Representing Rurality? New Labour and the Electoral Geography of Rural Britain

Representing Rurality? New Labour and the Electoral Geography of Rural BritainAuthor(s): Neil WardSource: Area, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 171-181Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004221 .

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Area (2002) 34.2, 1 71-1 81

Representing rurality? New Labour and the

electoral geography of rural Britain

Neil Ward School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT

Email: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 20 December 2001

The first Blair administration faced clamorous criticism from some lobby groups for its handling of rural issues. Yet Labour has presented itself as a 'one-nation' party representing both urban and rural areas. This paper examines the basis of recent claims about the parliamentary representation of rural Britain, and analyzes the results of the last two General Elections. It illustrates how the malleability of the category of 'rural' allows for contrasting claims about rural representation, and highlights the continuity of party representation among those constituencies located outside the main urban areas in the 1997 and 2001 parliaments, despite regular rural protest.

Key words: Britain, New Labour, rural voting, countryside politics

Introduction: New Labour and rural voting

During much of the 1997-2001 parliament, the Labour government in Britain was attacked by some organizations for its approach to rural areas and rural issues. At their mildest, critics accused the Blair government of being naYve and ill-informed about rural life and livelihoods. At the other extreme, 'New

Labour' were accused of being actively opposed and hostile to rural people. Under Blair's leadership, the reconstruction of the Labour Party between 1994 and 1997 widened its appeal both politically and geographically. After its damaging election defeat in 1997, the Conservative Party needed to challenge and undermine that appeal and so sought to present Labour as an urban and class-based party.

A key tactic in this political strategy was to brand Labour politicians as partisan on rural issues and problems.

In response to Tory attacks, Labour politicians have sought to emphasize New Labour's 'one nation' credentials and highlight how the party draws on public support from both urban and rural areas. A Rural Group of Labour MPs was established in November 1997 and, as a challenge to the prevalent

view of the Conservative Party's dominance of the so-called 'Tory Shires', Labour politicians have claimed that the party holds many 'rural and semi rural' seats (Rural Group of Labour MPs 1999, iv). For example, in a debate in the House of Commons called by the Conservative Opposition in November 1 997, a Labour Minister pointed out that the party

held 1 70 of the parliamentary constituencies defined by the Boundary Commission as 'county constituen cies', more than the other two main parties com bined. Labour politicians have repeatedly used this category of county constituencies as a surrogate for 'rural and semi-rural areas'.

For geographers, these struggles over which political party might be able legitimately to claim to represent rural areas provide an interesting insight not only into the contemporary politics and social construction of rurality in Britain but also the political geography of New Labour's support. Geographers and other social scientists interested in the cultural politics of rurality have, over recent years, drawn attention to the struggles between social actors over

who has legitimacy to 'speak for' rural interests (Pratt 1996). Research into dominant and subordi nate discourses of rurality has opened a fruitful vein of analysis and marked a break from the logical

ISSN 0004-0894 K9 Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2002



1 72 Ward

positivist tradition of seeking to define and delineate objectively classified rural areas (see, for example,

Murdoch and Pratt 1994). As a result of this 'turn' to social constructivism, geographers and others have examined how the category of 'rural' is utilized by social groups in their struggles over what constitutes legitimate economic activity, land development or social practices beyond towns and cities.

The debate about the political representation of rural Britain provides one example of a struggle over the social construction of rurality. Over recent decades, rural areas popularly have been understood to be dominated by the Conservative Party in

parliament, particularly in England. The 'Tory shires' are the Tories' heartlands. On what basis, therefore, can the Labour Party claim to represent more 'rural and semi-rural' seats than the Conservatives? And, after a parliament in which the biggest public demonstrations against the government - the 1998 Countryside March, and the September 2000 fuel protests - were high profile examples of the social mobilization of 'rural' discontent, how was Labour's representation among its 'rural and semi-rural' con stituencies affected by the 2001 General Election?

This paper examines the basis of the claims made in recent years about the parliamentary represen tation of rural Britain. After first briefly describing the geography of the 1 997 General Election result, it goes on to examine the parliamentary debates about the so-called 'rural crisis' in the 1 997-2001 parlia

ment. It explains how the Labour Party could claim to represent more rural and semi-rural seats than the other parties combined, and then discusses the rural geography of parliamentary representation produced by applying an alternative classification of rural con stituencies developed by market researchers. Finally, the paper compares the outcome of the 2001

General Election with that of 1 997, before drawing conclusions.

