Labour to target women voters

According to today’s Times (£) Ed Miliband has identified working-class women as the key electoral battleground in an attempt to capitalise on falling support for the coalition among female voters. He’s got a point. Although Labour has maintained a consistent lead in the polls, it hasn’t been anywhere near as big a lead as we’d want, nor – given the unpopularity of the coalition, as big as it should.

But if you delve into the poll details, you’ll see that the coalition is proving to be much less popular with women voters than with men. This is an important aspect to understand: because although the Conservatives have usually enjoyed a clear advantage amongst women voters, women voters are now turning back to Labour in a way that is alarming some senior Conservatives .

Lord Ashcroft’s recent survey of voters in marginal constituencies found that women voters were more pessimistic than men about the outlook for their families and for the country. Labour’s decision to sharpen and calibrate its message for women voters is a positive sign that its leadership has recognised the opportunity that is being presented.

The Shadow Cabinet is said to be examining a list of reforms on retraining, childcare costs, social housing, salary insurance and a new scheme to encourage saving in an attempt to draw up “a new welfare state for working people” (according to the Times). With the policy review still under way, it may be some time before we get to see some concrete policy proposals in this area, but in the meantime, it is encouraging to see action underway in this area.

Jobs and growth

Lord Ashcroft's survey of 13,000 voters in 41 Conservative-held marginal seats makes for interesting reading . 66% of voters surveyed listed the economy and jobs as a top concern - more than twice the number who listed the deficit (32%). The NHS and immigration were also listed as higher priorities than cutting the deficit.

There's no doubt that we need to work extremely hard to win back trust and economic credibility, and a deficit reduction strategy will need to be a central part of that recovery. But we also need to turn up the volume when we talk about growth and job creation. Ed Miliband is right to focus again and again on the "squeezed middle". These are the voters for whom job security is a really big issue - whether they work in the public or private sector. A growing economy not only creates new jobs, but it also secures existing jobs. Labour needs a credible plan for growth as much as it needs a deficit plan.

The Labour Party heads North

The Labour Party last held its national annual conference in the South in Brighton in 2009. This year we gather for the first time in Liverpool and next year we return to Manchester, which hosted its first Labour conference in the modern era last year. The 3Bs seaside venues of Blackpool, Brighton & Bournemouth have been replaced by the city centre convention halls of Birmingham, Manchester and now Liverpool. As party conferences have become bigger, so too have the cities hosting them.

Unless you have a penchant for "Kiss me quick" hats, sticks of rock and fish and chips from Harry Ramsden, the choice of venue doesn't really matter. Party conference doesn't need to be held in the South to be relevant to the South. But as I flicked through the conference guide on the train up I was struck by the absence of any fringe meetings on what is known as Labour's "southern discomfort" (courtesy of Giles Radice's work in this area). Now that is not to say that the debates taking place on the fringe at conference will ignore Labour's challenges in the south; but it is a concern nonetheless.

Stuart King

SCRATCHING OUR NAILS DOWN THE BLACKBOARD

During the 2005 General Election we heard a lot about “dog whistle” politics as employed by the Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby. Simply put, the Conservative campaign was about making sure die-hard Conservatives were motivated to turn out by focussing on specific issues that agitate them.

Dog whistle politics works for political partisans. But it also works just as keenly for ordinary, unaligned voters who aren’t tribal and will vote for the party that they believe best represents their interests at each election.

But just as significant as dog-whistle politics are what you might call “nails on blackboard” politics - signals that drive ordinary swing voters screaming from a party. At the last election Labour was scraping its nails down a lot of blackboards: far too many people identified Labour as being on the side of those who expect a hand-out rather than a hand up; too concerned with promoting a rights agenda that lacked any corresponding emphasis on the responsibilities that accompany them. This perception is even more damaging than the view that we are deficit-deniers.

And right now some in Labour are reinforcing that disastrous impression. Dale Farm is a classic example.

