat in Rochdale). Labour lost some ultra-marginal seats in this part of Britain — Lancaster & Wyre and Scarborough & Whitby — but these were the exceptions and not the rule. On the whole, despite disturbance, the North West and North East did not desert new Labour.
So it was not, despite the cliché, that grim up North. Indeed, in the North West, the likes of Ruth Kelly and Jack Straw might argue that the outcomes were positively decent.
There is one aspect to this showing that neither will care to talk about. The BNP may have, in effect, helped Labour by siphoning off votes that could otherwise have (more dangerously) gone to the Tories. Nor was the ballot that bad for Labour in terms of the overall swing against them in votes in either the West or East Midlands. There is, nonetheless, an important distinction between these two important areas. Labour clung on to its key marginal seats better in the West than in the East of the middle. In Redditch, where Jacqui Smith had endured a month of reading her own political obituaries, she managed to increase a wafer-thin opening 2,484 majority slightly. By contrast, the Conservatives picked up most of their target seats in the East Midlands such as Kettering, Northampton South, Rugby & Kenilworth and Wellingborough.
Finally, there was the South West and the West of England. Despite the huge amount of noise made by the pro-hunting fraternity that they were poised to wipe Labour out, the evidence behind that assertion is very patchy. The Forest of Dean was lost but other plausible constituencies for the Tories including Gloucester, Stroud and Worcester remained in the hands of the Labour candidates. The West Country presented a particularly fascinating and wonderfully inconsistent picture. The Tories took WestonSuper-Mare and Devon West & Torridge from the Lib Dems but suffered defeats of their own such as in Taunton. Labour lost the Falmouth & Camborne seat but to Charles Kennedy’s champion, not the man favoured by Michael Howard. An enormous amount of energy expended in Dorset ultimately involved little change in the round.
What on earth should we make of these Little Britains? Three broad points suggest there is some rationale for what otherwise might strike the reasonable person as a set of political outcomes in which the anarchists could take satisfaction. The first is that there is a complicated three-party interplay in different parts of the country which voters are, understandably, taking their time to adjust to. The second is that there was an important class factor at work here, middle-class radicalism in specific types of constituencies and working-class resilience coming to Labour’s rescue. The third is that the politics of London smells different from the rest and Labour would do well to ask itself why it lost support in so many diverse kinds of seats here in so many directions. The Little Britains beg lots of political questions. The chances are that the 2005 contest will not be the last Little Britains election either.