The 1997 General Election: Labour - the party of the countryside?

New Labour came to power in Britain on 1 May 1997 with a landslide victory. The Conservative Party had not only been ejected from office after 18 years in government, but also now found itself with fewer

MPs than at any time since 1906, and with its lowest share of the popular vote (at 32%) since 1832. The 1997 election result saw the Conservatives wiped out in Scotland and Wales and pushed back into a suburban and rural heartland in the south of England.

Labour made important gains across the English midlands, and parts of the south, even taking an

additional 21 seats in suburban London. The General Election result was therefore notable

in its political geography. From the 1950s, support for the two main political parties had begun to polarize geographically, with Conservative support concentrating in the south and in more rural areas, and Labour support concentrating more in the north and in urban areas. Unfortunately, studies of voting patterns and behaviour have tended to neglect the importance of geography. The preoccupation has been with questions of 'who voted what', usually addressed through discussion of different social classes, rather than with questions of 'who voted

what, where'. However, a study in the early 1980s by Curtice and Steed pinpointed the 1 955 election as a turning point. They demonstrated that from 1955 onwards the long-term change in the relative strength of the Conservative and Labour parties

within constituencies became marked by two major spatial cleavages. A north-south cleavage began to emerge in the 1955 swing, while the urban-rural cleavage became clearly evident in the 1959-64 swing (Curtis and Steed 1982, 256, quoted in Johnston et al. 1988, 63). The trend continued until the 1980s, with the Conservatives increasingly dominating the more rural seats.

Historically, Labour has tended to be cast by its political opponents as an urban-based party, with its roots in an industrial culture. However, Labour's 1997 gains in what might be termed the 'less urban' parliamentary constituencies - the county con stituencies that fall outside the main metropolitan areas - meant that, for the first time since the 1950s, it could challenge the Conservatives' claim to

dominate the rural areas. Now, when attacked as a party somehow out of touch with the people of the shires, Labour MPs could legitimately claim that their party held more of the county constituencies than both the other main political parties put together. In a Commons Debate on rural life, called by the Tories in November 1997, Angela Eagle, a Labour Minister, stressed how Labour now held 1 70 county con stituencies. 'The rump that the Tory Party parades as an outdated caricature of town versus country can only do damage to the countryside, while Labour is a one-nation party', she proclaimed (Hansard 4 November 1997, Col. 210).

How are these county constituencies defined? The Boundary Commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are required to review



Representing rurality 1 73

parliamentary constituencies periodically and make recommendations for changes in their boundaries, and the creation of new constituencies, in the light of population changes (see Rossiter et al. 1999). The Commissions are required to recommend a name for each constituency and to recommend one of two designations. Constituencies deemed to contain 'more than a small rural element' are designated as county constituencies. All others are designated as borough constituencies (Boundary Commission for England 1 995, 12). These designations are used to determine the level of election expenses for parlia mentary candidates, these being lower in borough constituencies 'to reflect lower costs of running a campaign in a compact, urban area' (Boundary Commission for England 1995, 12).

Following the last Boundary Commission review, completed in 1995, there were 363 county con stituencies in the UK (55% of the total) and 296 borough constituencies (Table 1). Only 51 per cent of English constituencies are county constituencies, while the proportions are 61 per cent in Scotland, 85 per cent in Wales and 78 per cent in Northern Ireland. In essence, county constituencies are those found beyond the main metropolitan urban areas.

Many large towns are defined as falling within county constituencies if the constituency boundary includes a number of outlying villages. For example, the constituency of Stevenage in Hertfordshire is a county constituency, although the vast majority of the electorate live in the urban area of Stevenage.

As Table 1 illustrates, following the 1 997 General Election, Labour held 170 county constituencies. A third of these were in Scotland and Wales, however, and the Conservatives' 1 36 county constituencies in England outnumbered Labour's 11 3 there (see also Figure 1). The Conservatives outnumbered Labour's county constituencies in the East of England, the South East and South West regions, while Labour held more in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and Humberside. Labour dominated the East Midlands county constituencies by 18 to 14, and the West Midlands by just 12 to 11.

