By-elections - October 20th

[East Anglian Lefty]

Not all small towns in the south are alike. This point cannot be emphasised enough. Treating them as a homogenous mass is about as sensible as assuming Southport votes like Bootle.

There are small towns with a pre-dominantly working class population, where the historic industry has largely disappeared and the prevailing employment these days is low-skilled, low wage and non-unionised. Anti-immigration rhetoric may have a great deal of traction here. And then you've got more prosperous places, which are attractive to commuters and are becoming increasingly prosperous. Look at Rothwell's position on a map and guess which one it is these days.

And social conservatism is still the wrong concept to work with. Even amongst voters who are anti-immigration and have a strong sense of attachment to their local town, there's widespread acceptance of things like abortion or same-sex marriage. The only degree to which there's a correlation between the two is about age, not place.

[gwynthegriff]

Oct 24, 2016 9:06:05 GMT Penddu said:

Oct 24, 2016 7:03:01 GMT marksenior said:

The Conservatives do not have a sizeable vote in Grangetown , they were 4th behind the Lib Dems who held the ward 2008-2012

Mark - I think you are right - i mixed up Conservatives and Lib Dems (an easy thing to do..)

Smite! Smite!

[Pete Whitehead]

Oct 24, 2016 17:55:13 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Oct 24, 2016 9:53:40 GMT Merseymike said:

Well....working class Liverpool certainly wasn't overwhelmingly Brexit! And Ukip and other far right forces have never taken much of a hold in this area.

But if those sort of places aren't particularly socially conservative why are we banging on about Ukip appeal and issues like immigration? Or perhaps the London metropolitan thing isn't the key issue some claim it to be? I am really not sure what is being advocated here..... There are some who think we could just try a rerun of Blairism but I think that would fall on deaf ears - enthusiasm for globalisation, an optimistic outlook which just wouldn't be believed

I suspect Rothwell was probably one of the less Brexit-y bits in its are and UKIP have never got close to electing anybody from the area. You're doing what you always doing, arguing against your set conception of the small town south. Some of what you say is true of parts of the small town south (not including Rothwell), some bears very little relationship to anything at all and rather a lot actually seems like a much better description of Labour-voting areas in the north.

I'm not really sure what is being advocated either, given that as far as I can tell nobody in this thread has been advocating anything.

Only 6.5% from winning the CC seat in 2013 which was the second closest (and 2nd highest % share) in all of East Nothants (by which I mean Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough and East Northants). Comparing the UKIP result in Rothwell in 2015 with neighbouring areas is probably not a good idea as it was a countermanded poll and the UKIP bubble had deflated (further) since May

[andrewteale]

Oct 24, 2016 21:59:38 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Oct 24, 2016 17:55:13 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

I suspect Rothwell was probably one of the less Brexit-y bits in its are and UKIP have never got close to electing anybody from the area. You're doing what you always doing, arguing against your set conception of the small town south. Some of what you say is true of parts of the small town south (not including Rothwell), some bears very little relationship to anything at all and rather a lot actually seems like a much better description of Labour-voting areas in the north.

I'm not really sure what is being advocated either, given that as far as I can tell nobody in this thread has been advocating anything.

Only 6.5% from winning the CC seat in 2013 which was the second closest (and 2nd highest % share) in all of East Nothants (by which I mean Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough and East Northants). Comparing the UKIP result in Rothwell in 2015 with neighbouring areas is probably not a good idea as it was a countermanded poll and the UKIP bubble had deflated (further) since May

The UKIP candidate in the county election in 2013 was the outgoing Tory councillor who had defected to them, so he would have had a personal vote. It was his death that led to the 2015 postponement - had the 2015 poll in Rothwell gone ahead as planned UKIP would probably have done better.

[Merseymike]

Oct 24, 2016 20:24:00 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Not all small towns in the south are alike. This point cannot be emphasised enough. Treating them as a homogenous mass is about as sensible as assuming Southport votes like Bootle.

There are small towns with a pre-dominantly working class population, where the historic industry has largely disappeared and the prevailing employment these days is low-skilled, low wage and non-unionised. Anti-immigration rhetoric may have a great deal of traction here. And then you've got more prosperous places, which are attractive to commuters and are becoming increasingly prosperous. Look at Rothwell's position on a map and guess which one it is these days.

And social conservatism is still the wrong concept to work with. Even amongst voters who are anti-immigration and have a strong sense of attachment to their local town, there's widespread acceptance of things like abortion or same-sex marriage. The only degree to which there's a correlation between the two is about age, not place.

I agree with all of that.....so, why the angst about immigration being the cause of all our ills? It's a lot more complicated and so I doubt whether the line that we need to be some sort of left wing version of Ukip would stand up to even surface level scrutiny

[Sibboleth]

There's an attempt by a lot of people to lazily important analysis from the United States (which has electoral patterns that have less in common with ours with every passing year). This is not helpful. Rothwell is a strikingly average town in most respects as are a lot of the places we've been bombing in recently. The fundamental problem for the Labour Party is that it doesn't seem relevant and obsessing over whether it has the right kind of voters is actually part of this; the Party is not in a position in which it gets to do that. The really clever thing about New Labour was the emphasis on working out why people who might like this or that Labour policy were not voting for the Party and then on trying to square the circle; a refreshingly undogmatic approach that is currently advocated by precisely no one in the Party.

