Does David Cameron understand how much he needs the north?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/may/11/davidcameron-edmiliband

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Writing on Tuesday, Patrick Wintour, the Guardian's Political Editor gave a useful summary of the importance of 'Essex men and women', declaring that they represent:

The kind of working class aspirational voter that by legend served up three terms for Margaret Thatcher and then three more for Tony Blair.

Little wonder therefore that in the same day this week, the people of Essex were subjected to not one, not two, but all three of the UK's main party leaders.

For Ed Miliband it was a trip to Harlow, scene of a Labour gain in last week's local council elections, to listen to the voters and declare that in the face of unpopular Government policies, "there is another way for Essex." Cheesy though it sounds, there is a serious point. One look at the political map of the UK following the 2010 General Election clearly shows why Labour found itself back in opposition. Save the island of red in London, the party remains confined largely to northern England with just the odd speck of red in the south. Connecting with 'Essex voters', for Miliband, is essential if he is to win the keys to Number Ten.

As the founder of the progressive blog Left Foot Forward and now associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, Will Straw noted on Sunday:

The national significance of local election results is usually viewed through the lens of how well Labour did in the south. This is, of course, absolutely right if the exam question is 'Can Labour win an overall majority?

For Miliband, tours of the south make sense.

What of Clegg and Cameron, however? After a dreadful night for both their parties at the polls last week, it was a week in which they experienced their first 'relaunch', a tell-tale sign that things are not going well. Gordon Brown had many 'relaunches' during his three years as Prime Minister, none of which were successful.

Where did C&C choose to hold theirs? At a tractor making factory in Basildon. Two years after the post-election Rose Garden fest, they reappeared with a backdrop of workers rather than flowers, albeit appropriately clad in blue and yellow uniforms. It appeared to be the kind of place, full of hard working people that our Prime Minister and his deputy are at pains to argue they are standing up for. The choreography was deft, and although they didn't have anything new to say both were on message: Nick and Dave, buddies in a hard but shared task. Yet for all the imagery, one wonders who has been advising them. Why, on a day when they had to show they were listening and learning, did they stay in the south and not come than north? Research I have undertaken shows incontrovertibly that an appearance in Bolton, Blackpool, Burnley, Bury or Bradford would have been far wiser than Basildon, given the hole that they are in.

Using the simple process of adding up the total votes for each party, by ward, in northern constituencies which had local elections, it is clear that the Conservatives would have lost almost a quarter of all their northern seats had last Thursday been a general election. The Lib Dems would have lost just over a quarter - three of their 11 northern seats. The following would all have been looking for new jobs and Labour successors would have taken their seats:

Jake Berry MP (Conservative, Rossendale and Darwen) Kris Hopkins MP (Conservative, Keighley) David Nuttall MP (Conservative, Bury North) Craig Whittaker MP (Conservative, Calder Valley) John Stevenson MP (Conservative, Carlisle) Jason McCartney MP (Conservative, Colne Valley) Simon Reevell MP (Conservative, Dewsbury) Alec Shelbrooke MP (Conservative, Elmet and Rothwell) Stuart Andrew MP (Conservative, Pudsey) Andrew Stephenson MP (Conservative, Pendle) David Mowat MP (Conservative, Warrington South) Esther McVery MP (Conservative, Wirral West) David Ward MP (Lib Dem, Bradford East) Gordon Birtwistle MP (Lib Dem, Burnley) John Leech MP (Lib Dem, Manchester Withington)

Of course trying to make judgements about general election results based on local polls with low turnouts is hazardous and needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. But the Conservatives in particular have hit the buffers in the north; there is no sign of progress towards those few extra seats the party needs to gain an outright majority. Quite the opposite.

Look at recentYouGov polling: just 17% of northerners approve of the Government's record, compared with 71% who disapprove. What a mountain to climb.

Nick Clegg did at least appear to recognise the fix, telling the audience at the tractor factory that:

It's not lost on me that where our two parties got a particular beating last week was in Wales, Scotland and the large cities of the north. I take one very important lesson from this – we must redouble our efforts as a Coalition Government to govern for the whole country.

Arguing that for too long the north has relied too heavily on Whitehall subsidies he continued:

That economic model basically relied on Government sucking up to the City of London, basically letting the banks get away with blue murder

They generated huge pots of tax revenue and then that tax revenue was transported up the M1 to public subsidy in other parts of the country. The merry-go round was fine as long as it kept going round and round. (But) it has stopped.

The words sound good, but from the content of this week's Queens Speech it ishard to see where the Government's big idea for rebalancing the economy is coming from.

Writing this week, Reuters' Senior Market Analyst, John Kemp observed:

While the leaders of Britain's coalition government insist "we are all in this together", austerity is being felt and viewed very differently across the country, re-opening the big north-south divide which characterised the economy and politics in the 1980s.

Broadly the country is again dividing into the 'Two Nations' that was part-title of a novel written by Benjamin Disraeli in the 1840s, when he was a young and radical politician, before he went on to become prime minister in the 1860s and 1870s ("Sybil, or the Two Nations", 1845). But rather than splitting by class, as in Disraeli's novel, the country is dividing along a regional fault line that pits prosperous and coalition-supporting south-east England against the increasingly disaffected Midlands and north of England, Wales and Scotland.

Whichever party can claim to be able to straddle the north/south divide will win the keys to Downing Street. After last week's results across northern England, David Cameron in particular should be sleeping less comfortably in his bed. If his backbenchers begin to sense his northern problem, things will become far more acute for him than they are already. As Laura McAllister, Professor of Government at Liverpool University has this week warned:

He's probably an interim Conservative leader. I don't think he's somebody who will lead them to winning a new majority and [the council] results underline this.

What do you think? How vital do you think Northern England will be to deciding who makes it to Number 10 at the next general election?

Ed Jacobs is a political consultant at the Leeds-based Public Affairs Company and devolution correspondent for the centre-left political and policy blog, Left Foot Forward.