The Labour Party has utilized this method of defining a rural constituency extensively in its political campaigning on rural issues. For example, a briefing paper produced by Labour's Front Bench

Agriculture Team in September 1997 sought to expose what they saw as a series of 'myths'. The first 'myth' was that 'Labour is an urban-based party'. The

briefing document argued that even at its electoral low in 1 983, a significant number of Labour seats

were rural or predominantly rural, while many others have always contained significant rural areas. It also argued that in the European Elections of 1 994 Labour won the majority of the vote in a whole range of shire counties including Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent and Northumberland. The second 'myth' was that Labour was elected to office in 1997 through the power of the urban vote. To rebut, the briefing document compares the national swing to Labour in 1997 of 10.7 per cent in England (and 7.1% in Wales) with the swing in the county constitu encies of 10.4 per cent in England (and 7.0% in

Wales), suggesting that there was 'virtually no differ ence between these rural areas and the national swing' (Labour Front Bench Agriculture Team 1997, 1). The document goes on to point out that Labour took 'the majority of the total rural vote by county constituency' (p. 1) in a number of English shire counties, including Staffordshire, Northamptonshire,

Warwickshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire. A third 'myth' was that Labour MPs do not represent the countryside. The document compares represen tation of county constituencies with that of the other two main parties as a counterpoint to this claim.

These arguments are interesting in the way they equate county constituencies with rurality. Using that definition, a variety of electoral statistics can be mobilized to challenge the idea of Labour as an urban party. From early in the 1997-2001 parliament, it became clear that the Conservative Opposition were seeking to cast Labour as alien to rural life and traditions. The use of county con stituencies as a surrogate definition of rural Britain therefore yielded some analysis that was useful to Labour in challenging the notion of a town-country political divide.

Between the production of the Agriculture Team's briefing document in September 1997 and the publication of an analysis of rural issues by the Rural Group of Labour MPs in June 1999, the number of 'rural and semi-rural seats' strangely rose in Labour publications from 170 to 180. This is because some Labour MPs in urban constituencies (such as the Agriculture Minister Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle East and Wallsend, for example), joined the Rural Group of MPs through an interest in rural issues, rather than because they were representing a rural constituency. Thus when the Rural Group of Labour MPs claimed that some 180 Labour MPs were elected to represent rural or semi-rural constituencies (I1999, iv 2000, 2), they were including the voters of inner city



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Figure 1 County constituencies and MORI's 'rural' constituencies in 1997

Tyneside in this increasingly stretched definition of rural.

While a majority of parliamentary constituencies may be defined as county constituencies, the majority of the British electorate of course lives and votes in urban areas. Estimates vary, but the Countryside Agency (2000, 26) suggests, for example, that over a quarter of the population of England live in rural districts. The use of county constituencies - which make up over half the total number of constituencies - is clearly a maximizing definition (and, some might claim, a significant dis tortion and exaggeration) of what might be generally understood to be 'rural Britain'.

An alternative and more statistically elaborate attempt to define rural constituencies was made by the market research and opinion-polling organiz ation, MORI, in October 2000. This was at a time

when questions of 'the rural vote' were arousing interest because of the role of farmers and other rural protestors in the fuel blockades, which then

represented New Labour's most serious domestic crisis to date. In a piece of commentary, MORI's Roger Mortimore argued that there was 'too much attention paid to the so-called rural vote' and that claiming 180 of Labour's seats to be rural repre sented a 'huge over-estimate' (2000, 1). He went on to argue that 'in almost every case' the rural ele

ments in Labour's constituencies actually comprise 'a tiny minority, if that' (p. 1).

MORI used the MOSAIC geo-demographic marketing classification developed by Experian - a commercial geodemographics agency - to devise what they claimed to be a more robust definition of rural constituencies (see, for example, Economic and Social Research Council 2001, 8; Experian 2001). The MOSAIC classification system is based on an algorithmic cluster analysis of over 350 socio economic variables including personal and house hold data on demographics and neighbourhood level data on, for example, the building stock, house hold structure, employment, residential density and



1 76 Ward

Table 2 MORI's 'rural' parliamentary constituencies at 2 May 1997

Conservative Labour Liberal Democrats Nationalists and Others Total 25% 50% Total 25% 50% Total 25% 50% Total 25% 50% Total 25% 50% Total

Rural Rural seats Rural Rural seats Rural Rural seats Rural Rural seats Rural Rural seats

England 49 3 165 3 - 328 10 1 34 - - 2 62 4 529 Scotland - - - - - 56 8 1 10 3 1 6 11 2 72

