One of the signifiers of this globalised age is that for a lot of Londoners involved in politics or the media, there are large chunks of Britain that have become far away places of which we know little.
So, for instance, I have spent a fantastic weekend break at the Chicago blues festival and carried out a journalistic assignment in Cairo. But I have never been to Crewe, and have no knowledge of Nantwich, other than the fact that it forms the ‘and’ part of the constituency held by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody.
I was acquainted with the cantankerous old bat (pictured) professionally, in her role as chairman – woe betide anyone who called her as chairwoman or chair! – of the Commons transport committee, and liked her tremendously.
If anybody personified the difference between old skool Labour rightwinger and what New Labour has become, this was the lady. Although she is probably too busy giving St Peter a hard time to pay too much notice to the by-election campaign, I doubt she would be particularly surprised by the difficulty her daughter seems certain to have in retaining her erstwhile seat.
A telephone poll of 1,004 Crewe residents by ICM for The Mail on Sunday last weekend put the Conservatives on 43%, Labour on 39% and the Liberal Democrats on 16%. That would overturn Labour’s 7,078 majority in the 2005 General Election and instead hand the Tories a majority of more than 1,000. That would be the first Tory by-election gain from Labour in 26 years.
That – after the loss of London and a local government elections performance in which Labour came third, with its lowest share of the national vote since 1968 - would certainly make Cameron an even stronger favourite to become next prime minister than most bookies rate him already.
What of the constituency in question? As I say, I have never been there and inevitably, my opinion comes at a discount. But my understanding is that Crewe and Nantwich is essentially a quintessential northern working class town with a few bits of posh Cheshire tacked on. Until recently it was dominated by a railway works and a Rolls-Royce factory, although both are now closed.
This is archetypally the kind of place that stayed Labour right through the Thatcher ascendency. Although direct comparisons are impossible because of boundary changes, the town of Crewe itself has been permanently Labour since world war two.
If it changes hands next week, the only parallel that comes readily to mind is the Bermondsey by-election of 1983, where I was among the young activists canvassing for Peter Tatchell.
We lost that natural territory seat and, a quarter of a century later, we still haven’t won it back. The way things are going, Crewe and Nantwich could turn out to be the Bermondsey for the current Labour generation.
While I hate New Labour’s persistent use of the term ‘heartland vote’ as a euphemism for working class voters – it’s almost as if they are too contemptuous of ordinary people even to utter the plain English designation for their place in society – let’s go with the terminology this once.
It's not quite 'weight the vote'/'donkey with a red rosette' territory, but C&N can fairly be classified as a heartland seat. It is impossible to overstate how catastrophic defeat next Thursday will be for Labour. It would call into question not just New Labour’s arrogant insistence that the stupid proles have nowhere else to go, but the party’s ability ever to form a government again. Yes, it really is as serious as that.
Posted at 14:06, 15 May 2008
Comments (18)
Dave, you knowd as well as I do the reason they use euphemisms such as 'heartlands'. It's because Labour has ushered in the 'classless' society, so to continue to use such archaic terms as 'working-class- or 'proletarian' is ridiculous. I assume that the Tories will win it on abstentions. There is not just a crisis in the Labour Party but in our whole democratic 'political' culture. Incidentally, I'm fed up with people saying how popular Tony Bliar was. He was a vote loser. After the massive win of 1997, the Labour vote steadily declined. Interesting to speculate whether if he was still PM whether Labour would still hold it together. They haven't got a hope with Brown, but as I don't think they are a socialist or particualarly worker-friendly party, it doesn't distress me too much. (except that the Tories are even worse).
To be fair, the political landscape of (Southwark &) Bermondsey has changed dramatically since 1983: however much residual hostility there is to Labour dating from the by-election, it's been a Lib Dem centre for the rest of London, and there's been considerable demographic change (see also Battersea). That's why Labour has failed to come very close to regaining it, even as it regained seats across London post-1992, and won others for the first time.
As has been noted elsewhere online, the Crewe Labour leaflet attacking the Tories for "not wanting to make foreign nationals carry ID cards" is one of the most disgusting pieces of electioneering I have seen from Labour or any other party in recent times.
Dunwoody narrowly held on in 1983, perhaps because of a personal vote, when a lot of Labour seats like hers were falling, especially to Tories. I don't know about it being all that "heartland" a Labour seat to the extent that losing it would be an unthinkable disaster. It does seem to me to be the kind of seat that would go to the opposition in a government mid-term by-election.
Rory, Labour electioneering rarely comes with a bag of principles these days. During the local elections in Coventry they moved heaven and earth to dislodge Dave Nellist, virtually ignoring the Tories and BNP.
I was born and bred in Crewe, although I haven't actually lived there for ages. However, I do vist my old mum there occasionally. Anyway, your description of Crewe (but not Nantwich) as "essentially a quintessential northern working class town with a few bits of posh Cheshire tacked on" was largely my opinion too. Nantwich was where the middle classes lived. That seems to have changed with the disappearance of the "The Works" (railway engineering) and Rolls Royce and the area seems to be more of a dormitory town - with good transport links to lots of cities. I think that the collapse of these employers came relatively late so that the local economy remained relatively buoyant in the early eighties, and the local trade union movement remained relatively strong That could explain why Gwynneth Dunwoody survived the 1983 election, when the constituency was merged with Nantwich.
