Still a Tory safe seat?
Broxbourne has always voted Conservative, but in a tough year for the Tories, we ask its voters how they feel about the party
BY MICHAEL HAVIS
I grew up in Broxbourne so I know the area well. It’s about as Conservative as they come. Even when Labour reached their high watermark in 1997, the Conservatives enjoyed a majority of over 6,500 votes. The composition of the local council after last year’s elections was 27 Conservatives, and three Labour.
But it’s been a torrid year for the governing party. Most polls have them trailing Labour nationally by over 20 points, and no wonder. The Tories staked a lot of credibility on their pledge to “stop the boats” bringing migrants across the English Channel, and their fight to deport these migrants to Rwanda. Yet the boats continue and not a single soul has been deported to Rwanda despite hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money being spent; in fact Britain has received asylum seekers from the central-African nation.
And the picture is no better when it comes to health and the economy, both of which rank as higher priorities among voters, according to an Electoral Calculus poll published on February 15. The ongoing crisis in the NHS shows little signs of improvement and the economy is now in recession.
Amid this backdrop, I expected to find a lot of dissatisfaction among the handful of voters I spoke to in Broxbourne — and there was indeed plenty of that. Yet still I found myself surprised.
This is an area where many voters have a strong taboo against voting Labour. Yet even in 2019, when Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a comfortable victory, Labour took 10,000 votes in Broxbourne — just shy of a quarter of the total. You might have thought, therefore, that I’d find someone — anyone — who was sympathetic with Keir Starmer’s party. With the Tories in such a parlous state, you might even imagine that there’d be a softening of anti-Labour sentiment, and yet…
I did not speak to a single person who endorsed Labour, even reluctantly. The general view I got from these voters was this: however bad the Tories might be, Labour would be worse.
I spoke to one lady who spoke eloquently about the cost of living crisis and how she had seen people struggling. But she prefaced her remarks by saying she was satisfied with the Conservatives and intended to vote for them again.
I spoke to a couple of people who told me the Conservative party wasn’t Conservative enough. It’s an irony that Rishi Sunak, despite running perhaps the most right-wing government of my lifetime, is — in terms of perception at least — seen as a moderate. Perhaps it’s that slightly Mark Zuckerberg-esque “tech bro” vibe about him.
For these people, migration was indeed the big issue. One told me that he wanted not just “net zero” on migration, but negative migration. Another, when listing the things he’d like to see the Tories handle better, said migration and then realised that was everything. This same man said that our Prime Minister should be British, then when I pointed out that Mr Sunak was indeed British, he deftly changed his criticism to the Prime Minister being out of touch.
One gentlemen told me that the Conservatives had been dealt a tough hand; an argument the party itself has deployed many times. Another said he didn’t intend to vote at all, and alluded conspiratorially to Mr Starmer having attended the Davos conference.
The only person I spoke to who inferred they might vote left of centre was a lady who declined to appear on camera, but said she was attending a Green Party fundraiser the following evening.
As with any vox-pop, you can’t draw any profound conclusions from all this; the sample size is too small. Perhaps the many (many) people who declined to speak were the elusive Labour voters I so spectacularly failed to find. Perhaps the sort of people in Hoddesdon town centre on a Friday afternoon aren’t representative of the wider electorate.
But it did make me wonder if some of the wilder predictions about how the Conservatives will fare this election year are too farfetched: namely, the prospect of a wipeout like their Canadian namesakes suffered in 1992 (they were reduced to just two seats).
If I had to make a prediction for Broxbourne, it would — unsurprisingly — be: Conservative HOLD.