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30/09/2007

Four out of five Welsh voters taken for granted by Labour in next General Election, says Conservative in top target seat

Four out of five Welsh people will be effectively sidelined and ignored by all political parties during the forthcoming General Election, according to Jonathan Evans MEP, the Conservative Parliamentary candidate in the key marginal constituency of Cardiff North.

The focus on marginal seats is the inevitable outcome of a first past the post system which increasingly marginalises the majority of voters and contributes to falling turnouts and disillusion with the voting system, he says.

Mr Evans will speak in favour of electoral reform on the first day of the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool today (Sunday 30 September 2007.)

He will make his remarks at the opening Conference fringe meeting held by Policy Exchange, the leading Conservative think-tank jointly with the Electoral Reform Society.

Mr Evans, a long-standing supporter of electoral reform will say:“Whenever the election is held, the reality is that it will not really touch almost 80 per cent of the population.

“The political parties will again chart the battleground based on the constituencies where there is a real prospect of the parliamentary seat changing hands. That’s about 140 seats in the UK and between five and eight in Wales.

“True, the Nationalists and Liberal Democrats will again tussle over Ceredigion, and we will see if Montgomeryshire has tired of an MP who seems to spend more time in gossip columns and Hello magazine than in the House of Commons, but Labour appear to be making little effort at campaigning in the seats they lost at the last General Election – Monmouth, Clwyd West, Preseli and Cardiff Central.

“That means that the real election campaign will be fought in just a handful of Welsh seats, and the rest of Wales will be effectively sidelined and ignored.

“Long ago, the political parties learned to focus all their campaigning efforts in the marginal seats. When the Conservatives lost in 1997, the difference in the total vote between Labour and the Conservatives was not historically high, yet Labour was three times more effective in the marginal seats and won by a massive margin. At the last election, Labour were barely three points clear of the Conservatives – but again targeted marginal seats better – and again won a comfortable majority.

“Political parties have learned that on this basis, Labour can carry on in government by winning in the marginals, even if the country as a whole votes against them. The Electoral Reform Society has calculated that the Conservatives have to be over ten points clear in the polls to be certain of gaining an overall majority.

“So it is hardly surprising that the Conservatives have learned the lesson of campaigning in the marginals. Even Peter Hain is now complaining of how much more effective our campaigning has been, and some recent polls point to the Conservatives polling much better in the marginals than in the country as a whole.

“But there are real challenges to Democracy in all this. Our electoral system is excluding most voters, and it is hardly surprising that turnout falls, when voters are taken for granted in this way. Nowadays, the political parties seem to make little or no effort to engage the voters outside the battleground marginals, and we are increasingly seeing candidates in such seats moved away from their own campaigns in order to add to the manpower in the marginals.

“During the recent Welsh Assembly election, Welsh Labour campaigned on its message of ‘clear red water’ between Cardiff and London. It judged this necessary as the voting system meant every vote counted – including swathes of voters in the Rhondda, Gwent Valleys and the Labour industrial heartland. Labour faced real challenges under this voting structure in Rhondda and Islwyn – but it is a different story for the General Election when the battleground is Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan, Llandudno, Tenby and Denbigh.

“Last week Welsh Labour tried to ditch their ‘clear red water’ message, recognising that it would not go down so well in the five to eight battleground seats in Wales. We had Gordon Brown changing Labour’s colours from red to blue, wrapping himself in the Union Jack, praising and adopting much of the last Conservative manifesto, and finally claiming to be the true heir to Margaret Thatcher.

“I know that vulnerable old men can often make themselves look fools when they fall for younger women, but I think it was rather quaint to see Norman Tebbitt swooning over Gordon Brown’s shapely legs as the Prime Minister implausibly donned Mrs Thatcher’s twin seat and pearls.

“The reality is that such cross-dressing by Labour is driven not by conviction, but cynical calculation of what may be needed to win crucial votes in a fraction of Welsh seats. No wonder many people increasingly feel that voting changes nothing.”

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