One thing that nobody mentions is the collapse of the local cattle industry. When I lived there, you could hardly go anywhere outside the town (and sometimes you didn't need to leave the town) to see a a herd of cows. It was claimed that a ten mile circle round Nantwich church contained the densest concentration of cattle outside of Texas. Nowadays you can sometimes see more cattle in a short walk from my house (in Yorkshire)than an entire journey through Cheshire. I know that farmers have always been traditionally Tory but there must be a knock on effect felt as the collapse seems to have occurred under Blair and Brown.
Anyway, I doubt that I'd vote Labour myself but I'd hate to see the old place elect a Tory MP (so I'll suggest my mum votes Labour).
Dave,
I lived in Crewe for 23 years, and was a member of the Labour Party there. Your statement that the Railway works and Rolls Royce are closed is incorrect, granted the Railway Works is a shadow of it's former self but it is still there, and Rolls Royce is now Bentley Motors on the same site, albeit owned by Volkswagon and doing very well being the biggest employer in the town.
The constituency of Crewe and Nantwich was formed in 1983, Crewe was always Labour and Dunwoody was the MP and Nantwich was rank Tory,when the seat was formed it looked like a Tory marginal, but she won because she had a huge personal vote.
The local party in my opinion have selected Tasmin Dunwoody because they think the name is worth alot of votes.I think this will backfire.
My prognostic is based on the well-tried-and-trusted Coatesite principle: listen to the blokes and blokettes in the pub.
I assume they have them in Crewe btw. That is pubs, not blokes and blokettes.
Anway, word I have got is that the working class loathes Brown from the bottom of its heart. Really really hates his tripes. Whether that will be enough to swing this by-election, don't know.
If Labour lose their 'core voters' the next election will be handed to the Conservatives on a plate.
Losing Crewe and Nantwich would be a massive blow to the reputation of the government and will make other traditional voters seriously ask whether they will vote for Labour in two years time.
Well if I was voting to day or when ever after hearing Browns queens speech I think I'd vote Tory.
Brown said wait until you hear and see my Vision we have been waiting with bated breath to get Education education, the NHS, and the Welfare reforms, I thought bloody hell Blair's back.
Brown has little vision except to hope like hell Blair was right, it's a sad day for Labour.
I have been blogging a lot about this by-election and I just want to add three other factors that will help Labour to lose this seat. None of them feature much on the political radar, so here goes.
The first is the smoking ban. In a world where the two parties share common economic policies, then social issues become much more important. The pubs are quickly becoming Labour free zones and many of them are joining a pro-Tory pressure group that will see them turned into blue bases at election time.
Secondly, Crewe has a population of just under 50,000, of which over 6,000 are Poles. It is hard to believe but some reason people just don't like having their wages cut. In the past they could rely on the Labour Party and the unions to make sure that this didn't happen, but today the party treats its working class voters with contempt. Fine, the attitude is getting returned with interest.
Finally, again as I pointed out at my own place, this anti-toff campaign that Labour is running just isn't going to work. The truth is that ordinary people are not particularly anti upper class. They have just voted for Boris in London and they voted for Churchill, MacMillan, Eden and Home in large numbers. The latter may very well have lost, but it was only by a very narrow margin.
What the traditional Labour voter loathes the most are the factory under-managers, foremen and other assorted rabble... Or their children, who today are social work filth, council managers and members of the teaching trade. In simple English, the very people who make up what is left of Labour's membership.
I dunno what you're hearing Exile but when I return to the estate where I grew up, or indeed go around Coventry, I don't hear many people (or indeed any) baying for the blood of "members of the teaching trade". Sure you're not projecting your own dislikes on to the class a bit there? ;-)
Sure, the point was rhetorical. However, as Codie Stott found out, all those creatures are connected and do operate as a kind of colonial elite - with us as the natives. That said I do accept that nobody really cares about the teachers.
The same cannot be said of the social work filth, can it? Everybody hates them.
That's funny... I could have sworn that I replied to this. Anyway, the point was obviously rhetorical, nevertheless, the basic one is still valid, I think. It isn't the upper class that people dislike so much as the lower middle class local government dross.
Don't usually venture into these waters but was prompted by our old shipmate (the swashbuckling Chris Paul!) to take a look.
Looks like the tide has gone out and the Old Labour ship is stranded for a while. Maybe you could spend the time (the next 10 or 20 years or so?) scraping those barnacles off your bottom that have been weighing you down for so long.
I'll get my coat.....
If people are fed up with having a right-wing party in power, why are they switching their votes to an even more right-wing party? Do they seriously think they're going to be any better off under the Tory Party Mark 1? Or is it just that the British electorate are so politically ignorant that they don't understand what they're voting for?
"What the traditional Labour voter loathes the most are the factory under-managers, foremen and other assorted rabble... Or their children, who today are social work filth, council managers and members of the teaching trade. In simple English, the very people who make up what is left of Labour's membership."
A few points on this:
Thing is, if that was honestly the case then the Labour Party wouldn't have got back in power post-1951.
The cast of characters that you place central to the Labour Party membership have predominated in its ranks for decades. Before Brown, before Blair, before Smith, Kinnock and Foot.
'Fraid my experience of working in factories and warehouses is that most foremen and such like come from the shopfloor. Poachers turned gamekeepers in many cases, I'm sad to say.
The Labour Party's current inability to win any future election?
The Labour Party's have been 'managing' British Capitalism PLC for ten plus years. The electorate have got bored, infuriated, and hacked off with the same old faces in govt and now it looks like the Tories are going to be given a shot a running British Capitalism PLC at the next election.
Sounds like I'm dismissing politics as nothing more than a game of two halves, but sadly that's what it is.
Would be amazed if Labour hold on. Still, I can't see any "left" challenge for leadership emerging even if they're fucked.