Cllr Iain Lindley’s Diary

One of my pet hates from my University days was the small number of senior politics “academics” who were seemingly only interested in using their position as a platform for their own (usually warped) views. While I was a student at York, Alex Callinicos was the worst offender, although there were others. He no longer works at York, and I must say I am considerably more likely to donate to the alumni fund now that they aren’t wasting money on his wages.

A second problem that lurks within politics academia has risen above ground again - that of political guesswork masquarading as “research”. Professor Tony Travers, an “urban politics expert”, has just released a new “study”, and unfortunately the Manchester Evening News seems to have swallowed it. Let’s have a detailed look:

DAVID Cameron’s chances of winning the next election could depend on votes in Greater Manchester.

No arguments here. There are some key marginals in Greater Manchester and plenty of constituencies where we can make real progress and spring some surprises on a complacent Labour Party.

A new study claims that unless the Conservative leader recruits activists and wins votes in northern cities he cannot win an overall majority in the Commons.

I think there are two issues here. One is whether the Conservative Party is committed to fighting the Labour Party in their traditional heartlands, where they have let voters down and taken them for granted. The answer to that is a resounding “yes”. The second is a purely psephological issue - do the Conservative Party need to win seats in the northern cities to win the next election? I suppose the answer to that is “it depends what you define as a northern City”. I’ll return to the electoral geography later on.

Author of the research, urban politics expert Prof Tony Travers, predicts the Tory fight back in the north will be a `long, hard slog’, despite good opinion poll ratings.

Political campaigning is always a long, hard slog. Of course, even the Guardian now admits that the Conservative Party is making real progress in the north of England.

He sights the example of Withington which now has a Liberal Democrat MP, John Leech. Before 1987, the seat was held by a Conservative MP, Fred Silvester, but its share of the vote had since dropped from 36 per cent to 11 per cent.

When Mr Silvester lost his Withington seat, I was four years old. Since then, that area of Manchester has undergone a huge demographic shift, and politically the Liberal Democrats have set up an excellent campaigning organisation there. I would love there to be a Conservative MP for Withington, but the suggestion that the Conservative Party could not form a Government without it is absurd. Indeed, the Conservative Party did govern without a Withington MP for ten years until 1997.

And in 1978, there was 46 Conservative councillors in Manchester but they had since gone into `freefall’ and ended up with none.

It is very disappointing that there are no Conservative Councillors in Manchester, nor is it in the interests of Manchester City Council that there is no Conservative opposition to scrutinise them effectively. We have a lot of work to do in Manchester and I know we have a committed new organisation there to start the long, hard slog - to use Prof Travers’ phraseology. However, David Cameron could win a landslide victory at the next General Election without any of the Manchester seats returning a Conservative. That is a sad state of affairs and one we have only begun to rectify, but how is this pointing to a hung Parliament?

Prof Travers, of the London School of Economics, said even if the Tories do well at the next election the most they can hope for is a hung parliament if they fail to reclaim northern cities.

According to the excellent UK Polling Report guide, the Conservative Party needs to win four additional Greater Manchester seats to form a majority. Those seats are Bury North, Cheadle, Bolton West and Bolton North East. These are the seats in Greater Manchester that the current electoral geography dictatates that we need to win in order to form the next Government. The next targets on the list, majority-wise, are Hazel Grove, Stretford & Urmston, Bury South and Worsley & Eccles South. Winning those would - on a uniform swing - lead to a sizeable Conservative majority.

He said: “The Tories simply aren’t winning in all the places that they used to and unless something changes the party’s relative weakness in northern seats will deny the Conservatives an overall majority.”

Actually, as shown by the Guardian polls I referred to earlier, the Conservative weakness in the north has been reversed. We are on the up and the Labour Party is in freefall.

Graham Brady, MP for Altrincham and Sale West, is the only Tory MP in Greater Manchester. And the Conservatives will also have to start from near zero in Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and Glasgow.

I would love to see huge Conservative progress in all of those areas - but arguing that the Conservative Party cannot win an election without support in Liverpool and Glasgow is rather like arguing that the Labour Party cannot win without support in Surrey and Buckinghamshire. This is transparently false.

Where the Conservative Party do need to win, in terms of electoral geography, is the suburban north. Here in Greater Manchester and the North-West, the signs are good. Here in Worsley & Eccles South, the Conservatives outpolled Labour at the last set of local elections. Ruth Kelly can call on only a handful of Labour Councillors in her Bolton West seat. In Pendle, a key marginal in East Lancashire, Labour have been reduced to a rump on the Council. In the new Sefton Central seat in Merseyside - another key constituency - there are now no Labour Councillors left at all. On top of all that, the polling evidence now shows that the Conservatives have caught Labour in the north as a whole.

In Trafford council the Conservative share of the vote has dropped from 54 seats to 39 seats since 1978, in Bolton from 45 seats to 22 seats, Bury 38 seats to 23 seats, Oldham 37 seats to three seats, Rochdale 35 seats to eight seats and even in Stockport it has plunged from 40 seats to nine seats.

1978 was an awfully long time ago - five years before I was born. In view of this, I don’t claim to be an expert on 1978, but I do know that the demographic and political changes that have taken place in the three decades since have been huge. It’s not really much of a comparison. Surely 1991 would have been a better comparison?

I really do despair at the quality of this “research” which seems to have completely ignored the actual electoral realities across not just Greater Manchester but the north as a whole.

However there is a more important issue here than the electoral geography. That issue is whether the Conservative Party is a genuine national party that is interested in making life better for local residents regardless of whether they happen to live in a target seat or not. The answer to that is a resounding “yes”.

The difficulties the Conservative Party have had in Manchester are well-known, although it is a real shame that the media concentrate on Manchester and Newcastle whilst ignoring areas of Conservative improvement like Salford and Sunderland.

However, compare the Conservative Party in Manchester to the Labour Party in areas where they are weak. David Cameron has visited Manchester several times, we are rebuilding our Party organisation in the City and fielded candidates in every single ward for the last two elections. Meanwhile there are huge swathes of the country where the Labour Party cannot even be bothered to field candidates, and where they do they poll about the same level as the Monster Raving Loonies.

Only the Conservative Party are a genuine national party these days.