Regular readers of my blog know that my political geography commentaries are peppered with references to food – the university town jam doughnut and the family-sized lasagne dish near the source of the River Thames. This week I’m focussing on a fruit-hungry yellow ghost-slaying hero – Pac-Man. In recent years the Lib Dems have steadily built up a power-base in the Home Counties that amounts to a Pac-Man shape crescent set to eat London from a westerly direction. This includes several district councils that the party mostly or exclusively controls – Watford, Three Rivers, Spelthorne, Mole Valley, St Albans, Hart – and a number of Westminster constituencies it has won or are ultra-marginal – Kingston, Twickenham, Richmond, Guildford, Esher & Walton, Chesham & Amersham, Carshalton & Wallington. We’re pushing towards what academics have called a ‘Yellow Halo’ and we haven’t finished yet.
Winning Chesham & Amersham may prove to be a watershed, response on the doorstep included many reasons for dissatisfaction – long term neglect, a sense that the government is paying too much attention to the Red Wall, mistrust of Boris Johnson, continuing recognition that austerity isn’t over and local services are mediocre, even where the houses are worth £500,000 or more. This could snowball in the coming years as commuters endure deteriorating rail services as TfL and out-of-town rail franchises suffer from unfavourable funding settlements. Grievances about underinvestment and being taken for granted will only magnify.
A sophisticated electorate
Our increasing success in these areas around or just outside the M25 has led the party to be characterised as one that represents Metroland, though the result in North Shropshire next month might show we’re much more than that. It’s certainly the case that socio-economic demographics, a high number of graduates and a growing number of ethnic minority voters, mean that many in the commuter belt around London feel instinctively comfortable voting Lib Dem, in the way that solidly blue collar areas (such as my home town of Dartford) do not. This point was made by Dominic Grieve when comparing Chesham & Amersham with Hartlepool, we speak the language of voters across the Home Counties, even if breaking the Blue Wall outside the M25 takes a lot of work (see my previous blogs about how happy certain Conservative voters are about the Green Belt, low taxes and stratospheric house prices).
Hart to Haärt – the parallels with Germany
Voters around the Home Counties, especially in seats with rural hinterland are content to return Conservative MPs but are open to persuasion. This is possibly down to an increasing post-materialist sensibility. The first meaningful manifestation of this was in West Germany during the 1980s with the rise of the Greens helmed by Petra Kelly. This proved to be a head scratcher to political scientists as it represented a departure from the traditional socio economic or occupation-based labour vs capital arm wrestle. West Germans had become rich enough for long enough to look for something else from the political class than just more money, they started to demand a better environment and quality of life improvements instead. It is this post-materialism and a quality of life focus that enables the Lib Dems to have a stake of power in Hart (in coalition with localists), part of the consultancy belt of North Hampshire. Hart is a pretty special place, it has the lowest level of deprivation out of 326 districts in England, on the face of it the Conservatives should be rock solid in Hart, but they lost of control in 2012 and haven’t been back in power since. There are extreme levels of affluence across the Home Counties, in Surrey and Buckinghamshire in particular, but this doesn’t mean the Tories have an unshakeable grip, like Labour has over coal and steel communities.
Soft Tories – their power fatigue
While Labour manages to compete in a few hotspots here and there, the Home Counties at council-level are generally a three-way toss up between Conservatives, Lib Dems and independents/localists. The intensification of competition since 2019 has exposed weaknesses in the Conservatives where they have been long-term incumbents, under pressure they have started to buckle with infighting, defections and vote share collapses. The most eye-catching examples of this are Spelthorne, Tunbridge Wells and Waverley boroughs.
Attitudes towards holding power divide the left and the right. Progressives want power as a means to an end, making a difference, conservatives are content to hold power as an end of itself, keep the others out, they have dangerous notions of fairness, equality and human rights – we can’t have that! That being the case it must take a special level of dysfunction within the Conservative party to see local groups disintegrate – this is either down to personality clashes or a recognition that there is no longer a place for centre-right free-marketeers like Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Philip Hammond or Rory Stewart.
The sudden reverse in Spelthorne is quite something, this was a majority Conservative council since it was configured as a borough in 1973 up until last summer. As recently as 2015 the Conservatives won 31 out of 35 seats, in 2019 a majority of 31 slumped to just seven, with the Lib Dems gaining five seats. Six Conservatives quit in the summer of 2020 and formed the United Spelthorne Group amid allegations of bullying within the local Conservative group. Spelthorne Borough is now led by Lib Dem councillor Lawrence Nichols thanks to Green Party and Independent Spelthorne support – bearing in mind the Borough’s electoral history this is one of the most improbable (but welcome) local government stories this century.
Tunbridge Wells was also Conservative for all this century until May. The borough contains some very well-heeled picture postcard villages such as Lamberhurst and Goudhurst, but the natives are restless – this is one of a few examples where Tory misrule is being punished severely at the ballot box. The Tunbridge Wells Conservative group has a reputation for being ineffective, and perhaps here lies the opportunity across the shires – local people are well off but that means they’re also demanding. They expect better, in the last two elections the Conservatives have lost 19 councillors in Tunbridge Wells, the Lib Dems group and the localist Tunbridge Wells Alliance have the bit between the teeth and it would be no surprise to see the NOC Conservative administration turfed out next year.
South West Surrey constituency was not regarded as a target seat for the Lib Dems at the last election, but Paul Follows leapt from fourth to second in 2019, increasing our vote total from 6,000 to 23,000. I get the feeling that Paul is hugely under-the-radar within the party because his local group also overturned Conservative dominance in Waverley Borough from scratch. Waverley contains the attractive small towns of Godalming, Farnham and Haslemere, however the local Conservatives, known for infighting, lost 30 seats in 2019, handing power to a Lib Dem-Farnham Residents coalition. The Lib Dems won no seats in 2015, so again this amounts to a political earthquake. In typical low-key fashion Paul Follows took over leadership of the council in April, as part of the power-sharing deal with the Farnham localists.
The future – taking Paddy’s path
In 2019 remainer discontent across the South was the dog that didn’t bark, the Conservatives lost St Albans and Putney – they were expecting to lose a lot more. The last election presents a strategic quandary for the Lib Dems, all of a sudden we picked up a substantial vote share in seats we’d never won or were competitive in before. What to make of this? Could this be part of a welcome trend or just a Brexit blip? Should we be chasing seats in the South West we’ve won before instead? If we are going to win big in Metroland it’s time to take a leaf out of Paddy Ashdown’s book. He returned to the UK from Geneva in the late ‘70s, and said to his local party, “Give me three shots at this seat, I will work it tirelessly, I will squeeze the Labour vote in Yeovil, I won’t expect any help from outside, I will raise community issues every week and eventually enough people will believe we can win.” It didn’t go to plan, Paddy didn’t win it in three, he won it in two. Adopting this relentless and focussed approach could pay off in say Wantage, or Hitchin & Harpenden, where we polled over 20,000 – it’s no longer fanciful to suggest a Lib Dem victory, we’ve got to the tipping point where knocking more holes in the Blue Wall is possible if we play our cards right.
My other geography-themed blogs can be found here – this blog explores rural politics and how the rural agenda is different from towns and cities:
This blog notes how several yellow clusters are gaining in size and are close to merging, if this continues we’ll have a Yellow Wall across Avon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire:
returnoftheliberal 