Northern Blues

Although her conclusion is wrong (who is looking for an alternative?), Frances Perraudin writes:

Last night Labour did what everybody expected it to do and won the byelection in Manchester’s Wythenshawe and Sale East comfortably, with 13,261 votes and a 55% share of the vote.

Ukip came second in the race with 4,301 votes, beating the Conservatives by 822 votes. The Tories, who usually come a poor second in the seat, now have even more cause to worry that Nigel Farage’s party is stealing their precious few votes in the north of England.

Although there are some notable examples of Conservatives in northern English seats – George Osborne in Tatton, Cheshire, and William Hague in Richmond, North Yorkshire, spring to mind – the party’s overall performance in the region is dismal.

Just 31% of voters in England’s three northern regions voted Tory in the 2010 general election, 12 points lower than the rest of the country, and there are no Tory councillors at all in the cities of Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester.

Home to what is sometimes labelled the biggest council estate in Europe, the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East is viewed as a classic Labour safe seat. But before 1964, the area of Wythenshawe was represented by Conservative Eveline Hill for 14 years.

The northern Tory has not always been such a rare breed. When Churchill’s Conservatives regained power in 1951, there was only a gap of three points between the north and the rest of England.

The party’s support in the region has fallen fast through the 20th century and an ICM and Sunday Telegraph poll conducted in November last year showed that the Conservatives were as unpopular in the north as they were in Scotland.

But why the demise of the northern Tory?

The most obvious answer is that the decline of the prosperous industrial north has led to a fall in support for the perceived “party of the rich”.

Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of British industry left large numbers of the northern working class unemployed, with no new jobs filling the void. Her premiership also saw a financial services boom that left many in the south-east wealthier.

Another possible explanation is the Catholic/Protestant religious divide that used to prevail in many northern cities – Catholics would traditionally vote Labour and Protestants would vote Conservative.

It was the Protestant vote that helped the Conservatives win a majority of the seats in Liverpool in the 1951 election and four of the nine seats in Manchester. Such divisions have largely disappeared over time. [Only in one direction. Politically conscious Protestants, as such, now exist barely, if at all. But the Catholic Labour vote is as solid as ever.]

But the obvious explanations of wealth and class aren’t as appropriate as they seem.

It is true that northerners are more likely to work in manual jobs than southerners, but according to YouGov statistics, when you remove London (home to the rich minority) from the equation and take in to account higher housing costs in the south, northerners aren’t actually much poorer than their southern cousins.

 

46% of northerners count as “working class”, compared with 41% of those in the south – not a huge difference – and YouGov’s research suggests that wealthy northerners are actually less likely to vote Conservative than working-class southerners.

The politics of those living north and south were also analysed by YouGov – their views on taxes and welfare gauged – and they appeared to be reasonably similar, though, again, the northerners surveyed were slightly more left wing.

The real difference came in the general view of the Conservative party. Some 39% of those in the north said that they would never vote Tory and most thought the party didn’t understand people in that part of the country.

Northerners don’t like David Cameron, they don’t like his friends and they think he’s out of touch, regardless of their profession or income.

 

The celebrations in many northern cities when news of Margaret Thatcher’s death broke were reminders that the Conservative party is a very toxic brand in the north. The battle the Tories need to fight is not necessarily an ideological one.

If the Conservative party had done better in the north in the 2010 general election, they might have won an overall majority, and with 86% of the party’s seats lying in other parts of the country, they will need to work hard to impress northerners if they’re going to win a majority in 2015.

If the problem is the brand and not the policies, Ukip could become the alternative to Labour for many in the north.