Wales - - - 7 1 34 2 2 2 4 1 4 13 4 40 GB Total 49 3 165 10 1 418 20 4 46 7 2 12 86 10 641

retail accessibility. The cluster analysis is used to

classify each neighbourhood into one of 52 distinct types, and each is assigned a stereotypical lifestyle descriptor (such as, for example, 'Smokestack Shiftwork', 'Bohemian Melting Pot' or 'Suburban

Mock Tudor'). Of these 52 categories, six are

defined as rural. These are 'Gentrified Villages', 'Rural Retirement Mix', 'Lowland Agribusiness', 'Rural Disadvantage', 'Tied/Tenant Farmers' and

'Upland and Small Farms' (see Experian 2001). The classification was used by MORI to categorize every census enumeration district as either rural or non rural. According to the classification, only 7.5 per cent of the adult population of Britain live in rural areas, and in only ten parliamentary constituencies are more than 50 per cent of the electorate found to live in these rural enumeration districts.' MORI calculate that there are just 86 constituencies in Britain where more than a quarter of the electorate lives in these rural areas. The 1997 election results for these 86 constituencies are shown in Figure 1.

'All the rest may have wide swathes of verdant

countryside dotted with farmhouses and farm

animals, but few people live there' (Mortimore 2000, 1).

Table 2 shows how, of these 86 constituencies where at least a quarter of the electorate lives in rural areas, the Conservatives held 49 (5 7%) and the Liberal Democrats held 20 (23%). Using MORI's alternative and far more restricted definition of what constitutes a 'rural constituency', Labour held only ten in the 1997-2001 parliament, and of these only three were in England.2

This discussion highlights how the particular method of defining a rural constituency can yield markedly different results in terms of the parlia mentary representation of rural Britain. MORI's use of an elaborate geodemographic market research classification system, with a requirement that at least

a quarter of voters live in rural enumeration districts, produces a political geography of rural Britain more akin to popular belief. The Tories dominate the (English) shires. However, the Labour Party's efforts to portray itself as the one-nation party representing town and country alike led it to construct a definition of rurality that includes all constituencies outside the main metropolitan areas that contain 'more than a small rural element' (Boundary Commission for England 1995, 12). The result is the reverse of conventional wisdom, and Labour dominates these so-called 'rural and semi-rural' seats. Thus, the defi nition of rurality can be seen to be contested - a social construction - with these contrasting repre sentations of political geography reflecting the strategies and techniques of those who produce them. In this context, it is worth considering how rural issues featured in the 1997-2001 parliament, before examining how rural representation changed at the 2001 General Election.

The 2001 General Election

Few could have envisaged the extent to which rural issues and controversies would come to dominate political debate, both in Parliament but also in wider public discourse, during the 1997-2001 period. There was little in the General Election manifestos of any of the main parties in 1997 that suggested the potential for a politicization of the countryside. The Labour Party's manifesto had little to say of sub stance concerning rural areas and rural policy, although a sub-section of the manifesto's chapter on quality of life issues did deal with life in the country side. It criticized the Conservatives' record on

managing the BSE crisis and on public services such as the Post Office, and pledged Labour to seek reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, ensure greater protection for wildlife and offer a free vote




in Parliament on banning hunting with hounds. It recognized the countryside as 'a great natural asset, a part of our heritage which calls for special steward ship', but qualified that 'this must be balanced ...

with the needs of people who live and work in rural areas' (Labour Party 1997, 1, 4, 30).

Because of the scale of its 1997 defeat, the Conservative Party needed to shore up its core support in order to prepare for longer-term political recovery. Rural issues were considered to be a fruitful line of attack, because of their potential to consolidate support for the Party among its English rural constituencies, and even to widen the Party's appeal if its criticisms of Labour's handling of rural issues could strike a chord with the wider elector ate. In November 1997, the Opposition therefore called a debate on rural life in the House of Commons. They proposed a motion expressing concern about the economic and environmental pressures affecting the rural economy and rural life, and condemning proposals to legislate for a right to roam and to ban hunting with hounds (Hansard 4 November 1997, Cols. 176-220). The transcript of the debate is illuminating as a string of oppo sition MPs repeated the claim that the countryside

was 'under siege'. The debate represents the first parliamentary occasion of the 1997-2001 parlia ment where the Tories could formulate this mantra and it set the tone for so much of the rural protest that would follow.

