A tale of two wards: a comment on the local elections

The Conservative Party's biggest problem is its brand image and brand equity not policy or positioning.

It wasn’t a good night for the Conservatives. And, because of this, acres of analysis will try to explain or understand why it was that the 2023 local council elections saw so many - over 1000 - good Conservative councillors (including such notables as Lord Porter, former Chair of the LGA) lose their seats to a rainbow of greens, Lib Dems, independents and Labour opponents. At the national level the reason really is quite simple - the party is unpopular because inflation is high, fuel bills have rocketed and people’s mortgage payments have doubled. In some places these factors were compounded or confounded by local factors such as housebuilding, allegedly polluted rivers or the bankruptcy of the sitting council. The confounding came in places with a big Indian population like Slough and Leicester, perhaps a reflection of the PM being of Indian heritage as well as the grim racism directed by some on the left towards other Indian heritage leaders like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman.

I’m not going to present any detailed analysis but am going to reject Phillip Blond’s ‘everyone is really post-liberal aren’t they’ as the reason for the Conservative Party’s poll disasters. Instead I’m going to look at two wards in the Bradford district, one where the Conservatives comfortably held the seat, the other where, for the first time, Labour won the seat. The wards are Bingley Rural and Wharfedale (I had the delight of representing the former for 24 years).First the results:

Comparing these results to the 2022 results, the Conservatives did better in Bingley Rural, up from 40% to 47%, but their vote didn’t shift in Wharfedale. The Labour vote did (largely because of a decline in the Liberal Democrat vote from 18% in 2022 to 10% in 2023 - whether this is tactical voting or simply the absence of an actual Lib Dem campaign is moot) resulting in the narrowest of wins in what was seen in times past as the safest Conservative ward in the City.

So why is there this difference? It is true that Bingley Rural had in both 2022 and 2023 an active Independent candidate (who was once the Labour councillor for Keighley West) and simply switching her votes to Labour makes the result a lot closer. But leaving aside that we can’t make this sort of assumption, it remains the case that the vote share fell for all the non-Conservative candidates in Bingley Rural. There are two reasons for this, both of which reflect the demography of the ward (and help understand why the Party lost Wharfedale): racism and the cost of living. 

Dealing with the racism point is straightforward - a lot of usually Tory voters didn’t vote for the Party in 2022 because the candidate was a Pakistani heritage woman (she was selected by a largely white party following the deselection of her predecessor, a Pakistani heritage man). There is no point trying to deny that this is the case any more than we should perhaps consider that a bunch of usual Labour voters aren’t voting for their candidate because he too is of Pakistani heritage.

But there’s a wider issue here about the demography of the two wards that links with the popular national discourse about Red Walls and Blue Walls. Wharfedale is, if you want to find somewhere that looks like Surrey up here in Yorkshire, pretty much the closest you’ll get. Wealthy commuters (and retired commuters) who travel for work into Leeds, a high proportion of graduates and a worldview that meant Wharfedale, along with Ilkley, was the most ‘remain’ voting part of Bradford (which overall voted ‘leave’).

Bingley Rural, perhaps with the exception of Harden, the village nearest Bingley, is very different. Its residents are commuters but, at least if my neighbours are a guide, they travel by car to work in Bradford, Skipton, Keighley, Halifax and East Lancashire. The proportion of the population with higher education is lower and this is attested by streets of decent semi-detached and detached housing, many with a nice van on the drive every evening. The average house price in Cullingworth is around £215,000 which compares with the average in Menston (one of the two communities making up Wharfedale ward) of £375,000.

So when people ask what is happening to the Conservatives support, the answer isn’t ‘post-liberalism’ or ‘the conservatives are out-of-touch’ but rather that, since the mid-1990s the Party has steadily lost support among what us ad men used to call AB consumers. And the reason for this isn’t about any policy platform or lack of intellectual analysis but more prosaically a matter of brand image. If you are a thirty-something lawyer in a big Leeds firm, admitting to being a Tory isn’t a good look especially because your colleagues are partnered up with teachers, doctors or university lecturers. This was the issue that Cameron (and to a lesser extent, May) recognised nearly twenty years ago and one that, for those AB consumers, hasn’t been put right. 

Meanwhile in Bingley Rural none of this applies. Admitting to being a Conservative doesn’t bring opprobrium if you are a self-employed painter and decorator, work at a store in Keighley, or help manage a warehouse in Halifax. Although the Party has lost votes in places like Bingley Rural this is simply a reflection of those national issues around the cost-of-living and mortgages rather than any issue with the brand. Moreover, the Bingley Rural residents are less exposed to the biggest cost impact from the current inflation - mortgage rates and rents. Over in Wharfedale couples who hocked themselves up to the eyeballs so as to live somewhere half decent (with a Leeds postcode - brand image matters) face a much bigger struggle than the more, dare I say, conservative outlook in places like Cullingworth and Denholme.

Over the hill from Cullingworth, we see the same pattern with the Conservatives coming within a whisker of winning Keighley West, usually a reliable if not super-safe Labour seat. The Conservative Party’s problem is with those Blue Wall voters in Wharfedale, the ones with good jobs, nice houses and a liking for European holidays, and with the children of those voters. Here in Bingley Rural the issue of housing building does matter (every candidate still says ‘save the green belt’ or similar) but isn’t as significant as in Wharfedale where local people have raised huge sums and conducted massive campaigns against relatively small extensions to the housing in the two villages. But, at the same time, many of those Burley and Menston residents also have children who, while absolutely anti-Tory, cannot see themselves having the same chance to own that their parents enjoyed.

But none of this fixes the brand. Adopting the Onward (or Philip Blond) view is the wrong starting point when the issue isn’t brand positioning but brand equity.  I’m not sure people want a sort of traditionalist version of Blairite communitarianism and they don’t see the free market - or ‘libertarianism’ as some sneeringly refer to that institution - as a bad thing. What the AB Consumers, the people who used to be the main buyers of conservatism, see is a party that attacks their daughter’s university, that seems unpleasant towards immigrants and doesn’t value teachers, nurses and doctors as much as they should. The party could sit back and accept that it won’t be getting those AB Consumers’ votes any more (or worse take on Matt Goodwin’s line that those AB Consumers - the metropolitan elite - are the cause of all the problems) but they do set the agenda, indeed their support is one of the primary reasons why the Conservative Party has spent so much time in government over the last 100 years.

Bingley Rural is the Red Wall. The Conservatives may have lost support in such places but improvements in economic circumstances (lower inflation, stable mortgages and maybe a bit of wage growth) will turn this problem around. But Wharfedale is the Blue Wall where the Conservative strength remains only because of increasingly ageing homeowners who are slowly replaced by people who like free markets, have a global outlook and enjoy good things but who are also, in the view of that Red wall Tory, far too woke, like the public sector and are far too keen on Europe.

I’ve a feeling that, until the party reconciles this issue with brand equity, all the policy positioning, whether you call it National Conservative, Red Tory or Postliberal, will make little or no difference. As I write the Conservatives face defeat at the next election. Perhaps only that will make them look at how the most influential political consumers perceive the Party’s brand and begin to do something about it. The Party won’t die (as some seem to want), Bingley Rural will carry on electing Conservatives and very possibly Wharfedale will do so again, but it will find itself stuck in a place where the only route to power is by getting the support of people who hate the brand, just a little bit less than they hate the Labour brand.