Labour in the south: The view from Southampton

The last in our series about Labour in the south

I have a strong memory of the evening Labour took control of Southampton city council in 1984, to become, at that time the only council in Labour hands south of London. Noone, including Labour party headquarters had told anyone in the media that it was possible for Labour to win anything in the south, so they simply ignored it on the night. ‘Surprise result in Southampton, and now back to Birmingham’ was the one and only acknowledgment of the result on television that night.

The culture of the south, you might say, simply assumes that people don’t vote Labour. And yet many of the pressing issues in the south – affordable housing in a market that has spiralled out of reach of most first time buyers in the south-east; public transport in a landscape of longer commuter journeys and hyper-congestion on the roads; skills in a high employment but high tech regional economy; are all Labour issues.

And if you are poor in the south, you are relatively poorer than elsewhere in the UK. Nationally, benefit rates mean that tax credit, for example, kicks in at about 90% of median income. In the south it is just 83%, and the cost of food, housing and transport are all higher in the south than elsewhere in the UK.

Furthermore, there are pockets of extreme poverty in the south sitting alongside areas of great opulence. Perhaps the debate about transfer of wealth in the UK ought to be as much about transfer of wealth within the south-east as away from the region.

But many of those southerners who are not poor - and perhaps do not respond to Labour’s ‘core’ messages - are moving towards the idea that individual aspiration only goes so far. This is because they are surrounded by the collective failure of the housing market, of the environment and of community health and safety, all particularly visible in the south.

Labour has done vastly better in the south in recent years than was the case even in 1992, when only about ten Labour MPs were returned in the whole area south of the Wash to Bristol, excluding London. Winning those extra seats has been achieved largely by combining Labour’s more traditional messages with those that couch aspiration in terms of the collective provision that underpins it. Labour’s housing message has become and should remain much wider than building publicly funded homes for rent. The south is a region where over one-third of all first–time buyers now receive parental help with the mortgage.

There is one other important factor which has nothing to do with values or messages, and that is organisation. Fighting for votes when the default is not to vote Labour is always hard. There are virtually no places in the south and south-east where there is a ‘reserve pool’ of votes waiting to be marched into the polling station, and yet, twenty or thirty Labour seats in the south makes the difference between government and opposition. Resources to keep the south Labour can make all the difference – at least until the day when the culture of the south has changed sufficiently so that ‘and now back to Birmingham’ is a thing of the past.

Alan Whitehead MP is MP for Southampton Test

29 Feb 2008 00:00

 

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