During 1997 and 1998, a series of issues became bound together in popular and media discourses in an agenda of rural discontent. Prominent among these issues was the Private Members Bill proposed by Michael Foster - the new MP for Worcester - to ban hunting with hounds. Opposition to this pro posal emphasized the contribution to economic ac tivity and employment that hunting generated (see

Ward 1999, for a discussion), as well as the contri bution of hunting to the so-called 'rural way of life'. Concerns about job losses and economic hardship in the most peripheral rural areas were compounded by the relatively sharp decline in agricultural incomes since their high-point in 1995. Official farm income statistics revealed repeated falls such that, by 2000, total income from farming was 72 per cent lower than for 1 995 (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food 2000). This decline was primarily the result of the relative strength of sterling against the Euro, but also because of the after effects of the 1996 BSE crisis and depressed world commodity prices (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food 1999, 1 7).

In the spring of 1998, the Countryside Alliance organized a march in London to demonstrate in support of traditional rural life and in defence of hunting with hounds. Over 250 000 people were estimated to have attended and the extensive and generally uncritical media coverage served to propa gate a sense of the countryside being 'in crisis'. In reality, and contrary to popular belief, economic statistics suggested that employment in rural areas

was relatively buoyant during the 1 990s. Compared to urban and metropolitan areas, rural local authority districts saw higher net employment growth between 1980 and 2000. Some 590 000 net new jobs were created between 1980 and 1990 and a further 590 000 between 1990 and 2000 (Public and Corporate Economic Consultants 2000, para. 6.4.2). Nevertheless, the idea of rural discontent was soon firmly established, and government ministers became nervous about the charge that they did not understand, nor care about, rural problems. In the aftermath of Countryside March, Environment

Minister Michael Meacher announced in an inter view that the government would prepare a White Paper on rural areas. (The government's formal announcement of the White Paper exercise followed some months later). In December 1998, Number 10 Downing Street also announced that the Prime Minister's newly established Performance and Innovation Unit in the Cabinet Office would conduct a review of government policies for rural economies in advance of the Rural White Paper as part of its first

wave of projects in early 1999 (Performance and Innovation Unit 1999). An extensive effort was therefore launched within government to develop a new policy framework for the countryside, in an attempt to dispel the idea that the government did not care.

Campaigning and protesting continued among rural groups, however. The Countryside Alliance organized demonstrations outside the Labour Party conference in September 1999 and in various regional cities that autumn. However, the most spectacular bout of protesting took place in September 2000, when groups of farmers and hauliers, aggrieved at the price of fuel, began blockading oil refineries and fuel distribution depots. The fuel crisis caught the government on the defensive and caused widespread disruption to economic and social life, almost bringing to a halt fuel supplies to essential services too. The crisis represented the biggest domestic political challenge the Blair government had faced, and for the first time



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County Constituencies MORI's 'Rural' Constituencies 2001 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~2001

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Figure 2 County constituencies and MORI's 'rural' constituencies in 2001

since 1992, the Labour Party briefly fell behind the Conservatives in public opinion polls.3

Although the Labour Party recovered its opinion poll lead relatively soon after the fuel protests, rural discontent and indignation remained prominent. In his book on British politics and identity, Andrew Marr (2000) went so far as to identify the schism between the metropolitan modernity of New Labour and the raw desperation of what he called the 'new rural politics' (p. 11 5) as the major cultural and political fault-line of the age.

While there may have been problems of agricul tural profitability, and a legislative threat to the few hundred people earning a living looking after hunt kennels, these specific issues did not really amount to a rural economic 'crisis'. Underlining Marr's point, for rural protestors, it appeared the main crisis was a cultural and political one, in the sense that the party they most identified with - the Conservative Party -

was politically marginalized. However, spring 2001 brought a new and dramatic chapter in New Labour's fraught relationship with the countryside

when, on 20 February, the first case in an outbreak of foot and mouth disease (FMD) was confirmed.

