Briefing | England’s two nations

Divided kingdom

The diverging politics of the Labour north and Conservative south make England look ever more like two nations. Reuniting them will be hard

| HESWALL, LIVERPOOL, SHEFFIELD AND SOUTHAMPTON

IN 1951 Winston Churchill launched the Conservative Party’s general-election campaign in Liverpool. The crowd went wild. “I’m not conceited,” he later told his doctor, “but they wanted to touch me.” The Tories went on to win a majority of votes in the city.

Today such a result is unimaginable. In the 2010 general election the Conservative Party won just 19,533 votes in Liverpool. Labour won 116,285. The Conservatives lost in all of the city’s five constituencies, and in 71% of those in the north-west as a whole. The party fared even worse in the north-east, where it won only 7% of the seats.

Over the years the Conservative Party has been expelled from most of the north of England (and almost all of Scotland). Labour has been virtually driven from the south. Margaret Thatcher once told a newspaper interviewer that economic change has the potential to alter “the heart and the soul” of a people; the double-edged sword of Thatcherism changed the hearts and souls of north and south in strikingly different ways, and with long lasting effects. The differences between them now go beyond economic circumstance—their cultural and political identities are ever more distinct. This represents a daunting but inescapable political challenge.

On ordinary electoral maps the north-south divide is not as plain as it might be. Rural British constituencies are both big and nearly always represented by a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat. Thus swathes of the country will appear blue and yellow come what may. And Northern Ireland is represented by parties not seen elsewhere. If you look just at the mainland, though, and equalise the size of the constituencies, the binary reality becomes obvious (see map). Save for a belt of Tory hills and dales across North Yorkshire and the Lake District, the north is red—as are, barring nationalists, Wales and Scotland. The south is deep blue, strikingly so in the surrounds of London (it gets more Liberal Democrat to the west). Only in London and the Midlands do the parties seem to be in real competition.

Isolated elements

Of the 158 seats that make up the three northern English regions, only 43 are Conservative: 86% of the party’s seats are elsewhere in the country. Of the 197 seats in the three southern regions outside London, Labour now holds a mere ten. In the 2010 election Conservatives won 31% of the vote in the north and 47% in the south; Labour won 17% of the vote in the south but 38% in the north.

Combining one of the most centralised systems of government with one of the starkest regional splits in party support makes England an oddity. Italy’s geographic division is deeper, economically; but right and left both have strongholds in the rich north and the poor south. Electoral maps of France and Australia are kaleidoscopes of shifting colours. America’s division between Democratic coasts and a Republican middle is relatively new—until 1988 the West coast was a Republican bastion. And unlike the peoples of Belgium, Spain and Germany, all of whom enjoy a federal structure, England’s halves must rub along in just one Parliament.

The rift goes back a long way. In 1900 John Hobson, an economist, described a southern “Consumers England” of leisurely suburbs and a northern “Producers England” of mills and mines. The north was Liberal territory: Conservatives were as weak there then as they are today. Later, as women and working-class men won the vote, the rise of the Labour Party and class affiliation overwhelmed older, regional patterns. Between the 1920s and 1960s the electoral map was more uniform than before or since.

The return of the split reflects the diverging economic experiences of the two halves of the country. Beginning in the 1960s changing industrial fortunes drove a wedge between the manufacturing-oriented north and the services-heavy south. In the 1980s wealth generated by London’s booming financial-services industry turned neighbouring regions a deeper shade of blue. Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist reforms were accompanied by high unemployment, particularly in northern cities. She defeated the National Union of Mineworkers, accelerating the industry’s decline—many former mining towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire struggle to attract new jobs to this day. The privatisation of the steel industry had a similar effect in places like Teesside. In Wales and Scotland Conservatism was widely viewed not just as malign but as a foreign imposition.

“Scousers have long memories,” says Tony Caldeira, who ran as Tory candidate for mayor of Liverpool. A doggedly upbeat bunch—and, tellingly, a young one—Conservative activists in the city report that Lady Thatcher’s legacy is hurled across doorsteps with a “barrage of hatred”.

And some of the forces behind fission have strengthened since the 1980s. Under the 1997-2010 Labour government the economy grew more slowly in the north—and, partly as a result, the state accounted, directly and indirectly, for a larger share of jobs created there. Public-sector workers are more likely to vote Labour, regardless of their social class, and constitute a larger proportion of the workforce in the north.

