Keir Starmer’s recent “Plan for Change” speech signals Labour’s nervousness about securing a second term. Lawrence McKay argues that the electoral challenge Labour faces is the mirror image of that faced by Boris Johnson after 2019, having to win-over voters in middle-class, suburban and rural seats rather than in the “Red-Wall”.
After the messy start to Labour’s term of office, Downing Street sources talk of the need to “get clearer on who exactly we want to vote for us in the next election and start being ruthless about delivery for those people, in the places where they live”. This very much sounds like a Labour government focused on retaining its marginals and potentially, testing the loyalty of core seats in the process, much as Blair in 2001 repeated his landslide but with a drop in turnout especially of the “core vote”. While analysis of electoral swings has been abundant, far less has been said about the kinds of seats Labour must hold to achieve a historic second term: the seats that will be obsessing Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and Labour HQ. What kinds of areas makeup these seats, and is Labour’s policy agenda – revised in Starmer’s recent “Plan For Change” speech – geared to appeal to them?
To understand the kind of areas that make up Labour-held marginals, I combine constituency election results with an official classification of neighbourhoods based on the most recent data: the 2021 census. The data, which comes from the Office of National Statistics, is widely used in policy-making and academic research. It classifies Output Areas (small neighbourhoods of less than 250 households) into eight “supergroup” categories, based on similarities across 60 different variables: age profile, population density, ethnicity, country of birth and religion, marital status, presence of dependents, type of property, housing tenure and under/over occupancy, qualifications, car ownership, employment sector and part-time/full-time status, and unemployment.
Eight “supergroup” clusters emerge from this analysis: for the sake of space I briefly summarise the full pen portraits available here.
We see a near total lack of Multicultural and Educated Urbanites in marginals, despite them being the largest group in the safest seats.
Who are the key voters?
The figure below plots the proportion of adults in each “supergroup” against the Labour margin of victory at the 2024 general election (where smaller = more marginal). Three “supergroups” stand out for their presence in marginal seats: Retired Professionals (RP), Suburban and Peri-Urbanites (SPU), and Baseline UK. While Baseline UK is well-represented across the board, RP and SPU groups are much more common in marginals than Labour’s safe seats. On the other hand, we see a near total lack of Multicultural and Educated Urbanites in marginals, despite them being the largest group in the safest seats. Two more groups, Ethnically Diverse Suburban Professionals and Semi and Unskilled Workforce, have a weaker, but still significant presence. The same applies to Low-Skilled Migrant and Student Communities, although this final group is larger in safe seats.
This begins to build a picture of the kinds of places that may be decisive at the next election. We can go further by picking out some specific examples of battlegrounds: constituencies that have a high representation of the most electorally influential groups, and are electorally decisive, ranked from the 50thto 100th smallest Labour majorities. This considers the fact that, having wok a working majority of 181 at the last general election, Labour can afford net losses of up to 91 seats in England and Wales. Even with a Scotland “wipe-out”, losing all 37 seats, limiting net losses in E&W to 54 or less would be sufficient. In the table below, I pick out the five constituencies with the largest share of Retired Professionals and Suburban/Peri-Urbanites that fall into this group of electorally decisive marginals.
* Note: seats here other than Amber Valley saw some degreeof change to boundaries in 2024.
In some cases, such as Hexham, Congleton and South Norfolk, these marginals were once true-blue territory while others are classic bellwethers (Stafford and Amber Valley). Either way, no part of their electoral history suggests that loyalty to Labour is likely.
These middle-class, suburban and rural seats may have received mixed signals from the government’s choices to date.
Labour’s next electoral challenge
The electoral challenge is the mirror image of that faced by Boris Johnson after 2019, where the goal was to retain less affluent and more urban seats than core Tory areas, often termed “Red Wall”. Instead, Labour’s marginals are more “middle England” (and indeed “middle Wales”) than Labour heartlands. Given the types of seats identified, is Starmer’s refreshed policy agenda well-tooled to hold them?
In many respects, these middle-class, suburban and rural seats may have received mixed signals from the government’s choices to date. Some are positive: for example, rural car-owners had far more reason to applaud the Budget, which hiked bus and train fares while pouring billions into a fuel duty freeze, than urban users of buses and trains. Others are fairly neutral: an ambitious drive on housebuilding and policing (emphasised in the Plan For Change) has less tangible benefit for these seats, where ownership is high and crime is low. Some are arguably negative, such as rebalancing council funding towards deprived urban seats, while farmers’ inheritance tax is incurring high-profile rural opposition, with potential future flashpoints around Green Belt reforms and on-shorewind.
Labour may, not without justification, calculate that these are politically minor issues compared to the core public services: unsurprisingly, health and education form two of the six “Plan for Change” pledges. People in these marginal areas are less state-reliant in some respects, such as working-age welfare but, given the strong presence of the elderly and parents of school-age children, they do have a clear investment in the state of the NHS, social care and the education system. Although No. 10 may talk of a “ruthless” geographically targeted strategy, Starmer’s reset attempts to pivot from a narrative of ‘winners and losers’ to an ambition that a catch-all strategy will also catch marginal seats and their typical voters.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Litepix in Shutterstock
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