Labour’s southern comfort: the shifts since 1997
I remember the evening of the 1997 election well. I was at a drinks party hosted by Punter Southall, a well-known firm of consulting actuaries. Pension lawyers always like to be fed and watered, and Punter Southall’s events were always excellent.
As a bit of fun, they had a big board up where you could guess at the outcome. The board only went up to a Labour majority of 150. Many entries were at that far side. In the end, of course, Labour beat even that tally, getting a majority of 179 and a total of 418 seats.
Time moves on, and 27 years later Punter Southall is now called XPS. They’re still hosting drinks parties, and I am down to attend their bash this coming Thursday (pension scheme trustees also like to be fed and watered and the quality of XPS’s events has not diminished with the name change). There won’t be an election board, however, because Rishi Sunak decided to hold an election in July. Labour got a majority of 174 and 411 seats.
Things can only get better, they sang in 1997, but to all intents and purposes things in 1997 and 2024 were substantially the same for Labour. Which is handy, because we can do some interesting comparisons.
How has Labour’s majority shifted?
The simplest way to look at this is to look by region. Here are the two sets of results.
There are two separate stories here. First, there’s the story of how constituencies have shifted by number between areas. Then there’s the story of how Labour have moved.
Parliament has become considerably more southern since 1997. Scotland and Wales were both down-weighted following devolution (the same did not happen for Northern Ireland). They had previously been overweighted to allow their voices to be heard more effectively, so this down-weighting to the electoral mean was justifiable. Alongside this, however, we also saw internal demographic movement. As a result, the South East, the South West and the East now have 20 more seats than they had in 1997, even as Parliament has shrunk by 9 seats.
Labour have followed this. They have 26 fewer seats in Scotland and Wales than they had in 1997. Some reduction was inevitable: they had more Welsh seats in 1997 than now exist.
This is more than compensated for by their performance in the south of England. They have picked up 14 more seats in the South East than they had in 1997, their previous highwater mark. They have 9 more seats in the South West and 5 more seats in the East than they had in 1997.
The astute will have worked out that means that Labour performed relatively less well in the rest of England in 2024 than they did in 1997. And so they did. It’s most noticeable in the West Midlands, where they won five fewer seats in 2024 than in 1997, and in Yorkshire & The Humber, where they fell short of their 1997 mark by four seats.
Labour’s voices
This will affect how Labour hears the country. Fully a third of all Labour MPs now come from London, the East of England, the South East or the South West. Add in the West and East Midlands, and you have more than half of the Parliamentary Labour Party. This is going to give Labour an unfamiliar southern tilt.
This can already be seen at Cabinet level. In 1997, Tony Blair’s first Cabinet included six Scottish MPs and as well as the Welsh Secretary the Attorney General, who attended Cabinet, represented a Welsh seat.
Now, the only Scottish MP to sit in Cabinet is the Secretary of State for Scotland. The only Welsh MP to sit in Cabinet is the Secretary of State for Wales. There are four London MPs, including the Prime Minister.
It is a little surprising that this shift has gone more or less unremarked. The election night goggling at Labour winning seats like Bury St Edmunds & Stowmarket and Buckingham & Bletchley has given way to pipe-smoking reflections on the government’s likely priorities. Perhaps a London-centric media does not notice that the Labour party is being shaped in its own image.
It’s not as though the 1997 incarnation of Labour was seen as an outcrop of horny-handed proletarianism. Its metropolitan tone often grated even in the balmier economic era that then prevailed.
And now Labour’s base has shifted far further in the direction of the southern middle classes. Can the government find the right tone to represent the whole country? Goodwill is in short supply. So it will need to if it is to prevail.