02 March 2017
Old Iron and Pots
Analysis of the by-election results
by J.R.Thomas
Copeland – not your typical Labour seat
Mr Trump is going to have to wait this week. We would not normally wish to delay the President but a minor matter has intruded, so we will save up the latest review of life on Planet Donald until next week. Instead, we thought perhaps to rain a little on Mrs May’s parade, and even cast a little sunlight on Mr Corbyn.
The occasion for this perverseness is of course the two by-elections last week. In one of them the Conservatives took the former Labour seat of Copeland, an oddly dull name for an exceptionally beautiful and interesting constituency, a result apparently extraordinary and earth shattering and a triumph for Mrs May’s middle way; or maybe not. Meanwhile, Stoke on Trent Central remains in Labour hands after much chatter that it would be won by UKIP in the person of its new leader Paul Nuttall, who, in the event, fought a campaign that could not have been better for Labour if Mr McDonnell had run it himself.
So, to bring a little cheer to Mr Corbyn first (lord knows, he needs it), a quick look at Stoke on Trent. This is one of the most ancient parliamentary boroughs, a rotten borough until the Great Reform Act of 1832, and one of the rottenest with a large but disenfranchised population working in the booming china industry. That and the Methodist and Liberal background of many of the industrial owners seems to have given the area a radical approach to politics which has never quite left it. In the 1920’s the seat was an early example of a constituency returning a woman MP to Westminster – Lady Cynthia Mosley. She was an unlikely Labour MP, daughter of that “very superior person” Marquess Curzon, former Liberal Foreign Secretary, and wife of that rising Labour minister – though not for much longer – Oswald Mosley; who incidentally and irrelevantly was the lover of both Cynthia’s sister and stepmother. The seat has always been Labour, albeit with a taste for rather grand Labour MPs, not just Lady Cynthia but also the privately educated grandees Mark Fisher and the recently departed Blairite, Tristam Hunt (gone to run the V&A, and nobody seems to blame him for that). It also has a strong dissenting vote which this century seems to have resulted in an urge to vote anything rather than Conservative; Liberal and UKIP being the runners up in recent elections. What should perhaps concern all the parties is the very low voter turnout of 38%, in a hard fought and controversial by-election, even in a constituency which has rarely seen more than 50% of the voters get to the polling stations. The Labour vote halved from the 2005 election as did the Liberal Democrat support, with Conservative support actually up, although only marginally, even with a UKIP candidate making all the running in the publicity stakes.
So where is the silver lining for Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell? It is, in truth, a little hard to find. But they did after all hold a seat that looked as though it might go to UKIP (though in reality that seemed unlikely, this is a seat that has always being loyal to Labour) and the Labour share of the vote fell by a mere two per cent. And the Conservatives did not win it – if Mrs May is getting across her message that the Tories are the party of the “hard pressed”, she should be doing much better than coming in third, (admittedly only 77 votes behind UKIP). And it is bad news for UKIP – they increasingly look unelectable, a party of protest after all. Without Nigel they look just eccentric and slightly unpleasant. So at least Jeremy can perhaps survive a little longer. Unless some fresh disaster comes along.
It is easy to see Copeland as that disaster, and to lose a safe Labour seat looks very careless. But Copeland has not been that safe a seat for many years. The demographics of the seat are complex; it once had strong and sizable heavy industries based around Whitehaven on the coast, formerly a major steel and iron town with coal and iron ore mining and a large port, and the descendants of those who worked there are still around; unemployment is high and there is much social housing. Farming is still significant as is tourism in the western Lake District, and a there is a growing contingent of retired, many coming in from elsewhere. And of course the largest and most controversial employer is the Sellafield nuclear plant, with a new power station soon about to be constructed – and where the previous MP thought his career prospects were better. Sellafield is not just an employer of skilled workers but also of high paid scientists and managerial types, many coming from outside the area. It is a very diverse elector base indeed.
Mrs May’s “squeezed middle” and “barely managing” are alive and well in Copeland and she needs to win such seats; and she did. So well done. But a close look at the figures is revealing. As the industrial base of the area has declined and its workers have gone elsewhere, on their bikes or otherwise, to seek work, the comparatively middle class voter base has grown. Whitehaven is a terribly run-down town, scarred by long gone industry, but the landscape is under repair and the town is in its bones a very attractive one, with Georgian terraces and a sheltered harbour, a potential Whitby or Wells-next-the-Sea, or a Weymouth of the north-west. And that is now being recognised, with houses under restoration, new life on the waterfront, yachts in the harbour, and the weekenders starting to be a noticeable presence. What is perhaps most surprising is not that the seat has gone Conservative, but that it has not happened before. The Labour majority has been declining over a long period of time, and was down to 2,400 votes at the last General Election, and it seems likely that without a good UKIP candidate who pulled in 6,100 votes it would have gone Tory then.
Indeed, it is a wonder that it did not do so in the 1980’s. The constituency was represented by a very popular MP, Dr Jack Cunningham, almost a local boy (from Tyneside), who was first elected in 1970 and built up a very strong local following, achieved cabinet office under Tony Blair, was a great public proponent of nuclear power (essential you might cynically say with Sellafield the source of so much economic activity), and retired in 2005. Even a man as locally popular as he almost lost the seat in the Thatcher years with very narrow wins in 1983 and 1987, though that personal following and a collection of weak Tory candidates saw him safer thereafter. So the result was not quite such a shock to the psephologists of the seat as to the commentating classes, especially with the current Labour leader an opponent of nuclear as vigorous as Dr Cunningham was a supporter.
So not too much rain for Mrs May, but the “surprise” of a victory in Copeland does say a lot more about the long Tory retreat from the north and Midlands than about some sort of response of the “almost surviving”, or whatever this week’s description might be. Given the long term changes in the nature of the voting population this should have been a blue seat by the late 1980’s and a disgrace it will be to the party if it slips away from their grasp at the next general election. A good active candidate – as the new MP Ms Trudy Harrison apparently is, with the additional bonus of being born and raised in the constituency, having worked at Sellafield and being married to a welder there – she could have been intended from birth to be the Copeland MP – has every chance of holding the seat.
So, sort of well done Mrs May, and sort of hard luck Mr Corbyn. But both of you have a long row to hoe yet, based on those results.
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