‘Better the devil you know’: two towns that refused to ride with Labour

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/15/labour-carlisle-stroud-tory-marginals-ed-miliband

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Laid out in a long black frame propped in the shop window of the Stroud Labour party office, for all the world like the body at a wake, is an epitaph for an election campaign.

“Thank you,” says the text, “to all our candidates. To those who wrote leaflets, stuffed envelopes, knocked on doors … Who braved bad weather, fierce dogs, huge hills. Who answered phones, replied to letters, who delivered and delivered and delivered. Who made donations, large or small, in cash or kind. And to all who voted Labour – thank you.”

250 miles north, there is no such message in the cracked window of the equally deserted shop that was the HQ of the Carlisle Labour campaign. Just a big smiling photo of the losing candidate, single mother-of-three Lee Sherriff, and, inside, a stray leaflet: Vote Labour. But not enough people did.

Carlisle, a handsome, rugged, rough-hewn place 10 miles from the Scottish border, and Stroud, an artsy but still pleasingly down-to-earth former mill town in the southern Cotswolds, are two different towns in two different parts of Britain.

What they have in common is that they both turned blue in 2010 and that, at numbers 15 and 16 on Labour’s list of most winnable seats, they were key marginals this time round: Carlisle, with a Tory majority of just 853, would fall on a 1% national swing, Labour reckoned, and Stroud on 1.1%.

Neither, of course, did. Instead, the Tory incumbent in Stroud, ex-farmer Neil Carmichael, nearly quadrupled his majority. His veteran opponent David Drew, Stroud’s first Labour MP for 52 years in 1997 and finally ousted by Carmichael five years ago, has quit active politics.

At the other end of the country, the Tory MP for Carlisle, local solicitor John Stevenson, who surprised even himself in 2010 by capturing a seat that had been resolutely red since 1964, saw his lead more than treble, to 2,700. Sherriff is taking a few days off, but few think she will run again. So what happened?

Both Labour candidates, their camps insist, could not have done more. Drew, said Geoff Wheeler, a re-elected member of the Labour group that runs Stroud district council in a rainbow coalition, was “a very strong, very credible candidate, with a very strong local background. He was the bookies’ and pollsters’ favourite”.

Mike Boaden, Sherriff’s agent and Labour’s losing candidate in Carlisle in 2010, said she was “an exceptional candidate. New, massive integrity, incredibly hard-working, really connecting. And we ran a good, organised campaign – we spoke to more voters than ever before”.

Nor did local issues come into it. “Planning is the big thing round here,” said Sharon Sugars, vice-chairwoman of the Stroud Conservative association, in the kitchen of the handsome house overlooking the Severn estuary that served as election-day HQ for Carmichael’s campaign.

Sugars said: “It’s where the developers are going next. But it didn’t come up on the doorstep. For me, this election was about national issues. The economy was key. What I got, strongly, was voters who understood that even if cuts hurt some people, Conservatives are about creating the conditions for everyone to do well. That it’s tough love, but necessary; we can’t expect something for nothing anymore. People just got that.”

That also rang true to Stevenson, in an upstairs meeting room in the Carlisle Conservatives’ offices. The MP felt he had benefited from “an incumbency effect, definitely: I live and work here. In a community like this I’m in the paper, on TV and radio, in the way a big-city MP rarely is.”

Boundary changes since 2010, too, had helped, he reckoned, bringing in more of the rural population and worth perhaps an extra 1,000-odd votes (further changes could increase that number five or six-fold, making Carlisle a very safe Conservative seat indeed).

“But no, on the doorstep this was about the economy – and in the later stages Scotland,” Stevenson said. “This never felt like a ‘change’ election to me. Except for Scotland, it felt like a continuity election. It’s like in life, if you have a big decision to make and you’re not sure, what do you do? You stay with the status quo.”

Looking at the way the votes swung, what happened on 7 May in Stroud and Carlisle – and, indeed, in many other Labour targets – was markedly similar: the Tory vote up by around 5%, and the Labour vote flat (in Carlisle), or down by around 1% (in Stroud). Plus, in both seats, the Liberal Democrats imploded, collapsing by 12 or 13%, and Ukip soared (up by 6% in Stroud, and 10% in Carlisle).

“Those Tory votes had to come from somewhere,” said Wheeler, a mild-mannered research physicist, in Stroud. “It’s too early to say for sure, but it may well be that here and in other places, much of the lost Lib Dem vote went Conservative – and while the Conservative Ukip vote reverted to the Conservatives, the Labour Ukip vote stayed Ukip.”

That was Stevenson’s analysis in Carlisle, too. Fiona Mills, the poised and self-assured NHS accountant who was Ukip’s candidate, said she was “actually expecting more than 12.4%. I’d have been up at around 20% if it wasn’t for tactical voting. I had a lot of Tories, a lot, saying they’d have have voted for me but for the threat of a Labour–SNP alliance.”

Mills said she does not have the resources to do a proper study, but her guess is that “perhaps 65% of our support – maybe 3,400 votes – came from former Labour voters. There are lots of Labour people here who wouldn’t dream of ever voting Conservative, but will happily support Ukip.”

Why? Because, said Mills: “They just sat down and thought, what has Labour actually ever done for me? We promised people on the minimum wage would pay no tax, an immigration system that’s fair to everyone – policies that would make a difference. And I listened. A lot of people told me that: Labour talked at them; I listened.”

Sitting in the window of the Bar Solo opposite Carlisle station, sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with former Labour health minister Nye Bevan’s cheery description of Conservatives as “lower than vermin”, the one-time Labour mayor of Carlisle, Craig Johnston, confessed to feeling bereft.

He said he understood why Labour voters might switch to Ukip. “If you haven’t got a job and you’ve no chance of getting one, if you’re fed a constant drip, drip of ‘It’s all foreigners’ fault’ and ‘Look at all the benefit scroungers’ … I don’t know. People don’t tend to see poverty as the fault of any system these days. They see it as self-inflicted.”

On the streets of Stroud and Carlisle, though, it was fairly clear it was not defectors to Ukip who cost Labour the election. “Simple: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” said Lynda Hooley on Carlisle’s Green Market, explaining her Conservative vote. “I don’t agree with them on everything – they have to be fairer. But it was a conscious choice. I just couldn’t trust Labour.”

In Stroud, Elizabeth Reed, a nurse who has voted both Lib Dem and Labour, went blue for the first time last week. “I just wasn’t comfortable with Labour on the economy,” she said. “I felt in safe hands with Gordon Brown. But not this time. We all took a hit, but we have to see it through. It was just too soon to take a risk.”

Graham Say, a staunch Labour supporter – a brief Lib Dem flirtation aside – who works for the district council, said the result was “devastating nationally. Although Neil Carmichael is a good constituency MP”.

Say said: “But I don’t think it was Labour who lost it. It was more that Cameron was just very successful in convincing people the economy was on track, that we had to stick with it. And you know, most people are in favour of reducing welfare where it’s not deserved, and do think there’s an immigration problem. Britain’s changed.”

So the next few years will not be easy, agreed Mike Boaden in Carlisle. “In the end,” he said, “it was about not wanting to take a risk on change. Labour didn’t connect into people’s lives; didn’t see what they really wanted. We made sound promises but we weren’t heard. We weren’t believed.”