Rural Voters

How important is the rural vote? There is in our view entirely too much attention paid to the so-called "rural vote". Questions are frequently raised as to whether Labour's failures to meet the needs and concerns of rural areas might cost it dear at the next election.

The Rural Group of Labour MPs identifies 180 (sic) of Labour's 419 seats as rural, in other words, 43% of all of Labour's seats won in the 1997 are classified as 'rural. If this were true, Labour might indeed need to take the rural vote seriously.

In any electorally meaningful terms, this is a huge over-estimate. Naturally enough, any MP with even token rural interests in his or her constituency will concern themselves about rural affairs - that is part of their responsibility to the electors they represent, to bear in mind the needs of the minorities as well as the majority. For, in almost every case, what the rural element in Labour's constituencies actually comprises a tiny minority, if that.

Using the MOSAIC geo-demographic marketing classification, which can be used to categorise every census enumeration district (ED) in the country as rural or not rural, only 7.5% of the adult population live in rural areas. On this strict definition, fewer than a dozen constituencies across the whole country have a majority of its voters in rural areas; indeed, there are just 86 constituencies in Great Britain where more than a quarter, 25%, of the electorate are rural. All the rest may have wide swathes of verdant countryside dotted with farmhouses and farm animals, but few people live there. Even in most constituencies that include rural areas and rural voters, the majority of voters live in the towns and experience rural issues only second hand.

The result of the next general election will be decided in the marginal constituencies which Labour now holds and the Conservatives hope to win. Of the 86 constituencies where a quarter of the vote is rural, the Conservatives already hold 56; the Liberal Democrats hold 20 and Labour just ten (and almost all of these non-Conservative rural seats are in Scotland or Wales). So it is a nonsense to suggest that the rural vote on its own can have any significant effect on the election outcome.

Analysis of the September MORI/Times poll for the BBC TV programme On The Record enables us to look at how voting intentions changed in the rural constituencies over the period of the fuel crisis. The period between 4 September (the end of fieldwork on the last of 3 polls which we have aggregated together) and 21 September (the first interviews for the Times poll) also covered the furore over new funding for the Millennium dome.

As the tables show, far from the Tories benefiting in the rural areas during the fuel crisis, their share of the vote fell there, though not as sharply as Labour's; indeed, even after the fuel crisis the Tories were doing less well in the most rural seats than at the last election - far from seizing seats from Labour, assuming uniform swing in the 86 rural seats Labour would have gained 5 from the Tories (and the Lib Dems a further 6). On the other hand, the swing back to Labour in this month's Times poll was much less marked in the rural seats than elsewhere, the Tories being the beneficiaries of the fall back in Lib Dem support there, the swing being only 1% in the rural seats as against 5.5% across Britain. Thus there is precious little evidence that the fuel crisis, supposedly a key issue for rural voters, swung votes from Labour to Conservative!

Of course, this analysis is constituency based. It may be that the genuinely rural voters have one agenda, have reacted sharply against Labour and are likely to vote more strongly against them than in 1997, but that these are swamped by the urban voters who predominate even in most "rural" constituencies. However, that is the point - they will be swamped when it comes to election time as well. Rural issues will only count if they can be given wider resonance to attract the support of the urban electorate as well - as happened with the petrol price protest.

But in any case, are rural voters really that different in their priorities from urban voters in the first place? To take the obvious example of fox-hunting, polls have persistently shown that a majority even of rural voters would favour a ban (though the majority is somewhat less than in urban areas, and those rural areas where hunting actually takes place may be an exception.)

In our poll for Carlton TV's 'It's Your Shout' on 13-14 October, we asked our respondents for a (subjective) assessment of where they lived: 9% described themselves subjectively as living "in the middle of the countryside", and we can analyse their political views separately. They turn out to be no more Tory than the rest of the country - the Conservatives got 37% in these countryside areas, 38% elsewhere. Labour did worse than average here (31% as against 40% nationally), but the beneficiaries are the Lib Dems, Nationalists, Greens and anti-EU parties. 64% in the rural areas think the Prime Minister is out of touch with what ordinary people think, compared to 57% of those living in the middle of a town or city. Meanwhile 55% of town and city dwellers think William Hague is out of touch, and 49% think so in the countryside. A small differential in Mr Hague's favour, it is true, but tiny when one considers it as a comparison of the two parties' supposed natural heartlands.