The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Polls, politics and policy ~ Last week’s by-elections and the Conservative Celtic Fringe
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Murphy’s Law from their Muphry’s Law.
This week we look, in our politics section, at the notion of a Celtic Fringe – a set of south west Tory seats that are vulnerable to the Lib Dems. What do the by-elections last week tell us about these constituencies?
And of course, there’s the Celtic ponytail that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including, the news that violent jackals are NOT invading the UK.
The Celtic Fringe
Last week saw two major by-election losses for the Conservative Party: to Labour in Wakefield, and to the Liberal Democrats in Tiverton and Honiton. While the former fits into many of the contemporary debates about Labour’s Red Wall heartlands, the latter is slightly trickier to place within the present ‘realignment’ narratives.
Tiverton and Honiton saw the Liberal Democrats overturn a massive Tory majority. Yet the constituency has little in common with affluent and graduate-heavy southern seats, sometimes known collectively as the Blue Wall, where one might expect them to do be making the most ground. Whereas Blue Wall seats tend to be part of an economically pragmatic but socially liberal commuter belt which voted Remain, Tiverton and Honiton is geographically remote and, according to the deductions of Chris Hanretty, had a Leave vote of 58%. How did the Lib Dems manage to achieve a swing of nearly 30% there?
A new piece of analysis by YouGov sheds some light on this. It describes a ‘Celtic Fringe’ of around 40 seats in Devon, Cornwall and other parts of the south west (see map above). These are places where the Lib Dems have traditionally been strong, but for reasons slightly different to in other parts of the country. They retained strong support for many years among working-class and older voters and were the primary repository for anti-Conservative votes – rather than Labour.
Before Thursday, Tiverton and Honiton was among the safer of these Celtic Fringe seats from a Conservative perspective; they had always held onto the seat, with the Lib Dems being the closest rival. The fear for Tory strategists, in light of last Thursday’s result, will be that a whole raft of these constituencies could turn yellow at the next election.
There are now rather a lot of ‘walls’, ‘belts’ and ‘fringes’ being put forward by psephologists and pollsters. These should come with something of a health warning. Yet the notion of a Celtic Fringe is also helpful, as a reminder that much of politics is based on traditional loyalties as much as an economic, social, or ideological preoccupations.
And finally this week Charlie’s Attic, the walled fringe at the end of our Weekly realignment:
Stay up to date with the latest news corrections and mistakes – including the shocking news that ‘violent jackals’ are NOT, in fact, invading the UK, contrary to the claims of the Daily Star.