Richard Howitt MEP is a decent and hardworking MEP. He’s well liked and respected (including by this author) in the Eastern region, which he has represented since 1999. Like many in our party he has a long and distinguished track record of working hard for the people who elected him. But when he suggests that “it could be that it is those who would evict [Basildon Council], that it is they who are the lawbreakers” , he’s scraping his nails down the blackboard in a big way. Meanwhile, the law-abiding residents of Basildon know full well that if they had attempted to construct, say a conservatory, without planning permission the council would have been down on them like a ton of bricks.

Sadly, on this Richard’s not alone. Basildon’s Labour councillors have been high profile and persistent in their support of the Dale Farm Travellers – long before Vanessa Redgrave and Workers Liberty descended on the site. I don’t doubt that the Travellers will have been the subject of some pretty despicable and racist abuse. But if Labour’s leader on Basildon Council really aspires to becoming the leader of the council, then she might care to reflect on whether it’s entirely sensible to tell her voters that she’s ashamed to live there . Locked inside our political comfort zone wearing our liberal instincts firmly our sleeves, we seem to prefer to blame the voters for their views rather than ourselves for our inability to persuade them they’re wrong (and of course it doesn’t occur to us that we may be the ones who are wrong).

It’s not as if the party doesn’t know where the mainstream majority is: Ed Miliband clearly understood where the live rail was in the aftermath of the August riots, for example. And he was speaking from the right side of the barricades on this issue when he spoke in favour of the evictions, saying that " the law does have to be upheld right across the country whatever background people are from, wherever people are ."

But in Essex Labour has decided to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the law breakers. I haven’t been able to find a single Labour figure who has publicly supported the Ed Miliband/law-abiding majority line on this admittedly emotive issue.

After Labour’s 2010 electoral rout Deborah Mattinson found that (in the South especially), voters identify Labour more closely with the “have not’s” than the “haves”. Labour is seen as the party that speaks up for immigrants, benefit claimants, and the Trade Unions, but doesn’t speak for the mainstream majority.

Let’s be clear: Labour must always stand for the disadvantaged and the dispossessed just as the Conservatives will always stand for those seeking to entrench their wealth and advantage. But we must also want – passionately, actively want – to speak for the majority who don’t see tolerance of lawbreaking and criminality as in any way desirable. It’s not enough just to expect voters to come back grudgingly because the Conservatives have let them down…again.

Yet some in the party seem to take pleasure in pursuing their support of the underdog – any underdog - without a consideration for the huge damage this does us among “ordinary” voters. Labour wore the straightjacket of discipline for eleven long and uncomfortable years, so perhaps some of us are still enjoying the freedom of no longer being in government. But each and every day spent on the wrong side of the debate condemns Labour to a longer and longer period of opposition.

Stuart King

Boundary review summary: South West

Bristol
Only one ward needed to be reallocated in the whole of Bristol to create four constituencies of the right size: one ward has switched from Bristol West to Bristol East that doesn't alter the political balance in the city at all.

Cornwall and Devon
A lot of the media seem, not unreasonably, to have used the pairing of Cornwall and Devon to illustrate the fact that county boundaries are being crossed for the first time. The new seat that cross the Tamar does so in the north of the county taking the Torridge out of Torridge and West Devon. This seat is notionally Lib Dem but it could easily go Conservative.

The consequence of Cornwall losing half a seat is to recreate the Falmouth and Camborne constituency, which is of course the only seat in the county Labour has ever had the remotest chance of winning. The party's vote has declined significantly since it was a Labour seat from 1997 to 2005 and we'd still start a distant third in this new version; but Jude Robinson's big council gain shows there are votes at the Camborne/Redruth end of the seat, and the return of Falmouth is a big help - provided Labour is successful in amking the case that it is a better depository for anti-Tory votes than the Lib Dems here.

Elsewhere in Devon, Exeter remains unchanged, but Plymouth undergoes some considerable change. Plymouth Moorview regains Devonport and with it that historical seat name; it loses some more Conservative areas to the east and Labour becomes stronger here.

But the marginal seat that is essentially Plymouth Drake is destroyed and Plymouth Sutton makes a return. Sutton was controversial Tory minister Alan Clark's seat until it was abolished in 1997 and, containing affluent suburbs like Plymstock (though not Plympton, which goes in with Tavistock), it was the most strongly (though not overwhelmingly) Conservative. On these boundaries it might well take a national landslide win to see Labour succeed here.