When Labour increased public spending in the north it strengthened its position there. When the Conservative-led coalition began to cut public-sector jobs they strengthened Labour’s position there, too. (The same may yet prove true of cuts in benefits, which are a larger part of incomes in the region.) Tory grumbling about Labour’s “client state” has something to it. At every election, the Liverpool offices of Unite, a trade union with some 250,000 public-sector members, become the engine room of the local Labour campaign. The possibility of the government “localising” public-sector pay, which would mean lower pay for teachers, doctors and policemen in the north, haunts those Conservatives vying for their votes.

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.

The purpose of understanding

The regional divide seems likely to widen, and not just because many public-sector cuts are still to come. Recent by-elections suggest that the decline in Liberal Democrat support will accentuate the gap by widening the Conservative lead in most southern seats and (to a greater extent) the Labour lead in the north. By forging a budget-cutting coalition with the Tories, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has damaged his party’s prospects in post-industrial northern towns.

In the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats got 16% of the vote in one such seat, Rotherham. In a 2012 by-election they got just 2% of the vote there. The UK Independence Party, which won 6% of the vote in 2010, came second with 22%, thus showing that its voters are not, as widely thought, exclusively found in the south. A right-wing party without the baggage of a Thatcherite past may complicate things further for northern Tories.

And in various practical ways the regional split is self-reinforcing. Previous successes mean the parties have their ground troops—activists, councillors and constituency MPs—in the wrong places. In 2010, for example, there were about as many Labour members in the five Manchester seats as in the 18 constituencies that make up Essex. The Conservatives have not one councillor in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield.

But some way to surmount the problem has to be found if either party is to get a respectable absolute majority. Though they will fight hard over seats in London and the Midlands—regions which have some of the post-industrial pallor of the urban north and some of the private-sector fizzle of the wider south—neither party thinks gains in those regions alone can win it an absolute majority.

The best way for a party to get into the other’s heartland may be to target the changing patterns of work that have perpetuated the split. Mr Green talks of breaking Labour’s grasp on Wirral politics by replacing monolithic provision of social services with a less statist political economy of “mutuals, co-operatives and co-production.” Other Conservatives point approvingly to the government’s moves to curb trade-union power. Labour, in turn, identifies a need to adapt to a larger private-sector workforce. Rowenna Davis, a broadcaster and Labour councillor (who has written for The Economist), points to the party’s moves to encourage companies to pay employees a “living wage” higher than the basic minimum wage.

Such strategies may bear fruit in the long-term. Looking to the 2015 election, the tactics are simpler: show up. The Conservatives have hosted a cabinet meeting in Leeds and included a number of northern seats—Wirral South and Berwick-upon-Tweed, for example—on their list of targets worth serious resources. David Skelton, who will run a pro-Conservative campaign group focused on the north, cites the attention that Michael Heseltine lavished on Liverpool when in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet as an example for the party today. The former deputy prime minister still has “demigod” status in the city, according to local Tories.

Mr Denham (a close ally of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader) has prepared a detailed report on improving the party’s standing in the south. His practical prescriptions have much in common with those voiced by Conservative activists in the north. Northern Conservatives and southern Labourites agree that their parties must repudiate the labels “Tory south” and “Labour north”. Both groups want their party leaders to talk more about their region: Mr Denham urges shadow cabinet members to cite Southampton, Reading, or Exeter in their speeches; Mr Caldeira praises the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, for name-checking Liverpool in his.

The talk needs to be accurate, though. Chloe Smith, the Tory MP for Norwich North, was widely mocked for describing Sunderland in the north-east as “near” Bolton, 200km (125 miles) away in the north-west. Pamela Hall, the 2010 Conservative candidate in Liverpool West Derby, admits to some head-in-hands moments when bow-tie-wearing southerners in her party betray their ignorance of the north: “it’s an absolute disaster for us.” Fellow Tories, she reckons, should shelve in-house obsessions such as the EU, talk more about jobs and living standards and put up more northern and working-class candidates.

Another good idea is to concentrate on voters with shorter political memories. Few older Liverpudlians will ever back the Conservatives, local activists admit. Ryan Shorthouse, a young Conservative commentator, reckons the party can escape the decades-long shadow of the “Thatcher effect” among his generation of northern voters by focusing relentlessly on public-sector reform. Showing the party’s commitment to effective, universal services, he says, can help exorcise its ghosts.

Some worthwhile investments take time to pay off. Labour members in Southampton recently campaigned at every farmers’ market in Hampshire. In terms of immediate electoral benefit this is something of a long shot. But it may have gone some way to securing what Mr Denham sees as the key long-term goal: reassuring voters that “people like you vote Labour.”

The temptation to defer investments in opponents’ strongholds is great. But, argue the long-termists, such investments need to be made. The party which first smears its colours all over the map will be in a position to reknit England’s heart and soul on its own terms.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Divided kingdom"

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