[Sibboleth]

Like mentally I keep going back to the infamous Ted Knight remark about "I don't want someone of your class voting for me". The Workerist element to that is more of a Labour Right thing now, but the sentiment is still very much alive.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Oct 25, 2016 10:08:49 GMT Merseymike said:

Oct 24, 2016 20:24:00 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Not all small towns in the south are alike. This point cannot be emphasised enough. Treating them as a homogenous mass is about as sensible as assuming Southport votes like Bootle.

There are small towns with a pre-dominantly working class population, where the historic industry has largely disappeared and the prevailing employment these days is low-skilled, low wage and non-unionised. Anti-immigration rhetoric may have a great deal of traction here. And then you've got more prosperous places, which are attractive to commuters and are becoming increasingly prosperous. Look at Rothwell's position on a map and guess which one it is these days.

And social conservatism is still the wrong concept to work with. Even amongst voters who are anti-immigration and have a strong sense of attachment to their local town, there's widespread acceptance of things like abortion or same-sex marriage. The only degree to which there's a correlation between the two is about age, not place.

I agree with all of that.....so, why the angst about immigration being the cause of all our ills? It's a lot more complicated and so I doubt whether the line that we need to be some sort of left wing version of Ukip would stand up to even surface level scrutiny

I can't really answer that, because I haven't been making that case at all. Your obsession with arguing against this, regardless of what the actual discussion is about, really is a barrier to actual seriously going over the problem.

If we must engage with that line here (and I seriously doubt it was a significant factor in the by-election result), then we should look at who has been pushing it lately, most prominently Rachel Reeves and Stephen Kinnock. I don't rate either of them, so I will make no effort to defend them. Instead I'll point out that they appear to have precisely no real knowledge of what middle England actually looks like, and to the extent what they're discussing has any relationship with reality, it's probably a reality encountered in their own constituencies. Which are Labour strongholds, not southern commuter villages.

[Merseymike]

So....Why do you think we are losing ground in some of these type of areas? Robin has talked about his area and suggested that Labour voters there tend to be socially conservative. And do you think that the fact we won Rothwell and Desborough in the Blair era gives us any indication of what to do to win them again? Which Rural Radical's comment indicated needs consideration.

[East Anglian Lefty]

I think it'll be harder to win them again now than it was in the 1990s. The industrial past of that bit of Northamptonshire gets more distant every year; there's no realistic prospect of significant social housing construction there (unless we start winning it, when by definition we wouldn't need it); it's getting wealthier and wealthier as it becomes more London-oriented; new jobs in the area are mostly warehousing rather than skilled and stable (and hence unionisable) employment. But if we could get a councillor there in 2015, then it is the sort of place we ought to hope to carry when winning the country.

I would start by considering why these sorts of places used to vote Labour and why they no longer do. We can't do too much about patterns of industrial change, at least not when the industry has packed up and moved on, but that's not the only issue. In rather a lot of Britain, people simply aren't sure what Labour does for them. Often there's a feeling that Labour looks after immigrants, benefit claimants and the like but ignores 'ordinary people'. There's not much point getting angry at it, because the urban myths and stereotypes those feelings are built on will take years to wipe away, and I'm not sure that process can even start until people trust us with something else.

So I would personally suggest a range of measures designed to show what you get with a Labour government, and I mean something more than our standard offers of better public services. It could be cash transfers reaching wider up the income distribution than is strictly efficient (which means you need to raise more revenue, but there's a trade-off to everything); it could be guarantees related to training (though apprenticeships alone are no longer enough); it could be populist measures against vested interests perceived to be taking the piss (pick a utility company, any utility company...); probably there ought to be something targeting pensioners (though probably not cash benefits, because that's just a wasteful use of public funds at this point). I'm agnostic on what the policies might be, provided you can summarise them in a sentence and they reach a much wider group than those whose minds we're actually seeking to change.

[Merseymike]

Oct 25, 2016 18:21:40 GMT Sibboleth said:

There's an attempt by a lot of people to lazily important analysis from the United States (which has electoral patterns that have less in common with ours with every passing year). This is not helpful. Rothwell is a strikingly average town in most respects as are a lot of the places we've been bombing in recently. The fundamental problem for the Labour Party is that it doesn't seem relevant and obsessing over whether it has the right kind of voters is actually part of this; the Party is not in a position in which it gets to do that. The really clever thing about New Labour was the emphasis on working out why people who might like this or that Labour policy were not voting for the Party and then on trying to square the circle; a refreshingly undogmatic approach that is currently advocated by precisely no one in the Party.

I think if we are honest the success of New Labour was more than anything else to do with the Tories having outstayed their welcome and that by then a significant number of people were prepared to vote for us
The optimistic can-do message seemed right in happier economic times as well. It did seem new and fresh. But if course it did only last for one election. We won the next two because of Tory abstentions.
The problem we now have is that different groups of people are not voting for us for different reasons and if we took measures to win back one group we would lose others. There is both more polarisation and more partisan dealignment. Plus Scotland.