![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.politics.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Blue-Wells-England.jpg\")
\nThe demise of Labour\u2019s \u2018Red Wall\u2019, a bank of parliamentary constituencies located predominately in the Midlands and the north of England, came to epitomise the 2019 general election.<\/p>\n
In particular, it was the nature of these newly captured areas that drew the eye.\u00a0 Working class constituencies to their core, these were parts of the country where it was previously considered inconceivable that a Conservative would win.<\/p>\n
As the UK heads into its next general election, Britain\u2019s electoral map is slowly being redrawn in a very different direction.<\/p>\n\n
Across the length of England there are some 42 seats that I have herein termed \u201cBlue Wells\u201d.<\/p>\n
Each of these is a seat that stayed loyal to the Conservatives throughout the Blair landslide years, but has remained out of Labour\u2019s grasp for at least six decades, and in most cases, ever.<\/p>\n
Throughout the course of the last decade, Labour has been making steady progress in each of these \u201cBlue Wells\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In an advance that has gone largely under the radar, perhaps masked by the scale of the wider 2019 Conservative victory, these seats strike to the heart of England\u2019s changing political landscape.<\/p>\n
In this year\u2019s general election, even if Labour falls just short of an outright majority, expect 14 of these \u201cBlue Wells\u201d to return a Labour MP for the first time since even their most ageing voter cast a ballot. Should Labour achieve a Westminster majority of 60 or 120 seats, then expect the phenomenon to extend to 29 or 42 seats respectively.<\/p>\n
So this prompts the questions, where are these \u201cBlue Wells\u201d, and how is it that they are now coming into electoral play?<\/p>\n
To qualify as a \u201cBlue Well\u201d seat, each of these constituencies (or the largest component of their forerunners in previous Boundary Commission Reviews) must not have been won by the Labour Party since 1966.\u00a0 As per Table (1), each of these seats must also now appear within the party\u2019s grasp.<\/p>\n
Table 1 \u2013 List of \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats now vulnerable to Labour<\/u><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.politics.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Blue-Wall.jpg\")
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Numbering 42 in total, the size of this \u201cBlue Well\u201d cohort is identical to the 42 \u2018Red Wall\u2019 seats previously identified by the political scientist, James Kanagasooriam<\/a>, some 34 of which subsequently fell to the Conservatives (the last being Hartlepool in the 2021 by-election).<\/p>\n Yet these \u201cBlue Wells\u201d are far less geographically homogenous than their \u2018Red Wall\u2019 predecessors.\u00a0 They spread down from Hexham and North Northumberland on the Scottish border, to include St Austell, Bournemouth and Worthing on England\u2019s southern coast.\u00a0 They include suburban areas such as Chingford, Croydon South, and Chipping Barnet in north London, Altrincham on the edge of Greater Manchester, and Rushcliffe near Nottingham, but also incorporate stand alone towns such as Macclesfield and Aldershot, and a host of coastal communities such as Weston-Super- Mare and Southend.<\/p>\n As of today just one \u201cBlue Well\u201d seat, Canterbury in Kent, has fallen to Labour.\u00a0 Having never been won by the party before, including even in 1997 when Tony Blair\u2019s \u2018New Labour\u2019 won 8 other Kent constituencies, Canterbury turned red for the first time in 2017. Although the city\u2019s substantial student population undoubtedly contributed to this particular \u201cBlue Well\u201d being early to the party, Canterbury exemplifies the wider forces in operation across this cohort of seats.<\/p>\n Separate to the current gulf in the UK\u2019s opinion polls, it is the steady onset of three separate political forces that have brought these particular Conservative heartlands within Labour\u2019s reach.<\/p>\n Force 1- The evaporation of the Liberal Democrats<\/u><\/strong> The Cornish seat of Truro and Falmouth is a prime example.\u00a0 In 2010 the Liberal Democrats and Labour were polling around 40% and 10% respectively in this far corner of England.\u00a0 Yet come 2019, those respective polling numbers had almost exactly reversed. \u00a0\u00a0Colchester in Essex and Southport in Merseyside exude the same pattern. Where in both areas, the Liberal Democrat recorded 48%-49% of the vote in 2010, a decade later, Liberal Democrat support had slumped to less than 14%.<\/p>\n Within the \u201cBlue Wells\u201d, even during the lowest points of the Corbyn years, the Labour Party has been successfully marching into this Lib Dem void. As it has done so, that Labour surge has also become self-fulfilling. \u00a0\u00a0With local Liberal Democrats no longer able to credibly claim that they are ‘Winning Here’, anti-Conservative voters have come to realise that in these seats, it is the Labour party that is the prime challenger to the Conservative.<\/p>\n Force 2 – Schisms in age and class based voting<\/u><\/strong> It is regularly remarked that the Conservative\u2019s failure to engage effectively with younger people poses an existential threat to the party\u2019s future.