It is often written that the Labour party has an enormous electoral mountain to climb in order to win a majority at the next general election – or possibly, even the general election after that. What isn’t evaluated enough is what this means in hard, psephological terms. Winning substantially in Scotland appears to be getting harder and harder by the day, with the SNP looking indomitable. This means that Labour has to win in England and Wales on a Blair-style majority – perhaps even bigger than Blair given the Scottish problem. All this leads to one conclusion: Labour has to figure out how to win again in seats with a rural contingent.
When looked at from one angle, this is completely doable. Blair’s Labour party held around 170 rural or semi-rural seats after 1997 (and worth noting, he kept them in 2001). Both the SNP and the Lib Dems have been able to win these kinds of constituencies while being broadly on the centre-left. In fact, the Lib Dems, during their 1997 to 2010 heyday, often did better in rural seats than urban ones, where even at the height of Iraq war outrage they found it extremely difficult to dislodge Labour in big city seats. Yet looked at through the lens of a post-Corbyn Labour party – with their lowest seat count overall since before the war – it seems a daunting task. The party has become increasingly urban in every sense over the past decade.
Labour has to figure out how to win again in seats with a rural contingent
Yet Labour could do it. Big spending directed at rural seats would prove popular if communicated in the right language. Even some of the existing policies from the Corbyn era might work with a little re-jig. Take ‘universal broadband’ – if you reposition the whole thing as being a focus on getting total coverage for the countryside, where there is a real connectivity problem, that could be a winner. They could attack the Tories on the absence of clarity around how the government is going to replace EU agricultural subsidies. The Conservatives have been able to be vague on this, often saying different things at different times, precisely because Labour has avoided the issue.
Yet it doesn’t come down to public policy in the end so much as values. The Labour party is perceived as being exclusively for metropolitan voters to such a degree that shifting opinion in rural communities might take some profound sign that Labour is serious about the countryside. Some of it is blanket stuff that Labour probably needs to do to win back red wall seats anyhow, for instance a display of basic patriotism. Other things would be even trickier for Labour because they would potentially risk alienating urban, liberal voters. In the language that it uses, the Labour party needs to ‘reconnect’ with the countryside. It needs to get serious about targeting a swathe of rural seats and select candidates in these areas based on their roots in the local community and more importantly, the trust and networks they have within their constituencies already. Then there is the pride of place that is more prevalent in rural communities than in urban ones, particularly London.
This would result in a Labour party that feels very different from the one we see at the moment. While the rewards could be vast, this strategy also has the risk of alienating the current metropolitan, liberal core Labour has established over the past decades. Given the left of the party already has their knives out for Keir Starmer – looking to paint the new leader as Blair 2.0 – moving MP selection away from leftist purity towards a more one nation approach would be an invitation for the left to truly come gunning for him. Perhaps that might be good for Labour in terms of image; perhaps it would be a total disaster, alienating the urban liberals while failing to convince enough rural voters.
It’s a risk the Labour party needs to take. They cannot sit still when it comes to the countryside. Where they are now, unless something miraculous happens for them in Scotland, means Labour are left with almost no way of winning enough seats to get a majority without an uptick in the rural vote. When people talk about Lib Dems seats Labour ‘has no chance of winning’ this is usually shorthand for ‘Labour can’t win in constituencies with any significant rural component’. The party has to figure out a way to change this. Worse still, it has to start doing it right now in order to give it enough time for the strategy to work to Labour’s benefit. Starmer has to see this is as the difficult path, but a path that cannot be avoided.
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