Dorset and Wiltshire
Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset and South Gloucestershire need to be paired to meet the new quota requirements; and while a Dorset/Somerset pairing was entirely possible, the Commission have chosen to twin Dorset with Wiltshire.

There is little of interest to Labour here: all three prospects: the two Swindon seats and South Dorset remain unchanged. But the changes are consequential for the Lib Dems.

Although the abolished seat is what used to be called Westbury and is now "South West Wiltshire", which was strongly Conservative, the ripple effects actually wipe out a Lib Dem MP: Annette Brooke in Mid Dorset and Poole North. Her seat loses some of the Poole bits and gains a chunk of Christchurch and a bigger chunk of North Dorset - both of which are solidly Tory. As a result, the Guardian estimates that her new seat: Blandford and Wimborne would have a Tory majority of nearly 5,000.

And on the other side of Westbury, after waiting decades for a winnable Chippenham seat to be created, Chippenham itself goes back into North Wiltshire and the geographic bulk of the constituency is renamed Trowbridge - both of which are notionally Conservative.

Gloucestershire

Gloucester loses a ward to Forest of Dean which doesn't really change the marginality of the county seat, though it does mean Forest of Dean crosses the Severn, somewhat unnaturally. Stroud and the other Gloucestershire constituencies haven't been touched.

Somerset

There are no Labour prospects in what the Boundary Commission calls Somerset (as distinct from North Somerset and North East Somerset which they treat as entirely distinct areas). Lib Dem prospects are boosted in Taunton and the old Somerton & Frome seat (now Glastonbury and Wincanton), but the encroachment of Wells towards Bridgwater notionally appears to flip that seat back to the Tories (presumably minus David Heathcoat-Amory).

North East Somerset is more interesting though, because Labour until 2005 held a seat called Wansdyke here, centred on Keynsham. That doesn't make a return, but by pairing this area with South Gloucestershire there is a new Kingswood and Keynsham seat which is marginal, but somewhat better for the Tories than the seat Chris Skidmore gained last year. The rest of North East Somerset merges with Frome and will presumably be where Jacob Rees-Mogg transfers; his opponent in this seat will be the Lib Dems but he'll start about 4,500 ahead.

The old Northavon seat grew to form, essentially, two new seats at the last election. Filton & Bradley Stoke went Tory in 2010 while Thornbury and Yate was held by Lib Dem Steve Webb. Those two have been broken up and merged anew; Yate now has its own seat which will be very, very marginal but is clearly the seat Webb will go for (assuming he stands again) while Thornbury and Filton will be slightly better for the Tories, but still competitive.

Boundary review summary: Eastern

Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire
The news from this amalgamation was always going to be bad for Labour: all the seats it holds or aspires to win are too small and surrounded by strongly Conservative areas.

Bedford is a case in point: it expands to the west of Kempston to take in two rural Conservative wards which will boost the current Tory majority; though it remains within sight for Labour.

Luton is another example. The town of Luton is about the right size for one and a half seats. Luton South becomes safer on these boundaries by expanding into North and losing the rural section of the unitary authority that sits within it at present. But that makes North, already undersized, even smaller - so it will now extend into Dunstable. There are Labour votes in Dunstable - the party could usually win the Northfields ward - but this is Conservative commuter-belt suburbia and while the Guardian seems to believe that Labour would have hung-on on these boundaries, I'm sceptical.

It doesn't stop there: Hemel Hempstead, already with a big Tory majority, becomes worse. Watford becomes worse. St Alban's and Welwyn Hatfield - about the same, but Labour's already faded in both big time.

To much excitement and delight on the left, Nadine Dorries' Mid Beds seat is abolished. There is no obvious successor seat for her right now: bits have gone all over the place: some to South West Beds, some to North Beds, some to Hitchin & Harpenden, some to Letchworth.

The only vaguely good news for Labour here is Stevenage, which hasn't taken as much Conservative surrounds as I expected it to, but the Tory majority continues to be in the region of 7,000 according to the Guardian's data.

Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk

The Commission has, entirely unnecessarily, sucked Suffolk - a county big enough to stand alone - into its proposals for Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, seemingly because it disapproves of the town of Newmarket being in Suffolk. This is of little concern to Labour as West Suffolk was only closely-fought in its first ever contest in 1997. On these proposed boundaries, Bury St Edmunds would have been Labour in 1997 and possibly 2001. In compensation for the loss of Newmarket they've also bunged a bit of North Essex into Suffolk to balance it out - again, unnecessarily.

The Suffolk seats Labour will be interested in are Ipswich - entirely unchanged; and Waveney - entirely unchanged (for which Labour can feel somewhat aggrieved as the constituency could easily has lost a rural Tory-voting ward given its electoral size).

In Cambridgeshire, Cambridge is untouched but Peterborough is not. The constituency has been split in two. Despite the existing unified Peterborough having swung hugely away from Labour, this is not especially great news for Labour. It's become somewhat like Colchester used to be: two chunks where the party has urban bits in which it does relatively well, merged with overwhelmingly Tory bits further out.

As it is, Peterborough North is the far better Labour prospect of the two: but by far better we're still talking a big Tory majority to overcome. Peterborough South will be safely Tory.

The cross-county seat Cambridgeshire shares with Norfolk will be called Wisbech and Downham Market and, although both the Liberals and Labour have had surges here in the fairly recent past it will stay safely Tory.

The news elsewhere in Norfolk isn't great for Labour. Although Norwich South remains unaltered, Norwich North is far too small on current boundaries and expands further into the Norfolk Broads, which of course isn't good news for the party. It suburban rather than rural territory that's been added, so if Labour can again win these areas it can win Norwich North. Likewise, Great Yarmouth stretches into North Norfolk, which will help entrench its Conservative majority.

Essex

This is a county where, if Labour were to win a general election by a wide margin the boundary changes would be helpful, but in terms of clawing back seats to win a bare majority they are not.

Harlow expands north into northern, rural Brentwood; it's not that huge a gain in population but it is enough to build the Conservative majority there to around 7,000.

As forecast, Witham is the abolished constituency: a change that makes Braintree more winnable, but again only in a landslide. Likewise we have a Harwich and Clacton seat not a million miles from the old Harwich seat but even on these somewhat better boundaries Labour is someway off the mark.

The better news is in the south of the county. Thurrock is unchanged and Basildon has been reunited in a somewhat better seat for Labour although a good performance will still be required to regain the seat.

Boundary review summary: South East

The boundary review was never going to be that radical for Labour in the Southern counties of England, simply because the party holds so few seats, and has relatively few prospects. Equally, because the Conservatives have a hegemonic hold on so many counties, where seats are lost they will, nearly always, be Conservative ones. Here's a summary of the provisional recommendations for the South East - summaries for the South West and Eastern regions will follow.

Berkshire
Both Reading seats are entirely unaltered. Slough has grown too large and loses a Tory-voting competitive ward from its east end bolstering Fiona MacTaggart further.

Buckinghamshire

There needed to be some realignment between the two Milton Keynes seats and they now look somewhat how they did before the last boundary change: an adjustment that makes the new MK South the stronger prospect for Labour. Good news for the recently selected candidate, Andrew Pakes. The rest of Buckinghamshire has been tidied up after some very strangely-shaped constituencies, but none of these are vaguely winnable by Labour.

East Sussex and Kent
The Commission needed to combine East Sussex with somewhere and they chose Kent. Between the two counties one seat needs to go - and while that is the Tory Faversham and Mid Kent, the political changes elsewhere look like they will cost the Greens their only parliamentary seat.

That's because Brighton is absolutely ripped apart: two halves of Hove are combined with the north and southern bits of Brighton Pavilion. In neither would the Greens have finished even second. The southern of those seats: Brighton Pavilion and Hove, would actually have gone Labour by about 600 in 2010 while the northern chunk (Brighton and Hove North) would have gone Tory by less than 100 - with the Greens in fourth.

Meanwhile a three-way marginal, leaning Conservative, has been created from a pairing of Brighton, Kemptown with Lewes town.