\u00a0 At the time of writing, Labour\u2019s poll lead amongst those under forty was in excess of 40%. \u00a0\u00a0Moreover there were signs that this advantage is now spreading into middle age.\u00a0 Amongst voters aged 40-49, Labour\u2019s poll lead now sits at a staggering 36%.<\/p>\n Yet it is when this cohort of younger voters, is mixed with a dosage of middle class voters, that the electoral impact becomes the most pronounced.<\/p>\n Although the Conservative Party was historically regarded as the party of the middle class, this bond has now been firmly detonated.\u00a0 \u00a0Inconceivable only a generation before, in the 2019 general election, Conservative support amongst A&B social-economic classifications was equivalent to that which it acquired from the D&E groupings.\u00a0 Roll forward to 2024, and polling<\/a> shows the party to be attracting the support of just a fifth of middle class voters, a quarter lower than its support levels amongst the skilled working class.<\/p>\n This cocktail of age and affluence does not impact on the most rural tranche of Conservative seats, ones where the demographic is slightly older and more working class.\u00a0 However it has become a significant problem for the party across most of the \u201cBlue Wells\u201d, the majority of which are urban and economically active English constituencies.<\/p>\n The Buckingham town of Aylesbury, where the Labour share of the vote doubled during the 2010s, is a case in point.\u00a0 According to the 2021 census the proportion of Aylesbury\u2019s voters falling within the A&B social class groupings was almost half as high again as the national average, with the seat further possessing an average age below that of the country as a whole.\u00a0 And Aylesbury is not alone.\u00a0 The same forces are at work in other once Conservative heartlands, such as Ashford in Kent, Banbury in Oxfordshire, and Basingstoke in Hampshire.<\/p>\n Force 3 – Intra County migration<\/u><\/strong> I have written previously<\/a> about estate agency data that showed sizeable numbers of anti-Brexit young professionals moving out of fashionable inner London to establish family homes in very specific particular parts of Kent, Hertfordshire, and Surrey.\u00a0 \u00a0Indeed such is the threat from this urban flight, that Jeremy Hunt has relocated out of the largest portion of his old South West Surrey seat, to compete in the newly created neighbour of Godalming and Ash.<\/p>\n And in different ways, voter movement is also assisting Labour in many of these 42 \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats.<\/p>\n Whether it be traditional Labour leaning Asian voters moving out of West London into towns such as Wycombe, metropolitan Manchester voters moving into leafy Altrincham, or bourgeois bohemians (\u2018BoBos\u2019) moving along the South coast to Worthing from Brighton, migratory trends posit a political impact.<\/p>\n Unlike Labour\u2019s 42 \u2018Red Wall\u2019 seats going into the 2019 general election, the 42 \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats will not in themselves define the outcome of the 2024 contest.<\/p>\n In what is an extremely fragmented electoral battlefield, Labour is also actively looking to regain as many as 30 of its Scottish strongholds that it previously lost to the SNP in 2015, the 34 \u201cRed Wall\u201d heartlands relinquished to the Conservatives, the UK\u2019s 60 traditional swing seats, and at least a further 32 areas that were once won by Tony Blair.<\/p>\n Yet it is these \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats, those that have rarely if ever been won by Labour, that represent perhaps the most interesting and telling component of this year\u2019s electoral background.<\/p>\n Rather than simply being conditioned by events that have occurred since Rishi Sunak entered Downing Street in 2022, these areas of England have been experiencing a demographic and political transformation that dates back to before Rishi Sunak\u2019s even arrived at Westminster in 2015. As detailed above, these are changes that go to the heart of England\u2019s underlying and changing political topography.<\/p>\n These 42 \u201cBlue Wells\u201d once presented the local Conservative MP with an impenetrable fortress from which to pursue their political career.<\/p>\n Now, as a whole host of Labour MPs have only too recently found to their cost in Scotland and the north of England, these 42 \u201cBlue Wells\u201d are the latest exert in the antithesis to the concept of a \u2018political job for life\u2019.<\/p>\n Politics.co.uk is the UK\u2019s leading digital-only political website, providing comprehensive coverage of UK politics. Subscribe to our daily newsletter <\/i>here<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why are the Blue Wells now emptying?<\/u><\/strong><\/h4>\n
\nThe first factor, common across almost all of the \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats, is a dramatic decade long demise in the Liberal Democrats as a local electoral force.<\/p>\n
\nThe second factor siphoning water from the \u201cBlue Wells\u201d is the long standing departure of both middle class, and increasingly also middle aged, voters, from the Conservative tent.<\/p>\n
\nThe third and final factor now bringing this previously untouchable cohort of Conservative seats within Labour\u2019s grasp is migratory.\u00a0 As populations don\u2019t remain still, many of these \u201cBlue Well\u201d seats have seen an influx of hostile voters from up the road.<\/p>\nThe Blue Wells \u2013 Just one part of the wider mosaic<\/u><\/strong><\/h4>\n