Swimming in the same direction

These policies may explain why the regional difference seems still to be widening. Poll figures from Ipsos MORI show that five years ago the Conservatives led Labour all over the country, but by 13 points more in the south than the north. In 2012 the gulf between northern and southern voting intentions was 21 points (see chart 1). The results of the council elections to be held on May 2nd should reflect this. Colin Rallings, a psephologist, predicts on the basis of YouGov polling that the Labour Party will win control of two or three councils, all in the Midlands or the north.

But the preference northern voters show for Labour is not merely a reaction to who pays their salaries, or just a matter of the size of those salaries. In the south people in the middle of the national income spectrum favour the Conservatives; in the north, they lean strongly towards Labour. Indeed well-off people in the north are more likely to vote Labour than the poor are in the south (see chart 2). Even in a place like the Wirral, a peninsula of golf courses and big houses west of Liverpool, the council and most of the parliamentary seats are Labour. Jeff Green, a Tory councillor, says lots of voters are well-paid public-sector workers who have moved out of the city to enjoy the well-heeled suburban life. They tend to retain their collectivist loyalties, he sighs. Policy Exchange, a think-tank, has found that even controlling for factors such as education level, housing tenure, benefit receipts, local unemployment rates and age, the political divide remains in evidence.

Thus the north looks hard for the Tories to crack. Judged just by number of constituencies, Labour’s position in the south looks even worse. Consider Southampton, a port city poorer and smaller than Liverpool in the middle of the south coast. Its industrial glories, like Liverpool’s, are long gone. Parts of the city reek of decline: inky waterways lined with derelict warehouses run up against rows of boarded-up shops. Yet John Denham, the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, very nearly lost his seat to the Conservatives at the last election. Until recently, Tories dominated the city council. Just as the Wirral, despite its well-to-do-ness, displays the pro-Labour tendencies of the wider north, so down-in-the-dumps Southampton reflects the politics of the south. Whatever their wealth, people there are more likely to consider themselves middle-class, and more likely to vote Conservative. There are 84 constituencies in the south-east outside London; Mr Denham’s is just one of four held by Labour. The average majority in all four is less than 3,000.

This part of the country, historically less dependent on heavy industry, has higher levels of private-sector employment, particularly in Britain’s successful service and knowledge industries. Mr Denham points to a factory along the coast where almost the entire workforce is university-educated. “They make satellites,” he adds by way of explanation.

Mr Denham accepts the south broadly lacks the Labour tradition of the north. But that does not mean that it has as deep a cultural aversion to Labour as the north currently does to Tories. Southerners can be quite happy to vote Labour when they like what it offers—or at least many were in 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s spin doctor, recalls the party’s astonishment at the results: “seats were falling that we would never have imagined standing a hope in hell of winning.” The greatest swing was in the south-east and eastern regions, where Labour won 44 constituencies, including such leafy, middle-class suburbs as St Albans (now comfortably Tory once more).

That result owed much to “Southern Discomfort”, a pamphlet produced by the Fabian Society, a think-tank, after Labour’s defeat in the 1992 election. It argued that the party had to engage more actively with aspirant, middle-class southern voters. Policy Network, another think-tank, recently published an updated version. One of its authors, Patrick Diamond, reckons that Labour’s challenge in the south is different today: “Insecurity has replaced aspiration as the dominant concern of wavering Labour voters.” Voters in the south feel caught between stagnant wages and rising living costs; if they think Labour can do something about that, they may vote for it.

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