Party faces long fight to ‘ claw back’ voters
THE former MP for Labour’s most rural seat in the country has stressed how it takes years to build up trust for voters to go red in the countryside.
John Grogan, who was most recently the MP for Keighley but was formerly the MP for Selby when it was Labour’s most rural seat in the UK, admitted gaining the trust of the electorate is a long game.
“Organisation is key in those areas and the bad news is it takes quite a long while,” he said.
“In Selby I stood three times before winning it, and just the absolute basics of standing, getting people to stand for the parish councils, for the rural districts and so on, building up the organisation and the credibility can take a long while.”
Mr Grogan said he felt the party’s membership had held strong in rural areas, with young people in countryside constituencies being more likely to vote Labour.
“I also think in terms of organisation across rural Yorkshire, we’ve got to be prepared to work with other what I would call progressive parties, Liberals and Greens and so on,” he added.
“To claw back support in quite a short period, which we’re trying to do in the next less than five years now when you’ve got Conservative strongholds, you’ve got to be prepared to speak to other parties, whether that is formal or informal co- operation. That is certainly what happened up to 1997 and thereafter.”
One issue in recent years, the Countryside Alliance suggested, was the lack of any rural policy – or when it did appear, a conflation with animal rights issues.
“By judging the communities on the activities they enjoy, the roles they carry out or even by the perceived social class associated with their livelihoods or activities, national policy was pursued that ignored issues in the countryside completely,” its report said.
Mr Grogan maintained that if the only issues had been focused on debates such as fox hunting, he never would have been elected.
“I went through the fox hunting debate when I was the Selby MP and I supported that ban,” he said.
“At one stage I had the Countryside Alliance at my surgery in Tadcaster on a Saturday morning, surrounded by horses, perfectly peaceful.
“But what I would say is that people in the countryside at that stage felt as passionately one way or the other as they did in the towns.
“It’s not true that everyone in the countryside opposed the ban on fox hunting and things like that, otherwise I never would have got elected in 2005.”
Mr Grogan added: “In Yorkshire, there were lots of rural and semi- rural seats that we held and to ever have a hope of forming a government again, we’ve clearly got to claw some of those back.”