Labour’s failure to connect with the ‘self-loathing’ Tories of Warwickshire North
Warwickshire North was, in theory, the easiest Conservative seat for Labour to win at the General Election. It hung by a 54 majority thread.
Instead of grabbing it back, Labour watched it move further from the party’s reach. It is now held by the Tories with a majority of 3,000.
And that’s a pattern you see across what were the most marginal seats in the Con/Lab battle. You can read about just how tough that makes Labour’s task in trying to climb back to power here and here: The mountain facing Labour.
One senior Labour figure takes a first look at the demographic data here.
Labour leadership hopeful, Yvette Cooper, is here today launching her campaign to succeed Ed Miliband in this highly symbolic seat.
There will be many authoritative surveys of what happened in different types of seats: the former Lib Dem seats that went Tory, the Labour seats that went SNP.
We’ve come here to take a first look at what the local party campaigns think happened on the ground and to talk to some of the voters.
A Ukip surge through the second half of the last parliament took the party up from a puny 1300 votes (behind the BNP in 2010) to topping the poll across the West Midlands in the 2014 European Elections.
In the election campaign, the Tories managed to peel back their Ukip deserters in big numbers and with ruthless efficiency. Labour achieved nothing of the sort.
The Tories had the weapon of their “don’t ruin the economy” message, which they had road tested to destruction in quantitative and qualitative polling.
They layered on top of that the “Ed Miliband will be pushed around by the SNP” argument, which combined the economic argument (“together they will ruin the economy”) with the “fear of chaos” argument.
I asked the Ukip candidate here whether he thought Labour’s Ukip defectors were a lost cause for Labour in the future.
He’s William Cash the Younger, son of the Tory MP.
William Cash Jnr thinks Chuka Umunna would be a disaster in communities like Bedworth where Labour used to harvest votes and where Ukip scooped up a lot of votes last week.
He thinks Andy Burnham would do better pulling back voters he won for Ukip.
Interestingly, William Cash seems much more interested in the EU referendum than any future general election. He regards the 3.8m votes Ukip won as a base camp for a referendum victory.
He describes Ukip’s work on election night, denying Labour Con/Lab marginal seats, as like Prince Rupert’s Army, riding to the Tories’ rescue.
I don’t think that’s quite how the mission was sold to working class voters in Bedworth. (You can, incidentally, see why Patrick O’Flynn, Ukip MEP, feels the party isn’t necessarily all pulling in the same direction.)
Voters in North Warwickshire talk of being “bombarded” with post from the parties, but they talk of the Tory literature standing out because the letters suggested that the Conservatives knew quite a lot about individual voters.
One voter told me that her autistic son who is on the electoral register was deeply disturbed by how much the letters suggested someone knew about him. She had to calm him down. Other voters talked of being spooked by the approaches. Some acknowledged that the post had affected their views.
But the Tory messaging seems to have worked in another critical way.
The Labour candidate, former MP for the constituency and former Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien, says that he didn’t realise the seat was slipping from his grasp until around 4pm on polling day.
More and more tellers and door-knockers were reporting that the mis-named “Labour vote,” – the people the party thought were supporters – was not turning out.
Door after door, the party workers reported that people who’d said they were good for the party were on the day riddled with doubt.
Mike O’Brien believes that the party’s failure to clarify its economic message earlier on had laid the seeds for this calamity and opened the way for the Tory machine to exploit it. Ed Miliband’s profile as leader didn’t help much either.
The Tories believe they managed to do more than just depress the Labour vote, they believe that they turned a chunk of it and got Labour switchers coming over to them.
Chairman of the local Tory party, Councillor David Wright, says he believes something like 2,000 people who voted Labour in 2010, voted Tory in this seat in 2015.
Some of these people might qualify as not “shy Tories” so much as “self-loathing.”
Some we met were happy to talk about their switch, acknowledged it happened pretty late in the day and that if you spoke to them days or weeks before they would have told a pollster they were Labour. They didn’t know or couldn’t reconcile themselves to the journey they were on.
Mike O’Brien is adamant that there was no great phenomenon of Labour switchers to the Tories that he detected and that the 3 per cent Labour to Conservative swing that happened in this seat is actually a function of the churn of voters that saw Labour people switch to Ukip and Labour’s declared support staying at home.
Both parties talk of voters who hadn’t voted for a while popping up out of the woodwork on polling day.
Some of these voted Ukip, it seems, but some also emerged blinking into the light of democratic participation after hibernating since the 1990s to vote Conservative..
There wasn’t that much of a Lib Dem vote in N Warwickshire to start with (55,00 in 2010, now 978) but the Labour hope that a good third of it would move to the Labour column and stay there may have under-estimated just how much of what remained would end up in the Tory column.
We may not have too many weeks to wait for some authoritative surveys.
But at first glance you come away from North Warwickshire with a sense of a Tory machine grinding out relentlessly crash-tested messages using below the radar and above the radar means, against a Labour Party whose messages were less refined and had no reach to the Ukip deserters who, if they’d returned in decent numbers, could actually have delivered Labour the seat.
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