Last Saturday we discussed Tory targeting strategies. Today, Cllr Leah Fraser, the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Wallasey, calls for a distinction between immediate target seats and more medium term targets.
Every book and manual you read about winning elections talks about the need for targeting. Whether it’s polling districts in a ward; wards in a borough or parliamentary constituencies. In days of limited resources – people and money – it makes sense for their efforts to go where they can make the greatest difference.
The focus is, rightly, on the next General Election. If we break down the seats purely on the basis of that election – we have the ones we hold, the ones we can win and those we won’t win, even with a 20% lead nationally.
Now, it would be crazy to pour scarce resources into seats which have a notional Conservative majority. If the local Party cannot hold a seat in the current climate, there must either be a very strong local factor against us or that association is not performing and no amount of additional resources will help. Money spent badly is worse than money not spent at all.
Those seats we can win and ‘need’ to form the next Government are most easily assessed via the swing required for us to win, compared to last time round.
These are the seats which have, pretty much, selected their candidates and are working towards detailed, month-by-month campaign plans. The Party’s focus on selecting early for target seats is already paying off in many places. It certainly made a difference in Crewe & Nantwich.
While some of the onus is on the candidates to perform – being the ‘public face’ of the campaign - the local party is also required to do its bit in being united, focussed and efficient. Not always easy in a voluntary organisation!
The final category, often written-off as unwinnable, includes vast swathes of the urban North.
The pace of demographic and electoral change in these seats is greater than anywhere else. Transient populations, often in areas with high ‘indices of deprivation’, with no local ties and weak political loyalty presents many campaign obstacles.
But these obstacles are not insurmountable. They must also be tackled if we are to be a truly national Party.
If we look at the period when the demographics started moving against us, we go to the period of industrial change in the 1980s. We lost our last seats in Liverpool (1983) and Manchester (1987). In those city areas, the priority for us now is to rebuild our local government base.
However, if we look not at the next election (perhaps next year, perhaps in 2010) but at the election after that, then the current strategy needs additional work.
No business would only plan for two years ahead. Companies such as Microsoft plan for the medium and long term. If we are to not only win the next election, but ensure a sustained period of electoral success, then a more medium term strategy is also needed, in addition to the current focus on today’s target seats.
Now, this is not about Liverpool or Manchester but it is about their suburbs and surrounding areas.
Let’s look at two examples – Wallasey in Wirral and, until 1992, held by Lynda Chalker – and Worsley and Eccles South, a newly created seat in Greater Manchester.
Both are typical of a handful of seats which do not fall into the category of a ‘Conservative hold’ or appear on a list of the Top 200 targets we need to form a Government with a decent majority. However, what I will call such ‘medium term targets’ could be crucial to retaining a majority in 2014 or 2015.
The likes of Wallasey or Worsley & Eccles South also matter now when it comes to local government success in metropolitan boroughs.
Today, both constituencies have large numbers of Conservative councillors – in some cases more than target parliamentary seats. In both constituencies, the Labour Party was easily beaten on May 1st (by 23% in Wallasey and 12% in Worsley & Eccles South.
So, what can the Party do with seats such as Wallasey or Worsley without spreading existing resources too thinly or wasting resources by not planning properly?
- First, don’t write them off as ‘unwinnable’. Enfield Southgate was said to be ‘unwinnable’ for Labour before 1997. None of us expects the kind of swing we saw in Crewe & Nantwich to be uniformly repeated at the next election but every election presents surprises.
- Second, allow such seats to share the advice and expertise being offered to short-term target seats. A simple list of things to be done to prepare to become a target seat wouldn’t take much to compile and could provide some focus to the medium-term target seats.
- Third, recognise that the electorate in the medium-term targets is likely (through their experience of the 1980s) to be more sceptical towards our Party than in those other, more ‘leafy’ seats. Voters didn’t start to question their support for us in these seats on Black Wednesday – their suspicions started 10 years earlier.
Trust will take longer to be restored and needs to be gained through positive work that engages with local communities – in other words social action projects which, as we saw in June, worked so well in Grange Park in Blackpool that we won that ward. I use this ward as an example for good reason – it had previously been written off as ‘unwinnable’.
Lastly, don’t assume there are not lessons in these medium-term targets which could be of use in the short term-targets. If we can win 50% or more of the vote in some of the most deprived wards in the likes of Wallasey or Worsley, then there MUST be lessons there for the rest of the Party.
