Intensive Vote Farming in Barnet

The spread of foot-and-mouth disease through the rural areas has brought the rural vote back to the top of the election agenda - although, at the same time, it has thrown into some doubt whether there will be an election at all when we have all been confidently expecting it, on 3 May. I have already written [Rural Voters - 20 October 2000] about how much smaller and less influential the rural vote is than almost everybody supposes. But even some of those rural areas are simply rural in the sense of not being urban; they are not full of farmers. The genuinely agricultural vote is smaller still.

Michael Brown in today's Independent, wondering whether the Tories might eventually derive some electoral benefit from the current crisis, talks casually of a hundred or so Labour-held seats with farming interests. Since he once sat for one himself as a Tory MP, only to be defeated in the 1997 landslide, he might be supposed to know what he is talking about. But, in fact, there are not that many other seats of the same type - certainly not a hundred unless you stretch your definition of "farming" well beyond breaking point.

Look at the figures from the 1991 Census, which among many other details classifies the population by the sector of industry in which they work. Suppose we take as a, very generous, definition of a constituency with a significant farming presence one where the census found at least a thousand "engaged in agriculture, forestry or fishing industries". Just one thousand. Even if we assume that for every farmer on this definition there is a spouse and 2.4 children, all economically dependent on farming but not listed as working in agriculture, that adds up to a fairly small vote in the constituency. Of course, in such areas local service industries will also be dependent on the prosperity of the farmers for their business, and even those locals with no direct personal involvement may still have the best interests of the farming community at heart and vote accordingly, but we can surely say that a constituency with fewer farmers than this cannot really be thought of as being agriculturally dominated. And we are not even considering what kind of farming (or forestry, or fishing) the farmers here are actually involved in.

So, on this very broad definition, how many farming constituencies are there? Exactly 150. And how many of those currently have Labour MPs? Only 28. Of these five are in Scotland and six in Wales, where it is possible that the devolution of responsibility for agriculture to Holyrood and Cardiff Bay will be a factor as well as satisfaction with Westminster's handling of the crisis. Of the remaining 17 in England, three were held by Labour even in 1983 (Bassetlaw, Bishop Auckland and Workington), and the Tories couldn't hope to win these if the Labour MP caught foot-and-mouth. That leaves just 14: Brigg & Goole (which has inherited the agricultural parts of Michael Brown's old seat), Forest of Dean, Lancashire West, Lancaster & Wyre, Newark, Norfolk North West, Scarborough & Whitby, Selby, Sherwood, Shrewsbury & Atcham, South Ribble, Staffordshire Moorlands, Stroud and Waveney; and only three of those 14 (Brigg & Goole, Norfolk North West and Selby) had 2,000 or more agricultural workers. So these may be the constituencies - and MPs - to keep an eye on if the plight of the farmers is really going to have an electoral effect. But even if it does, there just aren't enough of them to edge William Hague significantly nearer Downing Street.