Green Party and Conservative showdown
Hertford and Stortford is meant to be a safe seat for the Tories, but an unexpected rival has risen to challenge them here.
BY MICHAEL HAVIS
THERE we were, minding our own business, when this week’s vox-pop got suddenly strange.
I was in Hertford, part of the Hertford and Stortford constituency. Superficially, it’s a very safe Tory seat. It has only ever returned Conservatives to Parliament and the party had a majority here of nearly 20,000 at the last general election.
The thing is: the Green Party is making major incursions here. East Herts Council is the local authority covering Hertford, Bishop’s Stortford, and a number of neighbouring towns and villages. Going into last year’s local elections, the Tories had a supermajority on the council, with 39 of the 50 available seats, according to the BBC. Yet by the time the votes were counted, they had lost more than half of their seats, and the Green Party were now the biggest faction on the council, rocketing from just two seats to 19.
It’s the same story on the Hertford Town Council — a smaller body with more limited powers, operating only in Hertford. This too is held by the Greens. So is the town council in neighbouring Ware; again, part of the same constituency. And the town council in Bishop’s Stortford is now run by the Liberal Democrats. Not the Greens, sure, but it shows: the Conservatives are in retreat all over this seat.
Let me tell you: this is not business as usual. 10 years ago, I was working as a local newspaper reporter, based in Hertford. This seat was seriously Conservative; always had been, always would be it seemed. But time has cast a transformative spell here.
For affluent young city workers, Hertford is an attractive place: two rail links to London, bigger properties at better prices than the capital (though still outrageously expensive), plenty of shopping, good restaurants, and it’s generally just a nice town. With those young professionals come younger politics, and — one vote at a time — the Conservative stranglehold loosens.
Then there’s that other curious phenomenon I’ve seen in almost every constituency: long-time Conservative voters going Green. One party is a long way to the right of centre, and the other is a long way to the left of it, so the giant leap between them merits examination.
For some, the Greens seem to be simply a safe place to deposit a protest vote. For others, it’s that, but they also share the party’s environmental concerns. As for the Greens’ more controversial positions, I’m not sure these blue-green switchers are even aware of them. I’ve not yet encountered an ex-Conservative voter won over by the party’s anti-nuclear stance, or it’s longstanding scepticism towards NATO, for example.
Beyond that, the party’s environmentalism can also manifest itself in a very Tory-friendly way: opposition to new houses being built. Known as Nimbyism (i.e. “not in my back yard”), this attitude dovetails nicely with Green environmentalism. “You can’t build new homes in this pristine green land”. “You can’t build new homes there, a rare subspecies of lesser-spotted cormorant is nesting there”. And so on.
In the Bishops Stortford Independent (a fine local newspaper, produced by some fine people) the Green Party boasted that they could even take the Hertford and Stortford seat off the Conservatives. Could that really be true? I ventured out on to the streets of Hertford to find out.
The first person I spoke to, a young man, neatly summed it up when he said the Greens were appealing both to the young commuters and the old Hertford natives. He loathed the Conservatives, and was put off of Labour by its stance on the ongoing bloodbath in Gaza. For him, the Greens were an easy choice.
Another man, this time a Labour voter, was glad that the Greens had kicked out the Conservatives at the district council, and said he supported their environmentalism. He didn’t think there was any prospect of the Tories losing the seat in Westminster though.
One chap I spoke to said he was content whichever side won the general election, Labour or Conservative. But he made another interesting point vis-a-vis the Greens: he said that your traditional Tory is a country man, and that this country man’s concerns had a lot of overlap with Green environmentalism. Perhaps another strand to the peculiar phenomenon of blue-green switching?
And then Donald Trump came swinging in. A black lady had inserted herself into our conversation and changed the topic completely. Trump was guilty, she said. From there, we soon diverted on to Nick Clegg and tuition fees. I had to ask her to step aside for a minute so I could wrap up my interview, and she did, but only for a moment before she came thundering back in.
When I then let my interviewee escape and turned my camera on her, her politics were all over the place. She loved the Greens, but wouldn’t vote for them, or anybody else. She didn’t think good chancellors make good prime ministers, but then she could be wrong she said. For the bulk of the interview, I had literally no idea what she was talking about.
Last week in Waltham Abbey, I was stunned not to encounter a single person intending to vote Conservative on July 4. Not so this week. I met one older man who said he was a lifelong Tory, that Rishi was “first class”, and that he didn’t trust Labour at all. Revealingly, he was not excited about the election.
Another chap I spoke to off camera was a little less partisan about it, but still tended towards the Tories. He said he was a former finance man himself, and so he identified with the Sunak. I expect he’s in the minority there, though.
The only mention of the Prime Minister’s policy blitz came from a lady I met aged in her early 60s. She said she “couldn’t believe” his new national service policy, and added: “I just think there’s far more important things”. We also briefly discussed his new pensions gambit, and she complained that the pensionable age had risen ahead of her, and that her own children would likely never see a state pension at all. A former Labour voter, she was now voting Green.
I am almost 100% sure that the people I spoke to in this session were not representative of the Hertford electorate. For one thing, there were more instinctively left-wing people than I’d expect to meet in this seat. But then, I’ve made these sorts of disclaimers before. What if the reason I keep finding these anomalous voters in Tory safe seats, is because they’re not so anomalous after all?
Look, this is a tough one, but my long years of local newspaper service in this town stop me believing that the Tories can lose here — even in a bad year. That being said, their majority will be dramatically cut, and if the Green Party emerge as the main contender this time round, we could be just a couple of election cycles away from seeing an upset here. Until then, my instinct is Conservative HOLD.