Britain | Politics

Thinking at the margin

In the four sorts of constituency that will decide the election, the Conservatives face an uphill struggle

|BEESTON, LOWESTOFT, NORWICH AND PUDSEY

PUDSEY feels like the sort of place where they should weigh the Conservative Party votes, not count them. On a sunny weekday morning its hilly suburban streets are quiet, apart from builders working on extensions and retirees pottering about their gardens. Many who live here commute into Leeds, working in the city’s booming financial-services sector.

Yet as he makes his way from door to door, Jamie Hanley, the Labour Party candidate, is stopped repeatedly by well-wishers. “The Tories have done nowt for anybody,” shoots back an old lady, suddenly defensive, when asked why she supports him. “People often say they like me but prefer Labour nationally,” acknowledges Stuart Andrew, the Tory who has served as MP for this constituency for the past five years. A moderate, local man, the fact that he does not have this middle-class corner of Yorkshire in the bag is a sign of the Conservatives’ weakness in the north of England—itself one of the reasons why Britain’s upcoming election is so hard for the Tories to win.

Viewed nationally, the governing Tories seem set fair for success. The economy grew by 2.6% last year. The employment rate has never been higher. David Cameron is easily the most popular party leader. The prospect of a Labour government propped up by the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) is starting to come up on the doorsteps, Labour candidates report. If the election were decided only by political physics—big, national forces and issues—Mr Cameron would be safe.

Yet in the roughly 100 seats that will decide the election, including Pudsey, local difficulties impinge. Visiting some of these places makes it clear that these factors—regional social memory, demography, an uneven economic recovery and an unbalanced ground war—tilt the balance back towards Labour, making the result fiendishly hard to predict. “I usually have a gut feeling before an election,” says Mr Andrew: “But not this time.”

The arithmetic is more complicated than in the past. Britain is almost certainly heading for another hung parliament, in which the main governing party will rely on others to survive. What matters is not so much which party, the Conservatives or Labour, wins the most seats, but which one can persuade a majority of MPs (in practice around 320) to support it in budgets and votes of confidence.

What, then, would it take for Mr Cameron to remain prime minister? The Conservatives have about 220 safe seats (so secure they do not even appear on Labour’s ambitious target list). They can probably rely on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, which stands candidates in Northern Ireland, and the right-wing UK Independence Party. That adds another ten seats. Tory strategists privately admit that they would almost certainly have to do another deal with the centrist Liberal Democrats to retain power. That adds some 30 seats (either safely Lib Dem or ones where the main challenger is Conservative) to the pro-Cameron coalition, taking the total number to 260. By contrast, the number of seats almost certain to be occupied by anti-Cameron MPs—either Labour ones or MPs from other left-wing parties like the Scottish National Party—is around 280.

Whether Mr Cameron keeps the keys to 10 Downing Street thus depends on what happens in the 100 marginal Conservative and Liberal Democrat seats that Labour wants to grab. If Labour takes more than about 40, Mr Miliband will probably become prime minister. If not, Mr Cameron will survive. Those constituencies, in short, will decide the election.

The seats in question include some of the wealthiest parts of Britain and some of the poorest; some of Britain’s most ethnically diverse areas and some of its most white. They can be roughly divided into four sorts (see map). All illustrate the Conservatives’ local difficulties.

Narrowly held Tory seats in the north and Wales make up the first category. These are prosperous towns like Pudsey that would be Conservative strongholds were they in southern England. Yet northerners’ deep-rooted alienation from the party—partly a product of that region’s industrial decline, including under Margaret Thatcher—make such places marginal.

The Conservatives’ “brand problem” weighs the party down elsewhere, too. The second group of marginals is composed of liberal urban seats: prosperous, diverse, mostly in the south and with lots of university graduates. The Tories’ lack of support among ethnic-minority voters could push some of these constituencies, especially in London, into Labour hands. Some, like Norwich South, are currently held by the Lib Dems. A bit of their coalition partners’ toxicity has rubbed off. In Norwich’s “golden triangle”, a bohemian area popular with students, the streets bristle with Labour signs. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” marvels Patricia Hollis, a Labour former head of the city’s council.

Another problem for the Tories is that the economic recovery has been uneven and, in some areas, absent. This is especially true of the third sort of swing seat: post-industrial bits of southern England. These are the reverse of places like Pudsey: struggling enclaves in a culturally Tory region. One is Lowestoft, a depressed fishing port in Waveney. The Conservatives recently put up a hoarding in the town hailing the recovery, just as two large employers, an engineering firm and a home improvement store, announced closures. “It was ridiculous,” harrumphs Bob Blizzard, the Labour candidate, as he bounds around a newly built estate canvassing voters. Many turn out to be Tory-Labour swing voters who cannot even remember how they voted in 2010. They warm to his well-honed patter about local job losses.

Broxtowe, surely, is winnable for the Conservatives. It is typical of the fourth and final category of marginal: Midlands suburbia. Neither one end of the country nor another, left nor right, rich nor poor, this is Britain’s Ohio. The recovery is palpable here (“Britain seems to be doing well compared with the rest of Europe”, asserts a stallholder selling handbags in Beeston, part of Broxtowe). And Anna Soubry, the local MP, is the sort of liberal-minded, upbeat type who refutes voters’ negative perceptions of her party. Yet polling by Lord Ashcroft, a Tory peer, last summer put her nine points behind her Labour opponent.

One explanation is Labour’s advantage, here as in other marginals, in the ground war. The opposition party is bigger and younger than the Conservatives, and has an almost cultish faith in local campaigning. Even Ms Soubry admits that it has the more machine-like of the two campaigns—in one part of Broxtowe it claims to have put up 800 posters to the Conservatives’ two. That same disparity is true across the country: in twenty marginals polled by Lord Ashcroft in the past month, 53% of voters said they had heard from the Tories, compared with 68% from Labour.

None of this means that the Conservatives will not be able to form a government. It does, however, mean they must run an extremely strong national campaign. Some in the party fret that things are not going as well as they had hoped: Mr Cameron has slightly undermined his economic case by issuing unfunded spending pledges and Mr Miliband’s unpopularity has not been as much of a drag on Labour as had been expected. When the Tories are weak locally, they cannot afford not to be strong nationally.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Thinking at the margin"

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