Abstract
The 2019 General Election was won in Britain’s towns. The Labour Party lost seats to the Conservatives in Leave-voting constituencies it had held for a lifetime, sometimes dating back to mass franchise – like Bassetlaw (1935), Rother Valley (1918), Wrexham (1935) and Bishop Auckland (1918). The ‘red wall’ crumbled, leaving Boris Johnson with a commanding parliamentary majority and the Conservatives with a new electoral coalition.
These trends marked a continuation of the deepening geographical divide in British electoral politics – between places that have prospered in a globalised knowledge economy – predominantly major cities – and those on the periphery, towns and rural areas. This pattern had become sharply evident in the EU referendum and 2017 General Election. It is the product of a combination of divergence in the demographic profiles of places on the core and periphery, and changes in voting behaviours at the individual level, amplifying the magnitude of the electoral shock.
Changes affecting both people and places are driving electoral change. As the UK’s ‘core’ cities (places like London, Bristol, Cardiff and Manchester) have become younger, more ethnically diverse and home to a growing population of professionals and graduates, many smaller towns have aged and seen a smaller contraction of their population employed in routine and manual occupations (the traditional working class). At the same time, age and education have become stronger predictors of political values and vote choice for individuals. Together, these trends have given rise to a significant transformation of the electoral geography of England and Wales (with the ascendance of the SNP having redrawn Scotland’s electoral map, too).
In the aftermath of the 2019 election, the pivotal role of Leave-voting English towns in handing a large parliamentary majority to the Conservatives was widely heralded. The Prime Minister vowed that the government would ‘repay the trust’ that had been put in it by its new supporters. This political commitment to towns interpreted the Brexit vote as a demand for change – building on the government’s pre-election commitment to the £3.6 billion Towns Fund supporting 100 town deals (targeted investments in infrastructure, skills and culture) and a programme of high street regeneration. The government’s call for ‘levelling up’ seemingly treats the economic and cultural roots of Brexit as inseparable – fusing voters’ desire to ‘Get Brexit Done’ with the need to address regional inequalities.
Why has the ‘towns’ frame become so influential in accounts of the election? After all, many of the social and economic forces driving this electoral change have been much discussed by political scientists – not least trends of class dealignment, the changing relationship between education and voting behaviour, and the emergence of Brexit as a focus of political identities and attitudes. Place seems to have taken centre stage in attempts to understand the election and the political mandate it delivered.
As Co-Founder of the Centre for Towns think tank I am hardly an independent observer, but it is possible to identify a number of factors that arguably have contributed to the increased attention to towns.
Firstly, the raw political calculus that most seats that started the 2019 campaign as marginal were towns, and also typically Leave-voting, meant that these were prime targets for the Conservatives’ campaign on the issue of delivering Brexit. Focusing on ‘towns’ served as a proxy for the new bellwether constituencies that were integral to either party securing a parliamentary majority.
Secondly, there is mounting evidence of significant geographical inequalities in many aspects of social and economic life in Britain. These are not only observed with respect to regional productivity (often the focus of concern), but also in areas of public policy ranging from social mobility to opioid deaths to failing schools to charity sector activities to foreign direct investment to digital connectivity to bus cuts to local government spending.
From a public policy perspective, many – though not all – towns are struggling when evaluated against critical indicators. This is not to say that cities do not also face profound challenges, but policymakers have until recently, had a blind spot as a result of their focus on city-led models of economic growth. That focus was an understandable response to the struggles of many regional cities in the 1980s and 1990s, but there has since been a relative disregard for how outlying towns and areas are impacted by an agglomeration based model.
To fulfil its ambitious promises on levelling up, the Johnson premiership will have to be laser-focused on delivery. With the next general election due to be held in May 2024, the time scale will be extremely tight for realising material improvements in the condition of towns that are perceptible to voters. The underlying causes of decline in many towns stretch back decades. Turning things around will be neither a quick nor easy task for even the most capable government.
Brexit adds a further element of uncertainty, both in the potential for negotiations to distract the government from its domestic agenda, and if the terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU (and trade deals eventually struck with other countries) impact on the budgetary position of the government and its room to manoeuvre. Whether the levelling up agenda delivers a fundamental transformation of the geographical inequalities present in the UK today remains to be seen.
Footnotes
Will Jennings is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Southampton and co-founder of the Centre for Towns.