Hastings & Rye remains unchanged - so will continue to be a top Labour target.

The new Uckfield seat - a combination of heavily Tory Wealden and Lib Dem Lewes minus Lewes town - is forecast as marginally Conservative but I suspect it will be fairly comfortable for them. The cross-county seat is called "The Weald"- the Battle half of Bexhill & Battle and the Weald part of Maidstone & The Weald: possibly the safest Tory seat in these two counties.

In Kent, very little has changed for Labour. The new Margate & Ramsgate should be a slightly better seat than South Thanet though the inclusion of Sandwich ward looks unnatural and is politically unhelpful to Labour. Dartford loses a rural ward but gains another when adding Swanley would have made it a much better prospect. Gravesham Chatham/Aylesford and Dover become slightly worse; Chatham becomes slightly better.

Hampshire
When people talk about how the Lib Dems have been shafted by the boundary review, look to Hampshire. The county loses a seat - and that seat is Conservative-voting Meon Valley, most of which is split between Fareham and an expanded Winchester (much as it was pre 1997). But the knock-on consequences seriously impair Lib Dem chances in four existing seats: Winchester, Portsmouth South, Romsey & Southampton North and Eastleigh - none of which they are projected to hold.

Labour holds two seats in Hampshire, both in Southampton. Unfortunately, Test looks to have been flipped to the Conservatives by the shunting of one extra ward into Itchen, and a compensatory gain of a heavily Tory ward from Romsey.

Portsmouth could not have been drawn better for the Conservatives: instead of North-South divisions, they are now East-West, both of which would be Tory with Labour and the Lib Dems competing for a fairly distant second in both.

Eastleigh has been split in two: Eastleigh town itself takes in the northern Southampton bits that were in the marginal Romsey seat and those are pretty Conservative, flipping Chris Huhne's seat to the Tories. The rest of the Eastleigh constituency is big enough for its own seat: Hedge End and Hamble. The Guardian has both as notionally Tory, but any seat with heavily-Lib Dem Eastleigh in it will be very competitive.

Isle of Wight
The Isle has been divided pretty much as I set out a few weeks ago: a more urban northern seat and then the rest of the island. Neither is winnable by Labour though the Lib Dems might aspire to doing well in one of these new divisions: the less affluent southern one looking slightly more favourable towards them.

Oxfordshire

These counties saw only minor changes (if any). In terms of Labour prospects they have been slightly enhanced here. Oxford East (now to be called just Oxford) was too large and has lost a principally Lib Dem area, bolstering Labour. That change would also have kept the Oxford West division Lib Dem - the one piece of good news for that party in the south-eastern review. Oxfordshire will almost certainly gain a seat at the next boundary review; possibly in a cross-county pairing with Berkshire.

Surrey
Very minor changes here as all seats are close to being the right size. Labour has no chance in any of the seats and the least hostile - Spelthorne - remains unaltered gains a Tory ward from Runnymede and Weybridge making it less competitive. Surrey will probably gain a seat next time and that could make Guildford very more competitive again between the Tories and Lib Dems by shearing off some Tory voting rural areas.

West Sussex
This county is only marginally changed: Crawley gains one Tory-voting ward from Mid Sussex but is not beyond reach given how much Labour won this seat by in 1997 and 2001.

NB A lot of the notional figures used in this analysis are taken from the Guardian website which has had a first stab and acknowledges their figures are "crude" - we're aware of some incorrect forecasts for London so very closely fought seats may have come out differently.

Norwich South parliamentary selection

NORWICH SOUTH (Open Shortlist)

Closing date for applications 6 October 2011 (midnight)
Longlisting: 20 October 2011
Interviews and shortlisting: 23 October 2011
Selection meeting: 19 November 2011

Applications should be sent to: Nick Williams at 72 Spinney Road, Norwich, NR7 0PJ, or at

This is the seat held by Charles Clarke from 1997 to 2010. The Liberal Democrats hold the seat with a majority of just 310.

UPDATE: Sources within the constituency advise me that former MP Charles Clarke is not expected to seek selection as the new candidate.