In politics, an ascendancy is often strongest when it seems natural. Ever since Britain became a full democracy in the early 20th century, most of southern England outside London has habitually elected Tory MPs. Politics here has effectively shrunk to a choice between the party’s prospective parliamentary candidates.
This arrangement has worked well for the Conservatives and some southerners, but less well for everyone else. The Tories have built on their southern supremacy to frequently dominate national politics, and the south has increasingly dominated the economy. As Tom Hazeldine pointed out in his recent book The Northern Question, only a century ago the southeast and the north “were roughly on level pegging” in their share of our economic output. But by 2000 the southeast’s share was twice that of the north. Britain has become one of the most imbalanced countries in Europe, and the closeness between the Conservatives and the south has played a central role.
Yet only occasionally is this cosy relationship discussed – let alone challenged. Instead, political conversation revolves around the few dozen “red wall” seats further north, and the Tories’ vague plans to hold on to these recent gains from Labour by “levelling up” the country. The fact that the Conservatives won 174 southern seats outside London in 2019 – almost half their Commons total – has received far less attention.
For a decade, many people in these seats have benefited from Tory policies such as lowering the top rate of income tax and imposing lighter austerity cuts on councils in affluent areas. The party has continued to attract far more members from the south than anywhere else. And however much the chancellor Rishi Sunak talks up his North Yorkshire constituency, there are still more cabinet ministers representing seats in Surrey than the whole of northern England.
When southern privilege is talked about in Britain, the target is usually London. Interviewing red wall voters, the pollster Deborah Mattinson found that the capital came in for criticism “again and again”. This suits the Conservatives, as London is the one big area of the south they don’t control, and focusing on it draws attention away from the parts of the region much more pampered by Tory governments.
The political importance of this non-metropolitan south is likely to last. Because it has grown faster in population than most of the country in recent years, the current review of constituency boundaries, scheduled to conclude before the next election, is expected to give it another 13 Commons seats, and take away the same number from Wales and the north. If Scottish independence comes, the south’s share of the Commons will increase further.
During the 90s and 00s, the Conservative hold on the region was loosened a little by the Liberal Democrats, who were elected or at least strongly competitive in dozens of seats, particularly in the southwest. But the Lib Dem implosion at the 2015 election, from which they’ve yet to recover, has left the party with only three southern MPs outside London. So any serious challenge to the Tories in the south – without which they will be in power for a lot longer – will probably have to come from Labour.
Keir Starmer grew up in Surrey. As a teenage activist, he told Desert Island Discs, he spent much of his time walking “up long drives” to houses and failing to persuade their owners to vote Labour. In his childhood constituency, the party came third even in Tony Blair’s election landslide in 1997.
Such experiences may help explain why so far his leadership seems more interested in winning back Labour voters in the red wall than making converts in the home counties. If that’s the case, Labour could be making a mistake: not just because the south contains so many more seats, but because twice in recent history the party has come close to a lasting southern breakthrough.
In 1997, Blair spent much of the election campaign criss-crossing the south, delivering speeches designed to appeal to suburban voters, about promoting social mobility and spreading the region’s prosperity more widely. Labour increased its tally of southern seats outside London from 14 to 59, and held on to most of them for nearly a decade.
At the 2017 election, Jeremy Corbyn again dramatically increased Labour’s southern vote. This time, he addressed the fact that the region’s economy was no longer providing a comfortable life for lots of people, the young in particular. Labour came a close second in many seats, rather than winning them, but some commentators saw this as an ominous sign for the Tories. They pointed out that the southern electorate was changing: left-leaning young people priced out of London were moving into previously conservative seaside and commuter towns.
Labour’s less effective 2019 election campaign meant that the next stage in Corbynism’s southern advance never happened. Seats that the 2017 election seemed to have turned into marginals, such as Crawley and Watford, now have bigger Tory majorities again. But the exodus from London is continuing, and may be accelerated by the pandemic. The impregnably Tory south that frustrated the young Starmer is smaller than it was. Already, Labour MPs represent once quintessentially Conservative places such as Hove and Canterbury.
Two big new problems facing the government could erode its southern ascendancy further. The damage done to the public finances by the pandemic is going to be hard to repair without tax increases on the wealthiest. A possible new property tax has reportedly been devised by the Treasury, and is making some of the Tory press nervous. The Daily Mail recently warned that it could create “losers in the south, where property prices are higher”.
Meanwhile, all the new Tory MPs further north mean that the party can no longer favour the south as much as before. The Conservatives now represent places that have been the victims of Britain’s long southward drift, as well as places that have been its beneficiaries.
Next month, the budget may begin to show us how the Tories hope to resolve these dilemmas – or that the task is beyond them. But the other parties shouldn’t simply wait for the tensions between the needs of the different Tory regions to paralyse the government. If you wait for the contradictions within Conservatism to become fatal, you can wait a long time.
As long as the Tories represent most of the south, the old towns and rural expanses where, like it or not, so much of England’s sense of itself resides, they will feel to many voters like the country’s natural party of government. Meanwhile Labour – with its more urban, northern, and Scottish and Welsh roots – will feel too foreign. And no amount of posing by Starmer in front of flags and war memorials will change that.