Anorak post - regional voting patterns
Peter Kellner at Yougov has an interesting post which sets out to show Why Northerners don't vote Tory.
What he actually does is use the polling data to convincingly knock on the head almost every possible explanation you might think of, and then concludes that the Conservatives
"lost Scotland because they lost their reputation as a unionist party and came to be seen as an English party. They are losing the North because they are seen increasingly as a Southern party."
It would be seriously unhealthy for England, as for Britain, if our main parties came to be seen as representing only particular regions rather than trying to represent the whole country, and that is an issue for Labour nearly as much as for the Conservatives.
There are no easy answers to this. Having lived in Cumbria for nine years I find the idea that Labour has done any more for the North than the Conservatives to be a ridiculous myth which is all the more infuriating because so many people cannot be persuaded to realise how far from the truth it is.
But Kellner has correctly identified a problem - and it is a problem for the country and not just the Conservatives.
It would be seriously unhealthy for England, as for Britain, if our main parties came to be seen as representing only particular regions rather than trying to represent the whole country, and that is an issue for Labour nearly as much as for the Conservatives.
There are no easy answers to this. Having lived in Cumbria for nine years I find the idea that Labour has done any more for the North than the Conservatives to be a ridiculous myth which is all the more infuriating because so many people cannot be persuaded to realise how far from the truth it is.
But Kellner has correctly identified a problem - and it is a problem for the country and not just the Conservatives.
POSTSCRIPT December 2020
I don't often update posts which are more than five years old, but I have picked up from the traffic stats on this blog that this post has been read quite frequently in the closing months of 2020, and I felt I needed to add a rider pointing out that in the intervening seven years the picture it was trying to explain has radically changed.
At the beginning of 2010 there was just one Conservative held seat in Cumbria to four Labour ones and one Lib/Dem. At the time the above post appeared three years later there were two Conservative seats to three Labour. In 2019 Cumbria returned five Conservative MPs and became a Labour-MP free zone as Northern Labour seats all over the North of England in the so-called "Red Wall" fell to the Conservatives like ninepins.
There were a number of reasons for the shakeup in regional loyalties, starting with Brexit. Since 2019 we have had the COVID-19 pandemic which could easily shake things up again.
I will provide links to two subsequent posts which reference this one:
- "The Tories and the North: Fisking Owen Jones" is a response to a piece by Owen Jones which appeared a month after this and responded to the same issues which Peter Kellner had addressed but in a much less intelligent way.
- "When historical social media posts live on," written in December 2020, is a commentary on the fact that the above post had been read 66 times in the previous few days, more than seven years after it had been written, and at a time when it had become rather seriously out of date.
Comments
Though as a general observation I think too much has been cetralised into london (and a lot of thet then moved to brussels) though i think a lot of MPs are too london centric. I dont think it is so much of a north south divided, more a London and everyone else divide. I know certain partys tend to win certain areas, but the turn out gets lower and lower each year. People outside of London feel they are not listened to, and many people are fed up with the political process altogether, like MPs dont listen and are out of touch. Then even if a debate is held the party whips tend to prevail rather than the view of the constituents of an MP.
Also its quite clear there is a clash of interest between the executive and the legislature. How can a minister possibly be expected to act as the MP for an area who holds the executive to account? also the speaker does not even vote so who does vote for the people of Buckinghamshire?
No system will be perfect, but I guess what i am saying is turnout is less and less all the time and in the end its only the die hard supporters of a party (or their children) who end up voting, and in copeland most of those are Labour supporters.
I dont think many vote for Jamie Reed, they just tick the box next to Labour, would be surprised if more than 60% of those who voted for him can remember his name, or a single thing he has said in parliament.
I also think you are absolutely right that too many MPs in all the parties are a bit too London-centric.
A North West MP - no names, no pack drill - made a comment to me a few weeks ago about the disadvantage of your patch being hundreds of miles from London is that you don't get much help, the advantage that they don't interfere too much. That says something about the problem.