The scale of the FMD crisis increased exponen tially during its first six weeks and caused widespread disruption and economic damage to economic and social life in rural areas. It also prompted the Prime

Minister to postpone the date of the General Election, which most political commentators agreed had long been set for 3 May. By the time of the eventual General Election, on June 7, over two and a half million farm animals had been slaughtered, on almost 8000 farm holdings. Tourist organizations estimated that the crisis had cost ?5 billion in lost trade to tourism, and economic analysts estimated that FMD would reduce the rate of growth in the

UK's GDP from 2.3 per cent to 2 per cent for the year 2001 (Centre for Economics and Business Research, quoted in Adams 2001). FMD represented a major national crisis, and brought widespread criticism of the government's handling of the issue, particularly its slow response in the early days of the outbreak. It was against this seemingly unpropitious



180 Ward

background of continual protest by countryside organizations, and two serious national crises causing widespread disruption and public criticism, that the Labour Party fought the 2001 General Election. How then did rural discontent manifest itself in the election result?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the politicization of rural issues appears to have had little impact on the political geography of parliamentary representation. Table 3 presents the outcome of the election, break ing down constituencies by their county and borough categories (see also Figure 2). These data show an extraordinary degree of continuity in party representation. The Conservatives only achieved a net gain of one seat, after a net gain of two borough constituencies in England, and one county con stituency in Scotland, but a net loss of two county constituencies in England. Labour's 1997 total of 1 70

county constituencies was only reduced by two to 168, while the Liberal Democrats gained four county

constituencies, and a net gain of six seats in all. Labour can still claim to have significantly more county constituencies than the other parties, but can no longer claim to have more than the other two main parties combined.

Turning to MORI's categorization of rural con stituencies (Table 4 and Figure 2), a similar picture of continuity is apparent, although, because of the smaller number of constituencies defined as rural, a

change in a small number of constituencies can have a greater proportionate effect. For example, Labour lost to the Tories the seat of Norfolk North West -

one of its three English seats that MORI calculate as having at least a quarter of voters in rural areas. Thus it is fair to argue, using MORI's classification, that

Labour lost a third of its rural seats in England.4

Conclusions

The Labour Party's efforts to present itself as a 'one-nation' party deriving political support from all regions, and from town and country, have led it to define rurality according to the coverage of county constituencies. This is, of course, a questionable and contestable definition of rural. This social construc tion of rurality (or at least 'semi-rurality') provides a good example of how the malleability of the

category rural can be utilized and exploited by socio-political actors when seeking to derive legitimacy for their activities.

Labour politicians' efforts to cast themselves as the party of the countryside were prompted by the

strategy of their opponents. For the Conservative Opposition, which suffered a dramatic General Election defeat in 1997, invoking a socio-cultural and political divide between town and country served as a political survival strategy to maintain support among its core supporters before attempting to begin its political recovery. What is perhaps more remarkable than Labour's 1997 claim to hold more rural and semi-rural seats than its opponents com bined is the fact that so few of the county con stituencies changed hands in 2001. The 1997

General Election represented a marked shift in the electoral geography of rural Britain. In 2001 this geography was little changed, despite farm incomes problems, the fuel crisis and foot and mouth disease, and the sustained efforts since 1997 to mobilize the forces of rural reaction against New Labour.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Danny Dorling, Bethan Gulliver and

Philip Lowe for their comments on a draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to James Debenham, Roger Mortimore of MORI, and Ann Rooke and William Spice at Newcastle

University, for their assistance with the constituency data and mapping.

Notes

1 The ten are: Brecon and Radnorshire; Carmarthen East and Dinefwr; Ceredigion; Devon West and Torridge; Galloway and Upper Nithsdale; Leominster; Ludlow; Montgomeryshire; Orkney and Shetland; and Penrith and the Border.

2 These three 'rural' Labour constituencies in England were Norfolk North West in the East of England, and Forest of

Dean and Stroud in the South West region. 3 A 1 5 per cent lead for Labour in August became a

2 per cent advantage for the Conservatives, according to MORI (for the News of the World, 17 September).

A 10 per cent lead for Labour in August became a

4 per cent lead for the Conservatives, according to ICM (for the Guardian, 18 September). By the Labour Party conference later that week, Labour fell to 35 per cent in the polls, five points behind the Conservatives, according to Gallup (for the Daily Telegraph, 21 September).

According to NOP (for Channel 4, 23 September), Labour collapsed to 32 per cent, eight points behind the Conservatives (quoted in Rawnsley 2001, 527).

4 It would be difficult to attribute Labour's loss of Norfolk North West to issues of rural discontent. A much more likely explanation is the decline of the Referendum Party,

which had won 2923 votes in 1997 - many from

Eurosceptic Tories - when Labour's majority over the Conservatives was just 1 339.



Representing rurality 181

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Representing Rurality? New Labour and the Electoral Geography of Rural Britain

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